Customer Success and Customer Experience in Scale-Ups

In mid-March, the Customer Success Network kindly invited me to participate in a panel session at The Customer Conference in London, alongside Jo Massie, Hamish Wood, and Dave Jackson. The session -- “Killing Two Birds with One Stone: CX AND CS” – explored the differences between Customer Success and Customer Experience and how to gain efficiencies between the two. A deeper dive of my thoughts on this topic are below and for the full recording of our panel at The Customer Conference, check out the video below.

Customer Success vs Customer Experience

Firstly, its worth acknowledging that I’ve spent my career in B2B SaaS scale ups. So my answers and opinions are implicitly biased by that – ie: employing a VP of CX who is solely responsible for running a large enterprise’s NPS survey program is not something I’m familiar with. But what that also means is that my background has been spent implementing customer-centric processes oftentimes from scratch – so we’re not perfecting and fine-tuning, we’re building from the ground up. Hopefully that’s useful context as we explore my views on CS and CX.

That context also means that I don’t see a huge difference between CS and CX – it’s a rather semantic question. In the start-up/scale-up space the two functions are more inherently linked given we don’t have the luxury of separate teams to own each, meaning they’re sides of the same coin.  CS is the function responsible for helping customers achieve their goals – my team is doing CS when engaging with their individual customers which is 80% of the time. But because we work in a start-up and are always building new processes, my team is also doing CX when we are working with other departments based on customer feedback, which ultimately makes the CS part of their role easier. So it makes sense for these to be two sides to the same function in an early-stage business.

Put another way, customer success is an individual department focused on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes – it’s about depth; whereas customer experience is where you get above individual functions and consult with each department to ensure their processes are as customer-centric as possible – it’s really a “T” model. 

Given they’re the same function in a start-up, the real challenge is knowing when to dive deep and enhance CS vs spreading wide and focusing on CX.

To break it down another way, CS is the “what” and CX is the “how”. CS is what processes and initiatives we have in place to help you achieve your business goals and CX is the emotional state the customer has after engaging with those processes (and other functions within the company). Let’s take an example – the classic NPS survey. Based on the “what” and “how” model, an NPS survey is a customer success activity. But the personal call from the CS leader to say thank you for replying to the survey is customer experience. 

Speaking of closing the loop on an NPS survey, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a surprise detractor – someone who was in the middle of an upsell with us and we thought would be a promoter. When we spoke, he detailed how, during the upsell process, he and his company took our software and put it to the test against another vendor. The data we provided was 10x better than the other vendor. All good right?

But he warned us that the other vendor wanted it more – they were proactive and prescriptive, anticipated his needs. We still won the deal, but he warned that others in the organization wanted to select the other vendor – read a different way, others who were less familiar with the business value we provided (customer success) were swayed by the better customer experience of the other vendor. That’s the difference CX makes – your product might better achieve the outcomes the customer wants, but your decision maker might choose the company that makes it easier to achieve those goals. 

Our recent CSAT survey reinforces this data – we may be able to achieve the customer’s goals, but their experience matters. On the survey, we asked customers the NPS question and also Lincoln Murphy’s confidence question, which states “In the next 12 months how confident are you that your team will achieve your goals with our software?” Interestingly, 85% of respondents said “confident” or “extremely confident” – “not at all confident” and “somewhat confident” made up the 15%. But, our NPS response, while still a positive score, showed far more than 15% of respondents as detractors. That tells me that, while they may ultimately be successful – ie they will achieve some form of customer success, they might not enjoy the experience. Which by the way is why I consider NPS is a vanity metric that should only be used as part of a wide variety of data, but that’s a topic for another article. 

Being able to clearly define customer success and customer experience has helped me better get my head around all of the initiatives a CS leader is responsible for. My favorite session at Pulse Europe 2019 (my first Pulse believe it or not) was entitled "How To Climb The Customer Success Ladder To Become...Chief Revenue Officer?!”, presented by Dan Farkas of Box and Dan Steinman of Gainsight. The biggest thing that stuck with me was their comparison of KPIs for Sales vs Customer Success – CS leaders uniquely have a wide range of KPIs and targets they need to focus on. As a VP of Sales you have one KPI – revenue growth. But as a VP of Customer Success, I’m covering GRR, NRR, advocacy, adoption, NPS/CSAT, support case first response time, support case transactional NPS, training booking rates, training transactional NPS, onboarding transactional NPS, time to value, and a few more!  The “T” and “what and how” frameworks mentioned in this article have really helped me sift through these many KPIs and prioritize which to focus on when building out our customer success roadmap -- hopefully they’ll help you too!