Customer Success Vs Customer Experience

Customer Success and customer experience both are two different things but often they are replaced with each other on various occasions. Sue Duris said that customer success and customer experience will work together in an attempt to “[define] and [deepen] customer outcomes.”

Customer experience tells about the feelings, awareness, emotions of the customers when they feel while using your product. For example, whether the journey of the train ride was enjoyable or tiring refers to the customer experience.

On the other hand, customer success ensures that the customer gets a particular product from your product. Like, the train arriving on time refers to the customer’s success. Mainly, customer success focuses on the result of the customer experience. 

So you see, there’s a thin line of difference between customer success and customer experience. That thin line of difference between the two is worth noticing customer success and customer experience focus on different parts of the customer journey. 

Customer experience gives priority to the customer’s first contact with the company. It can start as soon as the user gets in touch with the company. Customer experience impacts marketing and sales, which generates touchpoints in the customer journey. 

Customer success comes into action when the buyer completes the purchase. It does influence the marketing, sales, and product decisions but the main focus of customer success comes after-sales.

What do customer experience and customer success mean?

Customer experience is the journey of creating a positive impression among your users and customers. Cx makes sure that your customers are happy and satisfied whenever they interact with you. And it should keep happening at every stage of the customer journey. 

Customer success is assisting customers to get the most out of your product. It covers a lot of activities, tips, and tricks. The main motive is to solve your customer’s problem for which the product is being used. 

How customer success and customer experience go hand in hand? 

Customer success is a part of the customer experience. There are many things that customer success can help you in optimizing your customer experience:

• Customer success works together with the product team to ensure that the product’s features solve customers’ problems.
• Guide customers on how they can use the product that works best for themselves/their business.
• Customer success scans your customer’s usage pattern which helps in recognizing the potential problem.
• Helps in maintaining customer relationships which results in buying the product again.
• Customer success quickly transfers the problem to the department which is responsible for handling that particular issue.

All these things help in giving out a positive customer experience. 

There are still many things that need to be done in improving the customer experience that is not related to customer success. 

• Giving personalized recommendations by analysis and data collection.
• Using emotional marketing techniques to increase sales.
• Working in improving the customer response time by providing additional training to the team.
• Rebranding your product.

All these activities help in improving the customer experience. The only aim is to give the best possible solution for your customer. 

Pearl Zhu, writing for Future of CIO, said that “the customer service is reactive, customer experience is interactive, and customer success is proactive. All three share similar goals. But they go about reaching those goals differently.” 

Both customer experience and customer success are tied with each other. One cannot work alone without another’s support. They both are important in boosting the growth that increases the customer’s lifetime value. The difference can be just about perspective.  

The difference in Experience vs. Value

Like, it is tough to distinguish every part of the customer journey. In the same way, it’s tough to distinguish between customer success and customer experience. The main difference could be told as the attitude that you adopt while providing the value between the product and product experience. 

Customer success is interactive, which has the goal of making the product easy and enjoyable for the customer. Customer success is proactive, to help your customer gain value from the product in different ways. 

It can also be said that customer success is focused on the overall customer journey and the search for lifetime customer value. Customer experience focuses on the interactions that your company had with your company. 

Customer success strengthens customer experience:

 If you want to understand the customer experience, you should know all the information related to your customer — including your goals and why they need your product. To gather all this information, you can take the help of customer success software. It’s like the storage of every customer interaction. Customer success software provides updated insight into the customer experience. You can filter out the data according to your needs and wants. The data helps you to guide proactive customer engagements.