Having talked about Customer Success fairly recently, we decided to dive even deeper into the topic and find out — what is the difference between customer success and customer support.
In this article, we'll cover:
What Is Customer Support?
Customer support is a scope of services aimed at assisting customers post-purchase to ensure correct use of a product. It includes troubleshooting, maintenance, help with upgrading, and answering product-related questions.
What Is Customer Success?
Customer success is a set of actions and measures a business takes to make sure customers are successful while using a business’ service or product and have a desired outcome.
Customer Support vs. Customer Success: What Is the Difference?
Reactivity vs. Proactivity
🤝 Customer support: Consultants’ main task is to react to customers’ inquiries and questions and provide them with a solution that is:
- Correct
- Timely
- Simple
- Able to resolve their issues completely
Making sure replies to customers’ inquiries follow all these points is what makes an efficient support team.
⭐️ Customer success: Customer success is more about proactively building and maintaining a strategy of communication, servicing and supporting the customer base. The process fully depends on a business and the ability of its team to make strategic solutions and steps.
Established Traditions vs. New Rules
🤝 Customer support: Customer support has a long history. In fact, the first-ever customer complaint was written almost 4000 years ago. Since then, the industry saw the establishment of several main principles of customer support and communication:
- The customer is always right.
- Always leave a customer satisfied.
- Empathy is the best approach.
- Always listen and be ready to help and so on.
These principles stem from customer-centricity. Remembering them will help any business raise customer satisfaction and reduce its customer churn.
⭐️ Customer success: Customer success is not as old as support. Its real path started somewhere from 1760-1876. That is when the industrial revolution and the invention of the telephone have caused a boom in the business world. Around that time, businesses saw the need for competition and the importance of customer service and success.
While customer support operations are clear, the knowledge on how to establish customer success is still shaky.
ROI Clear vs. ROI Proof Needed
🤝 Customer support: To develop and turn a support team into real pros, a business needs to invest in it. Why? Because 68% of customers say they are willing to pay more to deal with a business with excellent customer service. And because a 5% increase in retention can lead to at least a 75% increase in revenue.
To make money, a business needs to spend money.
⭐️ Customer success: customer success is more on the debatable side. It is not a big market — it is predicted to reach $3.1 billion by 2026. For comparison, the customer care market is predicted to grow to $28.16 billion. The work of success teams is only obvious when they are not there — higher churn, lower satisfaction, and falling revenue.
Focuses on the One Customer vs. Focuses on the Entire Customer Base
🤝 Customer support: One customer support consultant can only focus on one customer at a time. Of course, when the entire customer base comes in with a slew of similar requests, a support team can relay them to the client and set changes for all the customers in motion.
That is not as common as customers would want, though. In general, customer support is about making one customer happy at a time.
⭐️ Customer success: Customer success teams take a bigger picture into consideration.
- What does customer experience look like?
- Where do customers have the biggest issues with the service?
- Do we want our customers to return?
- How do we turn every first-time customer loyal and so on?
Customer success is about the entire customer base, no matter how big or small it is.
Both Complement Each Other
Both support and success team work to satisfy the entire customer base and ensure the highest satisfaction KPI. Now, it is possible by not only ensuring the highest level of customer service for the present, but by strategizing and looking into the future. This is where the synergy of customer support and customer success really come together.
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Anna started out in financial markets, diving into daily research on bonds and stocks. A passionate reader with a love for historical literature and international cuisine, she’s now all about mastering customer communication. She writes in-depth about customer support, backed by extensive research, and has become an expert on the topic.
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