TLDR:
- Customer Experience (CX) is the sum of all interactions a customer has with a brand throughout their journey and shapes perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and market reputation.
- Customer Success is a proactive strategy focused on helping customers achieve their goals and maximise the value of a product or service, leading to increased retention, revenue, and stronger relationships.
- CX is typically measured using metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), acquisition rate, and conversion rate, while Customer Success metrics focus on churn rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and product usage.
- CX approaches can be both reactive and proactive, but Customer Success is inherently proactive, anticipating customer needs and guiding them to desired outcomes before issues emerge.
- When organisations integrate both CX and Customer Success, they can achieve higher customer satisfaction, increased retention, and reduced operational/acquisition costs, resulting in amplified loyalty and business growth.
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In conversations withing organisations, terms like customer experience (CX) and customer success are often used, though not always in the correct way. Though they may overlap, each has distinct implications for your organisation. Understanding the key differences between CX vs. customer success can help your organisation focus better on distinct aspects of the customer journey.
To better unpack what these terms mean, let’s first define them, their characteristics, and the roles they would play in your customer’s journey.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) refers to the perception a customer has of a brand, influenced by the collective experiences they gain during their customer journey. This concept encompasses all customer interactions, from the first contact to post-purchase support and beyond.
Managing CX involves constantly looking at every interaction a customer has with a brand, identifying pain points and opportunities to stoke engagement and create a positive experience. A key goal of CX management is to create seamless, positive customer interactions that drive satisfaction, loyalty, advocay and business growth., all of which directly positively influence how a brand is seen in the market.
Explore how Resonate CX ’s customer experience management (CXM) platform can help your business achieve positive customer experiences.
What Is Customer Success?
While CX is more reactive, Customer Success takes a proactive approach, helping customers achieve their goals and maximise the value of a product or service. This concept goes beyond merely ensuring customer satisfaction, aiming to build loyalty and encourage long term product adoption.
Achieving continuous customer success requires businesses to understand existing customer goals as well as their real needs and motivations. To do this, customer success teams must work closely with customers to understand their perspectives and ensure that they get the products and services that best suit their needs. When customer success initiatives are employed effectively, businesses see higher customer retention, increased revenue, and stronger customer relationships by proactively helping users achieve their goals and maximise value from the product or service.
Key Differences Between Customer Experience and Customer Success
CX and customer success are complementary ideas that are often used together, which could explain some of the confusion surrounding their use. However, they serve different purposes within your campaigns. Here’s how they differ:
| Criteria | Customer Experience | Customer Success |
| Focus | Is the sum of all interactions a customer has with a brand, shaping their perception, satisfaction, and loyalty. | Is a proactive strategy that ensures customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product or service, driving retention and long-term value. |
| Metrics | Since CX is primarily concerned with how easy, useful, or how enjoyable customers find the experience, it is measured using mainly Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score® (NPS), customer effort score (CES). If the programme is running for a period of time, organisations also measure customer acquisition rate, and conversion rate to assess satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business impact. Learn the difference between the three concepts of NPS, CSAT and CED in this guide. | To recap, customer success is about helping customers achieve goals, with the intent of driving customer retention and increasing product adoption. With that in mind, your main metrics for customer success campaigns should be churn rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and product usage. |
| Approach | CX management approaches can be both reactive and proactive, as they rely on customer feedback to drive improvements while also aiming to enhance experiences before issues arise. | Customer Success, on the other hand, is inherently proactive, focusing on anticipating customer needs, providing guidance, and ensuring they achieve their desired outcomes before encountering challenges. |
| Type of Industry | CX benefits any business with customers but is especially crucial in highly competitive industries with low differentiation (e.g., retail) and those with a high customer lifetime value (e.g., telecom, education), where strong experiences drive loyalty and long-term revenue. | Customer Success is essential in industries with high customer lifetime value (e.g., telecom) or high-cost, complex products and services (e.g., B2B SaaS), where proactive support drives retention and maximises value. |
Explore the Ultimate Guide to Customer Experience Metrics to understand how various factors can shape your CX strategies.
How Customer Experience and Customer Success Work Together
Despite their differences, good organisations have both CX programmes and customer success teams running together. If anything, accounting for both in your planning creates a powerful, customer-focused organisation. Businesses that successfully integrate these approaches often enjoy:
Higher Customer Satisfaction
A broad, data-driven CX approach gives high-value customer success initiatives a solid foundation to start from. Combining CX and customer success activities can ensure a consistently satisfying journey from the discovery stage towards your customers’ wins using your product, cementing long-term relationships in the process.
Increased Retention
The synergy between CX and Customer Success leads to improved customer satisfaction, increasing the likelihood that customers will remain loyal to your brand. By integrating both approaches, you can consistently address customer needs at every stage of their journey, fostering stronger relationships and retention.
While CX metrics provide near real-time insights into customer satisfaction, Customer Success metrics focus on long-term outcomes. Combining these metrics offers a comprehensive view, helping you gauge the likelihood of achieving positive customer success results.
Reduced operational and acquisition costs
Consistently positive customer satisfaction and retention invariably build trust and loyalty. More trust and loyalty in your customer base reduces the costs to facilitate each conversion, increasing your business’s efficiency and potentially setting it on a path to sustainable growth and profit.
The synergy between customer success and CX has long been harnessed by such notable businesses as Expedia and Workplace Assured to achieve market leadership in their respective spaces. These companies have excelled at understanding customer perspectives through data and observation, creating consistently positive customer experiences while also ensuring customers get the best of their offerings.
Choosing the Right Approach for Your Business
The choice between Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Success (CS) is rarely an either/or decision—both are essential. Customer Success is a key touchpoint within the customer journey, making it an integral part of the overall CX strategy. Together, customer experience and success form a holistic customer approach that consistently drives satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. These benefits, in turn, improve business efficiency and allow your organisation to enjoy better stability as well as more avenues for business growth. If you’re looking to develop or improve a customer-focused strategy, consider the insights in How Customer Experience (CX) Drives Business Growth.
Employing Resonate CX’s advanced AI-powered CXM platform can set your business up for lasting success. With a solid, data-driven understanding of customers’ desires, you’ll spend more of your marketing resources in the areas that truly matter, developing a stronger customer base as well as a healthier bottom line.
