Customer service is a life style

When you contact customer service these days, you might find your rep signing off as “Customer Success Specialist,” “Customer Success Coach” or something along those lines.

And yet, it’s hard to define customer success. Even in customer support circles, it’s viewed as a nebulous concept toeing the line between glorified support and marketing gimmick. But if you view it as an approach or an attitude, it has its place in customer service: if customer support is reactive, customer success is its proactive counterpart.

What is customer success?

When it comes to customer success, you’ve probably seen everything from customer support teams that have been plainly renamed, to companies that have gone so far as to restructure their entire organization around customer success. This sums it up nicely:

The role of customer success at a company is to actively manage customer relationships to reduce churn, increase existing revenue and influence new sales.

But leaving aside semantics, small and growing companies are finding their own answer to how they build, engage and educate their customer base – and they’re doing it in more than one way. It’s not always a team, but it is a company lifestyle.

Anticipate your customers

How many times have you signed up for a new product or service with high hopes and then gradually settled into the limitations of your purchase? Customer success is responsible for minimizing that cognitive dissonance and helping customers get the value they were promised out of their new purchase. So understand that customer service is a life style.