What is the difference between customer success and customer support?

Chargebee's customer success leader answering an Indian founder's question in the SaaSBoomi community. Eight points, starting with the one most Indian startups get wrong: treating CS as an extension of support.

Best Practices for Setting Customer Success in your SaaS start-up

From SaaSBoomi by Sri Maneru 8 min read

• A CS leader should fix data first, then processes, then people, in that order.
• Customer success is a proactive consulting role (adoption, QBRs, needs); support is reactive ticket work.
• Tag every exit as avoidable (low adoption) or unavoidable (wrong ICP, business shut down) before you act on it.
• Track onboarding turnaround time and percent of customers onboarded as leading indicators.

The book that defined the function. Worth reading once if you are building the team, mostly for the ten laws and the argument that customer success is a company-wide operating model rather than a department.

Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue

From Wiley by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy 256 pages

A plain reference for the retention metric set (retention rate, revenue churn, CLTV, NPS) with formulas, from an Indian SaaS company that sells to both SMB and enterprise.

What is Customer Retention? Key Metrics and Strategies

From Freshworks 14 min read

• Acquiring a new customer can cost up to five times more than keeping an existing one.
• Customer retention rate = (ending customers minus new customers) divided by starting customers, times 100.
• Email existing customers every two to three weeks, and treat six months of no purchase as a churn signal.

Most explanations of this difference are one paragraph of theory. This one walks through who owns what, how the two teams hand work back and forth, and what breaks when you merge them, so a founder can actually draw the line.

The Ultimate Guide: Customer Success vs Customer Support

On CSM Practice 32 min