Customer Success is not Customer Support
You need to know what your customers will say before they say it.
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Iāve recently helped a few companies restructure their customer success teams. In all cases, it starts with the same phone call:
āI just found out we have a ton of hidden churn I didnāt know aboutā¦ā
How does churn hide? Sometimes there is a reorganization at a customer and a new group starts using the product while another group churns off. Like a shell game some gains hide other losses.
Other times itās a surprise! The team tells you that a customer is happy, only to get ambushed by them right before renewal when there is no time to save the relationship.
Behind all of these is a lack of understanding of the customer. Your customer success team needs to understand the customer so well that there are none of these surprises. That doesnāt stop at the customer engagement analytics, it means understanding how the customer thinks, what their problems are and how they solve them.
But many customer teams are not set up to do this because they are support teams. Customer support teams are reactive, they respond to questions customers ask of them. They only talk to customers when they ask a question, so they donāt have any other information about the customer! They might believe the customer is happy after helping them with their most recent issue, but not see the myriad other issues the customer never even mentions.
If you have customers, you have three teams to support them:
Onboarding. This team is responsible for getting the customer from zero to using the product. When the customer is up and running, they are considered āonboardedā.
Customer Support. This team is responsible for answering any questions from customers after they are onboarded. They are product experts, who can help with almost any problem.
Customer Success. This team owns the relationship with the customer and understands how the product fits into the rest of their world. They specialize in understanding people and building relationships.
Your company might combine these teams, which happens a lot. If the product is easy to adopt, the Customer Support team might help with Onboarding. If the product integration is really complicated, Customer Success might help with onboarding. But, even if you combine them, you still have these three distinct roles.
The problem arises when you confuse them. Many companies hire Customer Support teams and call them Customer Success. These teams are smart and professional, but they arenāt relationship building experts. They spend so much time answering customer questions they donāt have time to be proactive!
In these cases you lack important insight into your customers. As a reactive team the Customer Support people donāt have enough information to really understand customer health, and will be unreliable witnesses. You need a proactive team whose job is to focus on customer health that is separate from Customer Support. That is what Customer Success can be for you.
Each of the companies I helped suffered from this confusion. The good news is that fixing the problem is straightforward! If you have a Customer Support team, call them āCustomer Supportā and hire a Customer Success team. If you have onboarding problems, hire an Onboarding team instead of expecting Customer Support to do everything.
The bad news is that these fixes take time. Itās slow to hire a new team and train them well enough to be effective. Even with AI tools the process takes months. Everyone wants immediate solutions to their problems and these solutions take time.
So, if you want to avoid that trap, get started today. Make sure you separate Onboarding, Customer Support and Customer Success. Give those teams the focus to do their jobs well, and in return you will get deeper customer insights and understanding.
You will know you have mastered this when you no longer get surprised by customer churn. You should know what your customers are going to do long before they do it.
For more on Customer Success, see: