What is Customer Success? Roles and Differences in Customer Support

What is Customer Success? Differences in roles and customer support

Table of Contents

1. What is Customer Success?
2. Background of Customer Success
3. What is the role of customer success?
4. Summary

1. What is Customer Success?

Overview of Customer Success

"Customer Success" refers to the concept of "guiding customers to success" and is defined as "efforts to lead customers to success". In recent years, this concept has been gaining attention, especially among companies that offer subscription-based services, due to the nature of their revenue structure. In a situation where there is an abundance of subscription-based products and services, and customers are easily able to switch to other services, it is important to consider "how to keep customers using our service". The role of Customer Success is to accompany customers and help them maximize the value of the product or service they have purchased. It can also be described as "supporting customers to achieve success". The key characteristics of Customer Success are to guide customers to success, increase customer satisfaction, maximize LTV (Lifetime Value), and build long-term relationships.

Difference between Customer Support

Customer support is a service that provides direct support to customers when they have problems or questions about products or services. It can be provided in various forms such as phone, chat, email, etc., and specialized staff may provide solutions.
On the other hand, customer success is the process of maximizing the use of products and services by customers and leading them to success. Therefore, proactive responses such as product or service introduction, training, support, and regular communication are necessary. It provides the necessary support for customers to use products and services in the long term.
In other words, while customer support provides direct support to solve problems, customer success focuses on providing the necessary support for customers to maximize the use of products and services and achieve success.

Learn more about customer success here.
What is customer success?

2. Background of Customer Success

Spread of Subscription-based Business (such as SaaS)

The subscription-based business model has become widespread, where users pay for the service based on the usage period rather than purchasing the product. In the B to C industry, there has been an increase in subscription-based services, such as Toyota's KINTO. Even in the B to B industry, the traditional business model of paying a large initial cost for packaged products has shifted to a monthly subscription model for services provided online by SaaS vendors like Salesforce. With subscription-based services where customers only pay for the necessary period of usage, revenue cannot be maximized unless customers continue to use the product or service. Therefore, it is necessary to make customers feel that they want to continue using the product or service, and customer success is required to achieve this.

Changes in Sales Techniques

In sales of one-time purchase products, the goal is to sell the product and end the transaction. On the other hand, in subscription-based services, the contract marks the start of the relationship with the customer. Therefore, if the expectations are not aligned and the goal is not set with the customer, the contract may not be renewed. Additionally, in SaaS services, there are often areas that need improvement upon release. Afterwards, the features are gradually updated and the product grows alongside the customers and the market. In sales of subscription-based services, such as in the SaaS industry, it is important to have the motivation to gather customer feedback and improve the product's capabilities.

3. What is the role of customer success?

Customer Success (LTV)

In customer success, LTV refers to the lifetime value of a customer. This 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 how much value a customer brings and determines the cost of acquiring a customer. To maximize LTV, customer success supports customers in utilizing products or services to the fullest, increasing customer loyalty and repeat purchase rates. Collecting feedback from customers and using it to improve products or services also plays an important role in maximizing LTV. In other words, customer success provides a strategic perspective for building long-term relationships with customers.

Exchange Rate

Churn rate refers to the customer churn rate. The customer churn rate is an indicator that shows the percentage of customers who have left the company during a certain period. It is usually expressed as an annual churn rate. If the churn rate is high, it is important for customer success to reduce the churn rate as it requires a large amount of expenses to acquire new customers.
To reduce the churn rate, it is necessary to support customers to fully utilize products and services, and to increase customer loyalty. In addition, it is important to respond to customer needs and requests and improve products and services through regular communication and feedback collection.
In other words, the churn rate in customer success is an important indicator for the customer success team to increase customer loyalty and develop measures to reduce the churn rate.

Improving Customer Success Role Chain Rate

Service/Product Improvement

In customer success, improving services and products is extremely important. In order for customers to continue using and being satisfied with the product or service, it is necessary to constantly provide the latest features and quality. Additionally, as customer needs and requests may change, improvements are also necessary to respond to them. Improving services and products brings many benefits such as improving customer satisfaction, reducing churn rate, gaining competitive advantage, and increasing revenue. Therefore, it can be said that "improvement" is also a role of customer success.

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

The role of a Service Consultant includes promoting competitive advantages and increasing fans of products and services. When competing companies offer similar products or services, organizing and promoting one's own strengths can lead to gaining more fans.
In addition to improving services and communication with customers, listening to their "voice", providing education and training, and predicting and proposing solutions to customer issues can improve customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers can also lead to word-of-mouth advertising. Therefore, these activities have the potential to increase revenue. As products and services are improved, the likelihood of customers purchasing more expensive plans or upgrades increases, and developing new features can also lead to acquiring new customers.

Expand Usage

By improving the UX of products and services, utilizing referral marketing, and promoting improvements in onboarding, you can aim for usage expansion in customer success. For example, by providing guides, tutorials, and demo videos, users can understand and start using products and services correctly, which can promote usage expansion. Additionally, by offering upsells/cross-sells, you can promote usage expansion for users. For example, offering additional features or introducing related products.

4. Summary

Many BtoB companies (especially SaaS companies) have a high priority for customer success. The tasks of the customer success department are very diverse, but maximizing LTV is considered a highly important task. To maximize LTV, cooperation and collaboration among related departments, as well as streamlining tasks, are necessary. Therefore, it is also necessary to establish support mechanisms (streamlining) and introduce various tools. With Human Science's services, measures can be implemented that lead to the streamlining of tasks in the customer success department and the improvement of CX (customer experience).

Service Introduction

To efficiently share information on knowledge for customer success or to improve customer satisfaction, it is important to maintain documentation. It is also necessary to secure resources for this purpose. However, creating manuals and developing training content to improve customer satisfaction requires a large number of personnel and time, making it a high priority and a heavy workload task.

At Human Science, there are many services available for customers in the Customer Success department. In particular, we believe that the quality of the content provided by the Customer Success department is the key to success. Therefore, it is necessary to improve and create manuals, enhance FAQs, and create training content. All of these require costs if done in-house. Additionally, the quality must be easy to understand. At Human Science, we have a proven track record of creating easy-to-understand manuals and e-learning content. We offer the following services:

•Improvement of manual and training text quality
We propose the most suitable instruction manuals, technical documents, help, and FAQs for your environment. We provide consulting services from evaluating current manuals to creating a multilingual support system and building and operating a CMS. We can also handle the production of video manuals.

•Support for creating educational content and introducing LMS (Learning Management System)
Just like manuals, we will propose the most suitable educational content for your environment. Starting with evaluating your current content, we can also optimize LMS and provide multilingual support.

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

Achievements

The following are achievements for the Customer Success Department.

WingArc1st Inc.: Consulting and content creation services for the Customer Success department, including content evaluation and improvement consulting.
https://hs-learning.jp/case/wingarc1st/

We also offer services that can handle the creation of easy-to-understand "manuals" and "video manuals", as well as e-learning content, which are necessary for customer success, all in one stop. Please take advantage of them.