Customer success vs. customer experience: What's the difference?

While both customer success and customer experience are vital for business growth and customer-centric roles, they focus on distinct aspects of the customer journey.

Customer success guides customers toward achieving their desired outcomes with a product or service, ensuring they realize the full value of their investment. Customer experience, in contrast, encompasses the broader perception and feelings a customer develops through all interactions with a brand.

Understanding the distinction between customer success and customer experience is crucial for optimizing your customer journey and achieving key business outcomes. In this guide, we’ll explore the nuances of each, their impact on business growth, and how they work together to create a seamless experience that fosters customer loyalty and turns satisfied customers into enthusiastic advocates.

More in this guide:

• What is customer success?
• What is customer experience?
• Key differences between customer success vs. customer experience
• How customer experience and customer success work together
• Frequently asked questions
• Improve customer success and customer experience with Zendesk

What is customer success?

Customer success refers to the philosophy and practice of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using a company’s product or service. It’s a proactive approach to managing the customer journey, from onboarding and adoption to ongoing engagement and expansion.

Customer success teams work closely with customers to understand their unique needs, goals, and challenges. They then provide tailored support, guidance, and resources to help customers maximize the value they derive from the product or service.

The ultimate goal of customer success is to build strong, long-term relationships with customers based on trust, mutual understanding, and shared success. This not only fosters customer loyalty and retention but also contributes to the company’s overall growth and profitability.

Why is customer success important?

Customer success is important because it is a critical driver of business growth and long-term sustainability due to its impact on the following areas:

• Increased customer lifetime value (CLV): Empowering customers to achieve their goals creates loyal advocates who are more likely to repurchase and recommend your product or service, significantly increasing their lifetime value.
• Reduced churn: Satisfied customers are less likely to churn, saving your company money and ensuring a predictable revenue stream.
• Improved customer satisfaction: Proactive engagement and issue resolution by customer success teams lead to higher CSAT scores and positive word-of-mouth marketing.
• Increased product adoption: Customer success teams ensure users understand and utilize your product’s full potential, maximizing adoption rates and return on investment (ROI).
• Valuable customer insights: Close collaboration with customers provides a goldmine of insights into their pain points, preferences, and evolving needs, informing product development and improvement.
• Stronger competitive advantage: A dedicated customer success program sets your company apart, attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.
• Increased revenue growth: Focusing on customer retention and expansion unlocks opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, driving additional revenue.

Customer success is a win-win strategy. It ensures customers achieve their objectives while fueling your company’s growth and profitability.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience encompasses all interactions and perceptions a customer has with your company throughout their journey. It’s the sum of all customer touchpoints, from the initial brand awareness and consideration stages through purchase, onboarding, usage, and post-purchase interactions.

CX goes beyond individual transactions or support calls. It includes a customer’s overall feeling and impression of your brand, products, and services. This encompasses emotions, perceptions, and the value they derive from their relationship with your company.

Businesses can build a positive customer experience on several key factors:

• Consistency: Delivering a consistent experience across all channels and touchpoints, ensuring customers receive the same level of service and attention regardless of how they interact with your brand.
• Personalization: Tailoring interactions and offerings to individual customer needs and preferences, making them feel valued and understood.
• Ease of use: Designing intuitive and user-friendly products, services, and interfaces simplifying the customer journey and minimizing friction.
• Speed: Using intelligent tools like AI to anticipate customer needs and provide timely assistance to address issues before they escalate, building trust and loyalty.
• Emotional connection: Creating positive emotional experiences through empathy, responsiveness, and genuine care for customer well-being.

CX is about creating a holistic and memorable journey that leaves a lasting positive impression. It’s about exceeding customer expectations and building a relationship based on trust, value, and mutual respect.

Why is customer experience important?

When customers have exceptional experiences, they become loyal advocates who continue to do business with you and enthusiastically recommend your brand to others. This organic word-of-mouth marketing is invaluable, expanding your reach and building trust among potential customers.

Investing in CX also yields tangible financial benefits. Satisfied customers are more likely to spend more and remain loyal, becoming a reliable source of recurring revenue. Additionally, exceptional CX is a crucial differentiator, setting your brand apart in a crowded marketplace.

Prioritizing CX creates a positive ripple effect within your organization. It empowers employees to deliver outstanding service, fostering a customer-centric culture that boosts morale and productivity.

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Key differences between customer success vs. customer experience

While customer success and customer experience are both crucial for a thriving business, they operate within different spheres of the customer journey and have distinct focuses. Understanding these key differences is essential for aligning customer experience strategies, optimizing resources, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Scope

Customer experience is broader than customer success. CX focuses on creating a positive relationship between a company and its customers throughout the buyer’s journey—from the awareness stage to the end of the customer lifecycle. Customer success is only one part of the customer experience. CS teams work with customers after the purchase, helping them optimize the use of a product or service so they can reach their business goals.

Metrics

Typically, you will use different customer experience KPIs to gauge the quality of customer experience and customer success. CX is measured using customer satisfaction score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score® (NPS), customer acquisition rate, and conversion rate. CS is measured by customer lifetime value, customer retention rate, customer churn rate, Customer Effort Score, and repeat purchase rate.

Industry

You’re more likely to find a dedicated customer success team at companies that use a subscription-based model, such as business to business (B2B) or software as a service (SaaS) companies. Since their survival and growth rely on repeat purchases, they focus on helping customers reach their goals with the product or service. However, customer experience roles are more commonplace throughout all industries.

How customer experience and customer success work together

Customer experience and customer success play different roles, but they intersect in many ways and are equally critical to the long-term vitality of your business. Both customer success and customer experience teams help achieve company-wide goals of increased revenue and improved customer loyalty.

They influence one another, too—it’s easier to cross-sell and upsell your customers when they have good experiences. CS teams help improve the CX by showing clients how to optimize the use of a product or service. This helps reduce the need for customers to contact support teams and, in turn, improves customer satisfaction. When you look at the big picture, managing the customer experience is a team effort that involves both departments.

Frequently asked questions

Improve customer success and customer experience with Zendesk

Now you know the difference between customer experience and customer success. The next step is to leverage both teams’ strengths to build better relationships with your buyers.

Start by ensuring both CS and CX teams know why their roles are important and how to work together. Encourage the departments to collaborate regularly to achieve company-wide goals instead of focusing on only their individual team priorities. Improving customer support, increasing customer value, and providing better experiences are only possible when both teams work together.

A customer service solution like Zendesk can help connect customer data from all channels to streamline support and optimize the customer journey.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of NICE Satmetrix, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.