Is Customer Success the same as Professional Services?

You might call it professional service, or onboarding, or enablement. The team might help new customers with implementations, or training, or various other projects (like setting up a widget or building a custom report). Ultimately, these teams are project-based teams. There is a beginning and an end to each engagement. And these teams are not the same as a customer success team.

If you’re using Customer Success as an umbrella term, I would argue that your professional services team (I’m going to call this team Services from here on out) absolutely belongs under the umbrella. As many of my peers have eloquently stated (notably Donna Weber in her book Onboarding Matters) getting a customer off to a great start is key to building a strong, long-term relationship with them. However, the roles of Services and Success are very different.

The Work is Different

Services teams do work that is project-based. This means, as I mentioned above, it has a start and end date. More complex services tend to have milestones in the middle. Generally, there is a prescribed timeline, and the focus is on hitting the timeline. This is complicated by customers who don’t turn in their “homework” on time, don’t show up for critical meetings, or don’t require their team members to attend important training sessions. Services professionals spend a surprising amount of time chasing down customers. While the work is similar to Success in that it is proactive, it is different in that it is project-based.

Success teams do work that is value-based. There is no end date to the work they do. In a perfect world, the relationships they develop with customers last forever. In that same perfect world, a customer’s CSM will continue to challenge them, expand on the work they are doing together, and demonstrate ongoing value. Success teams have different objectives for customers. They aren’t trying to get them from point A to point B as effectively as possible. They are trying to understand the customer’s business so that they can maximize the value a customer gets from their solution. This is a proactive, value-based role.

The Objectives are Different

Given what I just described, the objectives of Services and Success teams are very different. The goal of a Services professional is to help a customer through the project they are working on together in a way that is efficient (meeting or beating the timeline) while effective (getting the customer to success) all within the scope of the project. Typical KPIs for Services teams are things like hitting milestones and deadlines, maximizing initial usage, and maintaining or reducing the time to the first value a customer receives from the solution.

Success teams have a different objective. Their objective is getting the customer to see value from their solution in a customer-focused (what the customer cares about) and concrete (measurable) way over the course of the lifetime of that customer. This is a much broader and less product-focused objective. Typical KPIs for Success teams include things like customer and revenue retention, revenue expansion, and long-term customer satisfaction.

Could The Same Person Do Both Jobs?

A lot of startups don’t have a choice – they don’t have the runway to split these roles apart. Early-stage companies are also still working on their product-market fit, so having a single person who is both implementing the solution and managing the customer over the long run has the advantage of quickly getting important information to the product and marketing teams. In addition, there is the obvious fact that a startup probably doesn’t have a bunch of customers who need to see long-term value – yet!

However, when a team is ready to scale it is time to split these roles up. If you have the same people delivering onboarding and trying to maintain long-term customer relationships, the relationships will always take the hit. Faced with emails coming in about meetings, training, or onboarding, do you think that a team member will take the time to do outreach? The urgency of project-based work is always going to take priority over proactively demonstrating long-term value. Both roles are critical to customer success, but they are different enough to warrant separate teams.