Are you striving to enhance your company’s customer satisfaction to drive growth? If so, understanding the distinct roles of customer success (CS) and customer experience (CX) is essential. While often used interchangeably, customer success and customer experience serve different purposes and have unique organizational responsibilities. 

Customer success focuses on ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes through the effective adoption of your technology, while customer experience is all about creating and maintaining a positive journey for your customers. By clearly defining and differentiating these functions, you can provide tailored support, boost customer satisfaction, and optimize your business operations. 

Dive into this blog to discover how mastering the nuances of customer success and customer experience can transform your customer engagement strategies and drive growth this year and beyond. Additionally, learn how to thwart customer confusion in your customer base by leveraging the proper naming conventions during the customer journey.

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What Is Customer Success

Parts of the technology and services industry use customer success and customer experience synonymously, as if they are part of the same organization. This must be corrected, as it can confuse customers who know the difference. At its core, customer success ensures customers achieve their desired business outcomes by effectively adopting a supplier’s technology or services. 

Customer success is best defined as the intersection between the promise of a supplier’s technology and the customer’s desired business outcome.—TSIA.

This involves proactively engaging customers to ensure they derive maximum value from their purchased products and services.

Critical Responsibilities of Customer Success

• Customer adoption: Monitoring and ensuring that customers effectively use the technology. This involves tracking customer usage and employing success plans and playbooks to guide customers toward achieving their goals.
• Retention and renewal: Focusing on activities that increase renewal rates and expand opportunities ensures long-term customer loyalty and business growth.

A significant majority (94%) of companies surveyed by TSIA reported having a dedicated customer success organization. These organizations are pivotal in tracking customer adoption and retention, with 76% of respondents indicating that their customer success teams are primarily responsible for these areas.

Related: The Business Case for Customer Success: Challenges, Value, and Key Metrics

What Is Customer Experience

Customer experience, on the other hand, encompasses the entire journey a customer undergoes when interacting with a company. In many companies, customer experience employees are seasoned behind-the-scenes professionals focused on creating and validating a positive customer journey and ensuring that every touchpoint aligns with the customer’s expectations and desired outcomes.

Critical Responsibilities of Customer Experience

• Journey mapping: Understanding and optimizing the customer journey to address potential issues and enhance overall satisfaction preemptively.
• Voice of the Customer (VoC): Gathering and analyzing customer feedback through surveys such as TSIA’s KORE Score and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to continuously improve the customer experience.

Approximately 51% of organizations surveyed by TSIA have a dedicated customer experience department, primarily focusing on engaging customers to align products and solutions with their needs and expectations. In most organizations, the customer experience department is under customer success and mainly supports them. In smaller organizations, customer experience is a shared resource(s) from marketing or sales.

Related: The Art of Using AI to Build a Seamless Customer Experience with Dell

Key Differences Between Customer Success and Customer Experience

While both customer success and customer experience aim to improve customer outcomes, they differ in several key aspects:

• Organizational structure: Customer success organizations are often structured around customer adoption and retention, whereas customer experience organizations focus on the customer journey and customer satisfaction.
• The focus of engagements: Customer success engagements are typically proactive, aimed at driving adoption and renewal. In contrast, customer experience engagements are broader, focusing on understanding and enhancing the entire customer experience.
• Metrics and measurement: Customer success organizations measure success through customer metrics (e.g., usage, return on investment (ROI)) and supplier financials (e.g., churn, retention). Customer experience organizations, however, prioritize customer experience metrics (e.g., KORE Score, NPS, satisfaction scores) alongside some supplier financial metrics.

Clearly defining and differentiating between customer success and customer experience can lead to more effective customer engagement strategies for companies. By aligning the right roles and responsibilities, organizations can ensure that customers receive tailored support that meets their needs at various stages.

Key Benefits of Differentiating Customer Success and Customer Experience 

• Improved customer satisfaction: By addressing specific aspects of the customer journey through dedicated customer success and customer experience functions, companies can more effectively meet and exceed customer expectations.
• Increased renewals and expansion: Targeted customer success efforts can drive higher adoption rates and renewals, while comprehensive customer experience strategies can enhance overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Enhanced organizational efficiency: Clear delineation of roles and responsibilities helps prevent overlap and confusion, leading to more streamlined operations and better resource utilization.

Don’t contribute to the confusion by being different at the expense of confusing your customers. Understanding the distinct roles of customer success and customer experience is crucial for companies aiming to enhance customer satisfaction and drive business growth. 

While customer success focuses on proactive customer engagement to drive adoption and retention, customer experience encompasses the broader journey of ensuring positive customer experiences. Organizations can deliver superior customer value by effectively aligning these functions, increasing loyalty and long-term success.

Related: The State of Customer Success 2024 - A Fight for Survival

Your Key Takeaways

• Clear role definitions improve customer outcomes: Understanding customer success and customer experience roles helps organizations provide targeted support. Customer success ensures customers achieve their business goals through proactive engagement and effective technology adoption. In contrast, customer experience enhances the customer journey, ensuring every interaction meets customer expectations.
• Enhanced satisfaction and loyalty: Companies can better meet customer needs by differentiating customer success and customer experience functions. Customer success drives higher adoption rates and renewals, while customer experience strategies ensure a positive overall experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.‍
• Organizational efficiency and growth: Clearly defining customer success and customer experience roles prevents overlap and confusion, streamlining operations and optimizing resource use. This approach improves customer engagement and supports business growth by aligning organizational efforts with customer needs and expectations.