Customer service and customer success meet in the present. But that’s about it.

Proactivity is the goal of customer success–addressing problems and setting customers up in advance–while service sits on the backend and is mostly a put-out-fires kind of role (even if it doesn’t feel that way in your organization). 

What’s more, is how deeply one impacts the other. Two-thirds of customers contact customer service after receiving proactive outreach from a brand, according to Gartner research, showing this is a two-way street in the end. 

To better understand the differences between success vs. service–and how the service alone isn’t enough to deliver value to customers–keep reading. 

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A very possible scenario

Customer success isn’t the same as customer service. While the overarching goal of both is to create happy customers, the two are vastly different in how they carry out that objective. Both are necessary for software adoption and utilization, but one is not a substitute for the other. Let’s look at how these two facets of customer satisfaction differ.

The name of the game in SaaS is lifetime value, made both by retention and expansion. The longer (and more) someone uses your platform, the better it is for everyone. 

But if that’s your end goal, you have to plan for it from the beginning. Let’s take, for example, a SaaS company that just closed a new sale. There’s lots of excitement, possibly a gong ringing somewhere, and there might already be conversations about how to spot expansion opportunities down the line. 

Great! Now let’s analyze what happens next in two scenarios: a customer service only approach and a success-first approach. 

Scenario 1: Customer service only

Your Sales Rep congratulates the customer on their purchase, welcomes them into the fold, and shares some basic get-started tips. Then that’s about it. From there, your customer has to figure things out on their own. As a best practice, your company has built an Academy or similar customer education platform and the software itself has a guided onboarding. 

So far, so good, right? 

❌Then there’s a question from someone on the client’s team, so they submit a support ticket. Then another, and another, each with its own ticket. Your customer service team diligently answers questions and provides resources. This seems fine, but is actually masking the bigger problem of you not knowing an issue existed until someone reached out—and what if they didn’t? They did, you tell yourself, so it’s good this time.

❌ But then there was a slight hiccup in the onboarding process because of an integration with another software. Alas, another ticket… but this time customer success has to bring Product into the conversation, which causes a response delay. This angers the customer a bit. 

❌ Months later, the customer is increasingly frustrated that they have to submit a support ticket for every little thing—it doesn’t feel worth it, so they slowly stop using the platform. They might renew (or not), but either way you’ve lost a champion and gained, at best, an apathetic user. 

If (and when) that customer churns, you can hopefully turn it into a positive by conducting a churn post-mortem, but you’ve still lost that revenue and logo.

Scenario 2: A customer success-first approach

When the Sales Rep congratulates the customer, they also make an introduction to the CSM to coordinate onboarding. All the while, the Rep has filled out the Sales-to-CS handoff template so CS is well aware of the customer and their use cases. 

✅ During onboarding, the CSM invites everyone who wants to join from the business, hosting a couple of drop-in sessions. Everyone gets their question answered live, so there’s no lingering confusion. 

✅ In the handoff document, the CSM noticed the client mentioned an integration need in passing. As a result, they were able to ask about it directly during kickoff and coordinate Product team members as needed to make it happen. 

✅ The CSM has an automated check-in email scheduled in their customer success platform, which prompted a quick reply from the customer that they did have a slight issue, actually. The CSM was able to ask Customer Service for a bit of help finding the right resources and then send that off to the customer with a concierge feel. 

✅ Since the CSM actively helped the customer with their use case, it was easier to tell when they were seeing value—this resulted in a prime opportunity to ask them for a case study, which the Marketing team was able to promote. 

✅ The customer ended up raving about the platform after overcoming certain obstacles, which meant highly value feedback for both Product and Sales, letting them know what a top-tier customer truly looks like and values. 

✅ Proactive outreach and planning led to reduced costs in overall Customer Service, since the team had more capacity to handle urgent customer needs rather than issues that could have been proactively solved. 

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The benefits of a proactive approach

Customer success centers on promoting and improving client relationships. Customer success managers (CSMs) work to detect and remove system-wide issues for easier, across-the-board implementation.

They prevent problems to make it easier for the customer to master their program and achieve company goals. They encourage users to utilize different features, maximizing product value. As a result, customers become loyal users and buyers, signing up for expanded services.

The focus of customer success is on long-term client needs, not short-term issues concerning glitches or confusion. CSMs collaborate with other parts of their organization to produce a 360-degree view of the target customers. As a result of this holistic knowledge, the entire SaaS company benefits.

Measuring customer success relies on metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), retention rates, and expansion rates. These numbers impact the company's success as a whole.

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Customer success tools

Lucrative customer success requires its own specialists and tools. SaaS companies benefit from ways to easily segment customers according to their needs, map out their journeys, reach thousands in the most fitting ways (i.e., emails, one-on-one sessions, ongoing discussions), and much more. Excellent customer service is no substitute for customer success, and harnessing the power of customer success could mean the difference between your business’s boom or bust. Go from reactive customer service to proactive customer success. There are many customer success software services like Catalyst to help your CS team.

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