Support is reactive and ticket shaped: the customer has a problem, you solve it, you close it. Customer success is proactive and outcome shaped: you own whether the customer actually gets the result they bought the product for, whether or not they ask. The tell is who starts the conversation. If every interaction begins with the customer emailing you, you have support with a nicer job title. In practice most early teams run both out of one person, which is fine, but you should be able to say which hat you are wearing in any given hour.
3 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it 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.
From SaaSBoomi by Sri Maneru 8 min read
Open saasboomi.org →Why we picked it 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.
From Wiley by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy 256 pages
Open amazon.com →Why we picked it 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.
From Freshworks 14 min read
Open freshworks.com →How customer success and retention reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.
The same ground, over in Grow organically & retain, our D2C track.
