Customer Support & Success: What’s the Difference? How can Peoplelogic Help? | Peoplelogic.ai

While it is no secret that any modern technology company needs stellar product, engineering, sales, and marketing teams-it’s critical that you invest in customer support and success teams to ensure sustained growth. In a world where customer acquisition costs are skyrocketing, as a leader you can’t rely solely on locking your customers into long-term contracts to keep the business afloat.

If you have paying customers, there is never a bad time to invest in and build out the customer success function and bolster your support team. As mentioned above, customer acquisition costs are increasing-so it’s a lot easier to keep the customers you have, and less costly, then going out and finding new cohorts. Studies have shown that it’s more cost-efficient to ensure happy, successful clients-which falls onto the shoulders of your customer success and support function teams.

What is Customer Success?

Customer success is the team responsible for building and maintaining the processes that help anticipate and overcome challenges, questions, and issues-helping build a loyal, happy, and retainable customer base that increases revenue. For the most part, customer success teams are responsible for:

• Facilitating the implementation of your product and/or services
• Building and maintaining long-term customer relationships
• Helping customers meet and exceed their goals

What is Customer Support?

The more traditional customer support typically exists in some form or fashion from the day a customer is acquired. In comparison to customer success teams, support teams function a bit differently, responsible for reacting the customer problems quickly and finding and/or building a solution that delivers value and provides a seamless user experience. Often, customer support teams are responsible for:

• Responding to and solving problems customers are having with your product/solution
• Maintaining records of customer feedback, complaints, and interactions
• Ensuring immediate customer satisfaction and providing prompt solutions

What’s the Difference Between Customer Success and Support?

Do We Need Really Need Two Separate Teams?

Both functions are critical to the long-term growth and sustainability of a technology company. Customer support teams have the power to keep your customers moving through the funnel and having a positive experience while customer success teams have the power to grow your loyal user base. Both have tremendous responsibility and vast effects on your organization.

As stated in the chart above, the responsibilities of each respective team differ. Support remains a very reactive function-as a customer encounters a problem, this team quickly and professionally provides a solution so they can continue to use your product or service. Customer success is a longer-term strategic vision that is cross-functional. Support teams knock down the barriers, while customer success builds the infrastructure that ensures your customers have a clear route to value creation and growth.

How Customer Support Teams Use Peoplelogic:

Peoplelogic connects with customer support platforms, like Intercom and Zendesk, to provide you with advanced insights and analytics around daily support volume, time to first reply, time to solution, tickets opened vs. Tickets closed, and several other metrics. Our advanced AI-augmented machine learning models then analyze your data in real time to provide you with automated prescriptive recommendations that can help keep your customers, and your team happy.

By understanding the capacity and utilization rate of their teams-customer support leaders have used Peoplelogic to justify making new hires, to eliminate broken processes, and prevent burnout amongst their team members.

How Customer Succes Teams Use Peoplelogic:

By connecting Peoplelogic across your technology stack, Peoplelogic starts to analyze data from your emails, calendars, CRMs, customer support tools, development tools, and communication tools to start to put together the pieces that give you a holistic and granular understanding of not only what it takes to acquire a customer, but most importantly, what actions, behaviors, and steps lead to a happier, engaged, and loyal customer base. By understanding exactly what leads to your most profitable, highest LTV customers-Peoplelogic can help automate the playbook for retention-reducing churn and increasing LTV over the customer journey.

By automating the data-driven story behind your customers and surfacing insights and recommendations in an easy-to-understand, actionable format-Peoplelogic maps the interconnectivity of teams, processes, and goals. Never has it been so easy to understand the exact functions required to maximize your acquired customers lifetime revenue potential.

Helping Your Customers Succeed:

The fastest growing and most successful companies don’t skimp on the customer experience. Arguably two of the most external facing teams, customer support and success teams are the ones eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring continued success and happiness of a company’s customer base. By creating best-in-class support and success functions at your organization, your customers will feel supported, have positive experiences, achieve value realization more readily, and become loyal advocates. Having these two teams allows you to build long-term positive relationships with your customers, who are after all, a group you depend on most.

To start to understand you people, processes, and performance on a deeper level get started with a 30-day free trial of Peoplelogic. We help you analyze, predict, and plan using your team’s data so you can make better decisions, faster and more confidently.

Originally published at https://peoplelogic.ai on October 27, 2020.