A lot of people confuse customer success for customer experience, while others believe that one is more important than the other. But the truth is that each team’s goal is to come up with unique approaches that help elevate the customer’s relationship with the company in the end.
If you’re wondering about customer success vs. customer experience, this article is for you. Here, we’ll discuss the meaning of these terms, the differences between them, and the benefits of each team.
Let’s dive in!
What Is Customer Success?
Customer success refers to a collection of strategies that studies how to boost the bond between a customer and a certain product or service. In other words, CS looks to solve potential product problems and boost its positive aspects to satisfy the company’s clients.
Of course, part of the customer success strategy is to interact with customers post-sale. The team asks the buyer questions about the product, such as:
- Did it deliver the promise it made?
- Was it up to the client’s standards?
- What points should be improved?
- What are the issues that need to be solved?
After getting the answers to these questions, the team’s job is to suggest modifications to cater to the client’s needs.
The journey of customer success includes three stages: onboarding, escalations, and renewals.
- Onboarding: Getting new customers optimized for a service or product
- Escalations: Working on issues and problems in more advanced ways than those of regular customer service
- Renewals: Ensuring that customers choose the same product again, especially for services with renewable relationships
Now that you have a general idea of what customer success means, let’s address the definition of customer experience.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is a broader concept since it focuses on the customer from the very beginning, even before any sales are made. Its main job is to provide a pleasant experience with the brand to build a solid relationship.
One of the most notable features of customer experience is that it doesn’t always result in a purchase at a particular moment. A positive customer experience works in the long term, increasing the chances of potential sales in the future.
Through different approaches, CX aims to create a general good feeling towards the brand. For example, this can be done via digital, physical, or human-to-human interactions.
Therefore, when the time comes in the future to make a buying decision, the client should naturally lean toward this specific brand. This automatic tendency, of course, is based on several positive interactions with this company in the past, which has been CX’s aim all along.
Customer Success vs. Customer Experience: What’s the Difference?
After understanding the meaning of these two techniques, it’s easy to assume they’re one and the same. They basically have the same goal, which is to create a positive relationship between the customer and the business. Plus, these two occasionally overlap.
However, customer success and customer experience have many differences that make each one of them unique.
Specific Team Goal
CS aims to deliver the best things in a certain product or service to the customer. It works hard to improve the features and solve any issues in that product by interacting with the buyer post-sale.
On the other hand, the ultimate goal of CX is to build a strong relationship between potential customers and the business. Here, there’s no exact service in mind, just the desire to give off positive vibes when the brand name is mentioned.
Position in Customer Journey
Customer success strategies exist in a specific timeframe, which is after the sale of a product has taken place.
On the contrary, customer experience techniques begin even before the customer is aware they’re in the buying journey. They simply focus on the subconscious mind of the client.
See, CX feeds the subconsciousness positive messages until the only natural response is to buy this brand’s product.
Customer Success vs. Customer Experience: Which Is More Important for a Business?
As a manager or business owner, the right thing to do is to get the best of both worlds. This means that customer success and customer experience are both essential for your brand, so you can’t choose one over the other.
Each strategy can deliver much-needed results and increase your sales, whether it’s in the short or long term. To make the picture even clearer, why don’t we discuss the benefits of both customer success and customer experience?
Benefits of Customer Success for a Business
- Helps build customer loyalty by interacting with buyers post-sale
- Boosts the chances of business expansion
- The data gathered from interactions with clients can make business forecasting much easier
- Works to improve future products and services based on customer recommendations
Benefits of Customer Experience for a Business
- Builds customer loyalty in the long run
- Helps reduce the overall costs of marketing
- Lowers the expenses for services and products by understanding customer needs better
- Improves crisis management
- Enhances customer engagement
- Increases customer conversion rates
After taking a look at the advantages of both customer success and customer experience, it’s fair to say that both are equally needed. This is because they could ultimately lead to an increase in sales at the end of the day.
To Wrap It Up
Customer success vs. customer experience: What’s the difference?
Hopefully, after reading this brief guide, you’ll know that these two approaches can differ in several ways. You can tell them apart by their specific goals and their location in the customer journey.
CS tries to improve a customer’s experience after buying a certain product. On the other hand, CX aims to send positive vibes about the company toward the customer even before any purchase takes place.
Hiring customer success and customer experience teams is a must for a business to build a solid relationship with customers. Enforcing both strategies can result in raising customer loyalty, a better understanding of the client’s needs, and, eventually, increased sales.