Customer Success vs Customer Service
They are both important to the company but cater to different needs
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Customer success teams are a new concept, but customer service people are familiar faces at most businesses. The main difference is that customer success focuses on the entire customer experience, while customer service focuses on the immediate issue.
Customer service is reactive; customer success is proactive. Customer success is all about long-term relationships with customers and growing your business by making customers happy and ensuring they stick around for the long haul.
Customer service is responsible for many tasks. A customer service agent helps customers get the most out of a product or service, answers questions and resolves problems, and helps customers resolve doubts about the product or service.
Customer success managers are also committed to helping customers understand a product or service but in a much more proactive way. Where customer support waits for problems to arise, customer success managers proactively build relationships with customers to help them succeed.
Do you need a customer success team?
Now, you may be wondering: why bother hiring a customer success team? Couldn’t my sales reps handle that?
Well, sure—but there’s more to it than just having someone in your corner who can build rapport with users and upsell them on other products and services. The goal of a sales rep isn’t to solve your problems—it’s to close the deal!
They might be able to act as a pseudo-customer service rep if they have time between leads, but they aren’t going to spend hours researching ways to improve the product based on user data or analyze broad trends across many clients.
What is customer service?
Customer service is defined as the assistance and advice you provide to customers before, during, and after they buy your product or service. Customer service can take many forms, but it’s commonly provided through phone calls, email, webchats, social media, or in-person visits.
Typically customer support is reactive problem resolution with a focus on meeting customers’ immediate needs and minimizing risk for the company. This type of customer support is necessary for nearly every business.
Customer service examples
Examples of customer service include:
- a help desk
- an in-store assistant
- email support
- call center agents
- live chat support and chatbots
- a community forum
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Photo by Charanjeet Dhiman on Unsplash
