Hello and welcome back to Startup Curious, where we discuss things you should know if you’re thinking about working for or starting a startup.
Today, I want to answer a common question: what’s the difference between customer support and customer success? On the surface, they seem pretty similar - but there are some important nuances you should know if you’re considering a career in either. This should also be useful for founders looking to hire in one or both of these roles for the first time. Bringing on a customer support team member when you really want someone who excels at customer success isn’t ideal, and neither is the other way around. Of course, at the very early stages, it may make sense to have the role be a bit of a hybrid - but in that case, you’ll want to look for people who have experience or potential in both roles.
One thing to note is that I’ll obviously be speaking in generalities here. Each company will have their own nuances around the differences and responsibilities of each of these roles.
So first, customer support. The customer support team is responsible for helping customers when they run into problems. They need to troubleshoot and get the customer on their way as quickly as possible. Customer support will generally be responsible for the entire customer base, unless a company has chosen to only offer support to customers on a certain plan.
Depending on the nature of support they do, they may be divided into specialties or have a sort of escalation seniority. For instance, a set of people may be responsible for handling easy questions that can be answered in under 5 minutes, but if an issue starts to become more tricky or requires some specialized knowledge or data access they may escalate it to the next tier. This helps keep things efficient.
Customer support is usually measured on how fast they can successfully solve their customer’s problems. Some support teams are actually just measured on how fast they can process customers, but usually the better teams look at a combination of speed and satisfaction.
Customer success, on the other hand, is focused on how to help customers get the most out of their product. Generally, a customer success team member will be responsible for a subset of customers, and will be the dedicated customer success person for just those customers. This allows them to establish a deep understanding of those customer’s goals and needs when using the product.
Since customer success is a more direct relationship, and the ratio of customer success team members to customers is generally smaller than that of customer support to customers, companies will generally have a threshold for when they assign a customer success person to a customer, usually tied to the revenue they expect to generate from that customer relationship. I probably said “customer” too many times in that last section, but hopefully you get the idea!
Customer success often has a sales component as well - in some places, their success is measured on renewals and upsells. Their responsibilities are to keep the customers from churning as well as convince them to expand their usage of the product, maybe by adding new seats or upgrading to a more expensive plan that includes the feature they want.
While both customer support and success teams have insights to how customers use the product (and product teams should listen to both!) they can end up with very different perspectives on what major things about the product need to be addressed. Customer support will know about the tiny things that trip people up on the way to becoming full, loyal customers and customer success will know about the things that loyal customers think are missing from the product.
Oh, and I suppose I should talk about how much each gets paid. In general, customer success does tend to pay more on average, at least in their base salary. Whether it’s fair or not, this is usually because they’re seen as a revenue driver, whereas customer support is usually seen as a cost center (which is not necessarily the wisest view, but… it’s pretty common).
The other thing to note is that customer support will sometimes be hourly, whereas pretty much all customer success jobs will be salaried. There are definitely pros and cons with both hourly and salaried, but I won’t get into those now.
So, which should you choose if you’re thinking about going into one of these roles at a startup? Well, many entry level customer success positions do want someone with some support or sales experience, so you may not have much of a choice and need to pick support first!
However, if you do have a choice - I think the sales component is the most important to consider. Would you feel comfortable pointedly directing someone to pay your company more money? If the answer to that right now is definitely a no, then you should stick with support.
Support has some other great benefits as well - if there are multiple support people at an organization, you can spread out who has to spend time with a terrible, high needs customer. In customer success, the one-to-one relationship means that you can’t necessarily have someone else handle them if you need a break (though the one-to-one relationship does mean you’ll likely end up with a great sense of how to deal with that particular customer at any given time).
Overall, if you enjoy working with people and are looking to break into startups - either role is a great starting point. We all know the saying about rocket ships and not picking your seat, and I think that can be especially relevant for your first startup role, even if you’re not necessarily getting into a guaranteed rocketship - the most important thing is landing that first role and being successful at it.
Alright, that’s where we’ll wrap up for today. Thanks for joining us! If you found this episode useful, please remember to subscribe and share. Our goal is to make startups more approachable for everyone and the only way we can do that is to get the word out!
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What's the difference between customer support and customer success?