What is Customer Success?

Customer success is a strategic approach that helps businesses ensure their customers derive maximum value from their products and services. Customer success teams typically include roles such as Chief Customer Officer, Customer Success Director, and Customer Success Managers or Specialists. These teams focus on building long-term relationships, guiding customers through onboarding, and offering ongoing support, consultations, and training.

Unlike customer service departments that reactively address technical issues and FAQs, customer success teams take a proactive approach. They focus on helping customers achieve their long-term business objectives by identifying and resolving challenges.

For instance, a SaaS company’s customer success team might notice a drop in product usage by a customer. The team would then reach out to the customer, gather feedback on the issue, and explore if an alternate product, feature, or additional training could enhance value. This proactive strategy not only helps improve customer satisfaction but also plays a crucial role in reducing churn.

Account management is a strategy focused on nurturing existing customer relationships, driving revenue growth, and providing a personal point of contact for product and account inquiries. Account managers (sometimes called Account Executives) are responsible for addressing customer questions, as well as upselling, cross-selling, and ensuring subscription renewals.

Unlike sales teams, which focus on acquiring new customers, account managers work with existing clients to deepen relationships and increase account value. By encouraging renewals, upgrades, and additional purchases, account managers directly contribute to business growth.

Typically we find that many companies will interpret these roles and job titles in different ways. Frankly, it doesn't matter all that much, provided your customer understands who they're working with and their specific role. These two roles tend to be separate in larger organizations, but in growth stage, mid-market or early stage SaaS businesses it's more common to find these roles merged into one Customer Success function.