How Customer Support leads to Customer Success?

Today agents who are working to support customers have different designations like customer support agent, customer success manager, happiness specialist and many more. But people actually wonder about what is the difference between these different names given to agents.

Customer Support and Customer success are two different terms that are often used interchangeably. This creates confusion among your customers and well the team when it comes to defining job responsibilities. These are not just terms but they are important functions for your business to operate successfully.

Let’s first define the meaning of Customer Support and Customer Success

While discussing support and success in business we generally tend to put them in the same basket. “So, let’s break them down and find what do they stand for”.

“Customer Support Team support a product or service whereas Customer Success team support the customer”

What is customer support?

“Customer support” means the reactive approach of working, “where a customer will come to you and you will respond to his/her queries”. Support focuses on making one-time transactions, by helping the customers with their queries or concerns which involves your business. Support is the ongoing technical support that will be given by an agent to the customer.

What is customer success?

“Customer success” is proactive in nature, in other words, a real-time approach where agents try to build a relationship with the clients by understanding their requirements and giving them information, which meets their goals and helps them troubleshooting on their own. A designation like a Customer Support Manager has a responsibility to understand what customers are looking for and be the hero of their entire journey with your business.

Customer Success is a new concept that has gain popularity in the past few years. The growth of your business is dependent on how your customer success team performs. If your customers are happy with the kind of service they are getting they will continue doing business with your organization and that will ultimately reduce the churn rate.

“Customer Support is the primary step that leads to customer success”

Think of a company that recently has started their operations and are planning to capture a market share. Do you think that they can achieve their goals, only with customer support or success? The answer is no because a business needs to support its customers first and that will lead to relationship and trust-building.

Let’s take an example to understand this better:

There is a customer who walks into the store to buy a Sketching book, a customer support rep will help the customer in locating the book and will get it billed for him this is a part of Customer Support. Now let’s assume that the same rep. is trying to tell the same customer about the Sketching pencils which are recently launched in the market. The extra mile which a representative is making to do the upsell after understanding the need for a pencil is Customer Success.

Today “support and success” are the inseparable part of any business. If they want to grow, they have to make sure that these two functions are going hand in hand. Customer support and customer success have to be aligned with each other otherwise it will cost the company both money and time. As it’s not just the delivery of information which is required but the value and quality of experience that customer gets is a Key to Success.

For having a great customer journey, it is important that you train your customer support and success representatives well and empower them will the right tools to execute your vision.

Empower your team with Hippo which is a one-stop solution for all of your customer support needs.

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