Key differences between Customer Success, Customer Support and Account Manager
Customers are the heart of any business. How companies treat customers is critical for the survival of the business. Raising tickets for issues and providing resolution on time doesn't always indicates the sign of successful business. Knowing customers' or clients' goals and potentials and being on your clients' side for whatever situations they come across is what called the sign of actual successful business. Speaking which defines the real meaning of customer success. Customer Success is all about making your customers feel valuable throughout the journey with your organization. But very often, business organizations make the mistake of understanding customer success with customer support as both of the role serves customers. Also, recent statistics say that it has been noticed that there is often a bit of confusion between customer success management and account management. Over the past few years, every revenue related functions have been made more specialized and have been represented as a particular profession. In this article, we will discuss the difference in functionalities of customer success manager, customer support, and accounts manager.
Key differences between Customer Success Manager and Customer Support
1) Functionality
Customer Success:
Customer Success is all about helping customers to achieve their goals through day to day contact. This approach is majorly popular in SaaS (Software As A Service) organization which provides application support over cloud and services are accessed through the internet. Customers have unique needs, and customer success manager has to understand the needs accordingly. It's a proactive sales approach on real time basis to build strong relationships with clients. It's not a fee-based service. It's all about adding values to the customers' needs. CSM (Customer Success Manager) will educate the client about the product services which includes support functions, communication procedure, escalations, new technologies, etc. CSM will discuss the onboarding procedures, plans, and time frame with your decision makers and IT staff of your organization. CSM will also take care of issues and complaints of customers during the onboarding process.
Customer Service Support:
Organizations provide the variety of services to the customers, and they develop a support team to provide resolution to the customers. It is a fee-based model. The customer support team provides full assistance on issues raised by clients and also provides product guidance.
2) Churn Rate
Customer Success:
The concept of customer success originally came from retention of clients which indeed brought the idea of adding more values to the customers. This is a holistic organization level approach that must have technical and real time visibility of customer health. Customer health doesn't only mean taking care of your client's end users but also providing full support to the employees, administrators, users whoever is using the Software As A Service. The ultimate goal is long term based on management and leadership skills.
Customer Service Support:
Customer Support associates handle the queries which pop up on a real-time basis. Customer support has to understand the needs and potentials of the customers over the phone or based on the ticket. It has a particular starting and ending session. The team has to perform well on short term basis to retain customers. Once resolved, the customer service team doesn't have to monitor the customer's service usage and progression, unlike customer success. All the team has to do is to build the rapport with their clients for a particular period to resolve and respond to their queries to provide excellent customer experience. That indirectly saves customer churn rate.
Confusion between the role of CSM and Account Manager
Organizations face the problem to identify where does the Account Manager's role fit into the equation while developing their customer success team. Customer success is a post-sales role. However, the boundary between customer success and sale process is not always clear. Sadly, what's happening is many organizations are just renaming their Account Managers to Customer Success Managers. The worst part about this is clients who thought the individual who will have a holistic view and willing to add values to their services, will only get an expert who is only worried about solving existing problems.
Let's discuss the key differences between customer success manager and Accounts manager.
a) Functionality
Customer Success Manager :
Customer success manager will see how more values can add to customers services. They will want the growth of the client's business so that the customers can renew their subscription at every renewal period. Customer satisfaction score is the primary performance indicator of customer success. It is the first and foremost concern of the customer success manager to reduce churn rates or cancellation rates. Customer success managers make the customers realize the sustained value of the product and also assist them with the related problems of the product so that the clients stay happy and satisfied.
Accounts Manager :
Account Managers try to meet the primary goal of the organization. They provide resolutions on the customer's problems and want them to be free of technical difficulties so that they continue using their products. They escalate the support tickets raised by the customers to the right departments. They want customers to upgrade to the next pricing phase of the product. They make an effort to demonstrate the correct value of the product so that the clients can think about up gradation.
b) Purpose
Customer Success Manager :
Customer Success Manager provides proactive response and approach to maintain the relationship with the customers. They anticipate any potential threats and problems so that the clients can enjoy smooth services and provides unprompted assistance so that they can improve their service experiences.
Account Manager :
An Account Manager works on a real-time basis and reactive on providing support on whenever customers or clients ask for it. Which poses a problem if customers have any other issues they are not aware.
c) Support Management
Customer Success Manager :
Customer Success Managers respond to broader client goals by addressing to security vulnerabilities faster. It is is not an issue which can be closed within a day. It has to be deliberated and analyzed properly to turn into a business. It might take a quarter or a year.
Account Manager :
Account managers work on support tickets escalated by customers or clients, and they respond within one or two business working days. They don't need to analyze much like CSM to put everything together.
d) Skills
Customer Success Manager :
The utmost important skill that a customer success manager should have is clear communication. They should be active listeners. They need to have the adaptive skills to handle challenging conversations with clients. Also, they need to have a strong domain or organizational knowledge to drive information correctly among users. Their consultative skills help organizations to build and maintain strong relationships with customers
Account Manager :
Account Managers work more as generalists. Obviously, they understand the product and the organization the best so that they can build rapport with the customers accordingly. They have a different role to play. They solely concentrate on meeting organization's goals. They don't need to strategize things like CSM. But both of CSM and AM must be empathetic and great communicators to identify client's problems and to create a scalable resolution.
e) Thinking bigger
Customer success managers can handle both of the roles of a CSM and AM. But that doesn't mean you need either of them. A CSM should only concentrate on the big pictures. If Customer Success Managers are assigned the task to handle support tickets to protect day to day resolution, then it will be difficult for them to deal with big areas of implementation. If Customer Success Managers are instructed to work as a support and to demonstrate product features, chances are customer success won't be in the picture. They might leave the organization or leave the Customer Success project as a whole. You need Account Managers to handle the end users properly on day to day basis as they are determined to meet organization's goals on target basis. It gives Customer Success Managers a relief so that they can solely concentrate on the actual Customer Success metrics. Predicting revenue growth is the luxury for many businesses. Growth and predictability go hand in hand. Customers who won't churn pay for the next month's service cost and continues. The longer the customers pay for the services, the less likely they are going to leave. Therefore, the answer of the predictability is nothing but retention.
The competition is getting higher and tougher in the industry. The retention rates determine the growth of SaaS organization. Even if you make sales in low levels, customer success is possible if existing customer is retained properly. There is always a well-organized approach that needs to be followed wisely to create enough values for the customers so that they don't move to your competitor's service. The fact is the profit of the organization increases with the increased life cycle of the retained customer's relationship with the organization. Companies should organize Customer Success teams based on strength, not based on availability. You need Customer Success Managers, Customer Support team and Account Managers working together to their strengths to serve customers better to fight churn of the company.
