Member-only story
The Startup-Killing Mistake Of Satisfying Your Customers
Take these preventative steps to properly separate Customer Success and Customer Support
From new startups to established large companies, I often see the same growth-crippling mistake made when it comes to customer satisfaction. It starts when the Customer Success role is charged with supporting the customer, and the Customer Support role is made responsible for customer success.
But wait! Customer support leads to customer success, right? They go hand in hand along the path of customer satisfaction, and that drives customer growth!
Well, sure — for a while.
I just spent three months advising a team that developed their Customer Support and Customer Success roles properly from the get-go. Not only did the proper division of duties pay dividends immediately, but it made their product launch and each additional feature rollout quicker, easier and more accepted by a larger portion of their customer base.
On top of that, it also put the company in a better position for customer growth.
When Customer Satisfaction Kills Growth
In any environment where organizational roles are combined and people wear a lot of hats, merging customer success and customer support seems like a good place to begin. In the short term, charging your Customer Support team with responsibility for customer success (or vice versa) creates a couple of quick benefits:
- Your Customer Support/Success team becomes a handy two-way conduit between the happiness of the customer and the profitability of the company.
- That team is right on the front lines, working with customers every day to make sure they are getting the most out of the product and are happy with what they’re getting.
Early on, everyone involved is chock-full of satisfaction — your customer, your Customer Support/Success team, and your company’s bottom line. But long-term, you’re setting yourself up for trouble, and eventually you wind up hitting a wall of limitations.
- Customers are no longer happy with the limitations of your product.
