Customer Experience vs. Customer Success: Learn the Key Differences

What is the difference between customer experience and customer success? We break down the differences  — and explain how they can work together to delight customers.

Often the terms customer experience (CX) and customer success (CS) are used interchangeably, but they’re not quite the same. Customer experience focuses on enhancing the entire customer journey, from awareness to loyalty. Customer success, on the other hand, caters to building lasting relationships with customers post-purchase.

Let’s explore how customer experience complements customer success, and how they work together for business growth.

What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer experience (CX) refers to the impression your customers get from interacting with your brand and offerings — from initial engagement to the post-purchase journey — across multiple channels and touchpoints. In other words, delighting customers happens at individual touchpoints across the entire customer journey, whether by offering user-friendly products, personalization, or round-the-clock support to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

5 Components of Customer Experience

1. Touchpoints and Interactions

A touchpoint is a digital or physical point of contact between your brand and customers. An interaction is how customers make contact — through a website visit, engaging on social media, making a phone call, sending an email, or having an in-person conversation. 

2. Brand Values and Emotional Engagement

Customer experience goes beyond transactional interactions to connect customers to your brand on a deeper, more emotional level. Through visuals and storytelling, you can reinforce values that align with their challenges or aspirations, or find other positive ways to express your mission and engage with customers emotionally.

3. User Interface and Design

Clear and intuitive design contributes to a positive customer experience and brand perception throughout the customer journey. Customers can easily navigate well-designed user interfaces without needing help from customer service teams.

4. Employee Experience

Employee experience (EX) is an important customer experience component that directly impacts customer loyalty. If your customers need the intervention of customer service teams, an engaged employee is more likely to serve better than one who isn’t. And an unhappy customer meeting an unengaged employee might be the last sign for them to take their business elsewhere.

4. Connected Experiences

Most consumers (79%) expect a connected experience when they’re interacting with teams across departments, but 59% feel like they’re communicating in silos. Teams often have various touchpoints spanning marketing, digital, contact center, and in-person operations. A connected experience cohesively delights customers across all touchpoints, regardless of the method of contact used.

What is customer success (CS)?

Customer success (CS) refers to any activity done to increase long-term retention and help customers solve problems with your product or service. Unlike customer experience, which is broader in scope, customer success has a narrow focus on helping customers get the most satisfaction out of their purchases. This includes providing post-purchase support and resources to maximize value while improving the frequency of renewals, upsells, or cross-sells.

3 Components of Customer Success

1. Upselling and Cross-Selling

Customer success managers have access to data on usage patterns that help them understand customer needs and proactively address any issues. This data also identifies opportunities to recommend additional features or services to customers that complement their existing usage and help them achieve their goals more effectively when they are most receptive.

2. Proactive Engagement

Monitoring key metrics — such as Net Promoter Score (NPS®), customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, and Digital Experience Scores (DXS®) — that indicate a customer’s progress towards their goals allows you to intervene proactively. Whether it’s providing onboarding resources or in-app engagement, taking responsibility for customers after the sale and helping them get the most out of the product or service contributes to customer success.

3. Relationship-Building

Customer success requires building strong relationships. For B2B organizations, this requires connecting with decision-makers within the client’s organization to understand their goals and how your product or service can help them achieve desired outcomes.

Customer experience vs. customer success

While some argue that the main difference between customer experience and customer success lies in the former being B2C-focused and the latter B2B-focused, that’s not always the case. After all, it’s just as important for B2B organizations to have CX strategies as it is for B2C companies. We believe the answer is what role they play in the customer journey — as the principles of both concepts are adaptable for any company, irrespective of the type of customers they serve.

Let’s review the key differences between customer experience vs. customer success, including in the overall customer journey, the approach to customer needs, and the means of nurturing relationships. 

Area of Focus

• CX prioritizes building a strong brand reputation and building trust with customers outside the scope of mainline customer service.
• CS ensures customer satisfaction in the post-purchase part of the customer journey.

Customer Journey

• CX orchestrates customer experiences across the entire customer journey — from awareness to post-purchase interactions.
• CS specifically revolves around helping customers get value from the product throughout their lifecycle.

Approach

• CX anticipates future needs, prescribes the next best action, and reviews previous actions to improve every customer interaction.
• CS proactively guides customers toward success using onboarding assistance, training programs, and ongoing support.

Customer Relationship

• CX focuses on the impression and emotional connection customers have with the brand while understanding and meeting their needs and goals at every touchpoint to ensure satisfaction and foster loyalty.
• CS strategically centers on managing customer relationships after sales to ensure satisfaction and foster loyalty.

How CX and CS work together

Even with considerable differences, CX and CS work hand in hand to drive business growth. They both overlap to create the perfect formula for customer retention. One without the other may lead to customer dissatisfaction and ultimately churn. We’ve looked at the similarities and differences of CX and CS. Here’s how they can work together to achieve shared goals.

Unified Customer Data

CX teams can leverage post-purchase data and analytics from CS teams to understand customer perceptions and feelings, allowing them to provide positive interactions that help improve the overall customer experience. Similarly, CS teams benefit from CX data and insights to inform their strategies. 

Collaborative Journey Mapping

CS and CX teams can jointly create comprehensive customer journey maps, highlighting touchpoints and critical insights from the customer experience.

Integrate Proactive Communication

A unified and anticipatory approach to communication from CX and CS teams enhances the overall customer experience from onboarding to ongoing support.

Collaborative Onboarding Programs

Combined insights from CX into user experience from CS teams on effective product and service usage and value realization can make onboarding programs more impactful.

Benefit from Experience Management Platforms

Equipping CX and CS teams with tools like Medallia’s customer experience platform enables better results for both teams by providing an overview of customer behavioral data and actionable insights across the entire customer journey.

Drive Business Success with Customer Experience and Customer Success

Every organization needs to deliver on their brand promise to customers — and in many cases, it takes robust customer experience and customer success programs to deliver those results. Customer experience focuses on the entire buying journey, with the goal to delight people during every interaction, from using the brand’s apps to calling customer service. Customer success, on the other hand, is typically more B2B-focused, with a CS team making sure a business is successful when using their product or platform. In the end, it’s the focus on customer relationships that drives significant long-term business growth.