What is Customer Success? Differences between roles and Customer Support

Table of Contents

1. What is Customer Success?
2. Background of the Growing Attention on Customer Success
3. What is the role of Customer Success?
4. Summary

1. What is Customer Success?

Overview of Customer Success

"Customer Success" literally means "customer success" and is generally defined as "efforts to lead customers to success." In recent years, particularly among companies offering subscription-based services, the concept of Customer Success has gained attention due to the nature of their revenue structure. In a situation where subscription-based products and services are proliferating and customers can easily switch to competitors' services, the perspective of "how to keep customers using the service" becomes important. It can be said that the role of Customer Success is to accompany customers after they purchase a product or service, ensuring they can maximize its value. It can also be described as "support to lead customers to success." The characteristics of Customer Success include leading customers to success, increasing customer satisfaction, maximizing LTV (Lifetime Value), and building long-term relationships.

Difference from Customer Support

Customer support is a service that provides direct assistance to customers when they have problems or questions about products or services. It is offered in various forms such as phone, chat, and email, and specialized staff may provide solutions.
On the other hand, customer success is the process of helping customers maximize the use of products or services and guiding them to success. This requires proactive measures such as product or service implementation, training, support, and regular communication. It provides the necessary support for customers to use products or services in the long term.
In other words, while customer support provides direct assistance to resolve issues, customer success focuses on providing the necessary support for customers to fully utilize products or services and achieve success.

We provide a detailed explanation about customer success here.
What is customer success?

2. Background of the Growing Attention on Customer Success

The proliferation of subscription-based businesses (such as SaaS)

The subscription-based business model is becoming widespread, with users paying for the duration of use rather than "buying products." In the B to C industry, subscription services are increasing, such as Toyota's KINTO. In the B to B sector, the traditional business model involved paying a large upfront cost for packaged products, but now, monthly subscription models provided by SaaS vendors like Salesforce, which offer services online, have become mainstream. In subscription services where users pay only for the necessary duration, maximizing revenue is not possible unless customers continue to use the products and services. Therefore, it is essential to make customers feel that they want to "keep using" the service, and customer success is required to achieve this.

Changes in Sales Methods

In the sales of one-time purchase products, the goal is to finalize the contract when the product is sold. On the other hand, in the case of subscription-based services, the contract marks the beginning of the relationship with the customer. Therefore, if expectations are not aligned and goals with the customer are not set, the contract will not be renewed. Additionally, in the case of SaaS services, there are often many areas that need improvement at the time of release. After that, features are gradually updated, and the product grows together with customers and the market. In the sales of subscription-based services like those in the SaaS industry, it is essential to have the motivation to provide customer feedback to the product and enhance its capabilities.

3. What is the role of Customer Success?

Customer Success (LTV)

In customer success, LTV refers to Customer Lifetime Value. Customer Lifetime Value is an estimate of the total revenue from products or services that a customer is expected to purchase over their lifetime. This is an important metric in customer success because it helps measure the value a customer brings and determines the costs to invest in acquiring customers. To maximize LTV, customer success enhances customer loyalty and increases repeat purchase rates by supporting customers in making the most of products and services. Additionally, gathering feedback from customers and using it to improve products and services also plays a crucial role in maximizing LTV. In other words, customer success provides a strategic perspective for building long-term relationships with customers.

Churn Rate

Churn rate refers to the customer attrition rate. The customer attrition rate is an indicator that shows the percentage of customers who have left a company within a certain period. It is usually expressed as an annual attrition rate. When the churn rate is high, it requires significant costs to acquire new customers, making it one of the important goals in customer success to reduce the churn rate.
To lower the churn rate, it is necessary to support customers in maximizing their use of products and services, thereby enhancing customer loyalty. Additionally, it is important to respond to customer needs and requests through regular communication and feedback collection, and to improve products and services.
In other words, the churn rate in customer success is an important indicator for the customer success team to formulate strategies that enhance customer loyalty and reduce the churn rate.

Role of Customer Success Improvement of Churn Rate

Service/Product Improvement

In customer success, improving services and products is extremely important. To ensure that customers continue to use products and services with satisfaction, it is necessary to constantly provide the latest features and quality. Additionally, as customer needs and requests may change, improvements are also needed to respond to these changes. Improving services and products brings many benefits, such as increased customer satisfaction, reduced churn rates, gaining competitive advantage, and increased revenue. Therefore, promoting "improvement" can also be said to be a role of customer success.

Increase in fans, improvement in customer satisfaction, acquisition of loyalty

The role of customer success includes establishing competitive advantages and increasing the number of fans for products and services. When competitors offer similar products or services, organizing and communicating your company's strengths can lead to acquiring more fans.
While improving service and communication with customers, listening to the "voice" of the customer, providing education and training, and anticipating customer challenges to make proposals will enhance customer satisfaction. When customers are satisfied, word-of-mouth advertising effects can also be expected. Therefore, these activities can potentially lead to increased revenue. As products and services improve, the likelihood of customers purchasing more expensive plans or upgrades increases, and developing new features can also lead to acquiring new customers.

Expansion of Use

In customer success, you can aim to expand usage by improving the UX of products and services, leveraging referral marketing, and promoting onboarding improvements. For example, by providing guides, tutorials, and demo videos to help users correctly understand and start using the products and services, you can promote the expansion of their usage. Furthermore, by offering upsells/cross-sells, you can encourage users to increase their usage. Examples include providing additional features and introducing related products.

4. Summary

Many B2B companies, especially SaaS companies, are prioritizing customer success. The operations of the customer success department are very diverse, but maximizing LTV can be considered a highly important task. To maximize LTV, collaboration and cooperation among relevant departments, as well as operational efficiency, are necessary. Therefore, systematization (efficiency) of support and the introduction of various tools are also required. With Human Science's services, we can implement measures that lead to the operational efficiency of the customer success department and the improvement of CX (customer experience).

Service Introduction

To efficiently share know-how for customer success or to enhance customer satisfaction, it is also important to organize documentation. It is necessary to secure resources for this purpose. However, creating manuals and developing training content to improve customer satisfaction requires a significant amount of personnel and time, making it a high-priority but increasingly burdensome task.

At Human Science, we offer a variety of services for the customer success department. In particular, we believe that the quality of the content provided by the customer success department is key to achieving customer success. Necessary actions include improving and creating manuals, enhancing FAQs, and producing training content. Attempting to handle these in-house can be costly, and the quality must also be clear and understandable. Human Science has extensive experience in creating clear manuals and e-learning content. We offer the following services.

•Quality Improvement of Manuals and Training Texts
We propose the most suitable user manuals, technical documents, help, and FAQs for your environment. Starting with the evaluation of the current manuals, we provide consulting for building multilingual support systems and CMS operations. We can also undertake the production of video manuals.

•Production of educational content and support for the introduction of LMS (Learning Management System)
Similar to manuals, we propose educational content that is optimal for your environment. Starting with an evaluation of the current content, we can also optimize the LMS and support multilingual capabilities.

•Chatbot Implementation and Development Support
To improve the efficiency of customer support, many companies are advancing the implementation of chatbots. We propose the most suitable chatbot for your environment. We can provide one-stop support from the implementation of the chatbot system to content creation.

Project Achievements

The following are achievements for the Customer Success Department.

WingArc1st Inc.: Content evaluation, improvement consulting, and content production services for the Customer Success Department
https://hs-learning.jp/case/wingarc1st/

We provide a one-stop service for creating easy-to-understand manuals, video manuals, and e-learning content necessary for customer success, so please make use of it.