One of the biggest buzzwords in business today is “Customer Success.” In fact, it’s becoming one of the most important elements in all types of businesses. What is the difference between customer service and customer success? The most obvious difference is that customer success is proactive and customer service is reactive. Whether your a Saas, B2B, or B2C company the difference between your company languishing or achieving mega-growth can be traced back to CS. The success of your business is connected to the success of your customer. If your customers succeed using your product, they’ll continue using your product, and thus, your business will succeed.

These days customer service means customer success. Customer success focuses on the long-term success of customers by building relationships with them and helping them realize the full potential of the product or service. Adopting an effective CS strategy in which your customer relationship is focused on client management that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes often results in decreased customer churn and increased upsell opportunities. To do this you need accurate data.

Having the best data empowers you to adapt quickly and more likely to succeed in a changing market. Your product and services can do the same for your clients and their customers. Forbes understands that knowing what the best customer service leaders do for their clients can help you move to and develop greater tools for your business and clients. Using a product designed to enable your company to develop, track, and deliver the best product or service experience for the customer can give you the tools needed to get the edge on your competition. Understanding the way customers use your product from their perspective, can help you ensure that your customers achieve the outcome that they anticipate reaching. Thus enabling your business to exceed users’ needs, starting at adoption, so they can be successful and therefore you can be successful. 

Understanding the Business Terms and Abbreviations: 

Customer Success (CS) is the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management, that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes.

The goal of customer success is to make the customer as successful as possible, which in turn, improves customer lifetime value for the company. In marketing, customer lifetime value (CLV or often CLTV), lifetime customer value (LCV), or life-time value (LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.

Software as a service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet. SaaS is one of three main categories of cloud computing, alongside infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

B2C and B2B are two forms of commercial transactions. B2C, which stands for business-to-consumer, is a process for selling products directly to consumers. B2B, which stands for business-to-business, is a process for selling products or services to other businesses.

Net Promoter or Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and claims to be correlated with revenue growth.