When you work in a big company in a managerial role, such as an account manager, a project manager, or a salesperson, you have to deal with clients. It’s a challenging task because communication with a variety of clients can be quite time-consuming and bothersome.
However, by satisfying the clients and their needs, the business wins. This is why concepts such as customer experience, relationships, and success are critical for every company. If you have been working in the industry for a long time, you know the rule of commuting with clients.
But what is the difference between these 3 motions? Are they different, or are they just the names of one phenomenon? It’s sometimes hard for experienced managers to state the difference between these notions. You might not be aware of what each term stands for.
However, the knowledge and understanding of the difference are what can make you win clients’ trust and help the company grow. So, let’s see how these 3 terms differ from each other and what their main characteristics are.
The Difference between Customer Experience, Customer Relationship, and Customer Success
If you work with clients, you must know how picky and demanding their requests might be. Thankfully, each business is supposed to have a whole team of people working on and improving customer success.
However, you can be bothered by these 3 concepts described. What are they for? How are they applied practically? It’s no wonder some employees don’t understand the difference because some businesses often misuse each of the terms in their work. So let’s clear the issue and see what makes these 3 concepts different.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is the first concept to discuss. When a company takes care of a customer experience, it’s mainly about the technical part. Is advertising targeted correctly? Are there any issues with the packaging, delivery, or quality of the direct services provided? If there’s anything complicated or impossible to use, the outsourced technical support team has to address the issue.
The task of this department is mainly to see if the process works correctly and if the company is offering market-driven quality services to the customers. If the services are provided correctly, but there’s still a certain type of dissatisfaction on the client’s side, it’s now the task of other teams to take on the task and figure out the problem.
What Is Customer Relationship?
If you wonder what customer relationship as a service is, you should dig deeper and understand why this tactic is used when communicating with clients. What is behind the name, and what techniques are used to build customer relationships?
- First of all, the team responsible for customer relations has to perform different reactive features. These are the tasks related to the problem-solving practices reported by the clients.
- However, there are also proactive functions that designate measures that a team should take to preserve good relations with the customers and ensure long-term and thriving work together.
This process requires time and can’t be easily managed by one person. If you have customers sending your tons of requests and asking for help, there has to be a successful and well-working customer relationship team to meet any issues and fix them.
Responding to clients’ requests is nice, and each business has to do it. But making sure clients retain trust and interest in the company after the issues are fixed is the task of the customer relationship team. There are many more tasks than just communicating with clients.
What Is Customer Success?
Customer Success is a broader concept. You might work in a company where the customer is prioritized, but there’s still a lot of work to make a general concept visible. Do you want to be seen as a helpful team of experts resolving the issue of every client? Then you have to have a bigger picture of what’s going on within your company and what approach the employees take in communicating with the customers.
What are the tasks of customer success managers?
- First of all, the team is responsible for retaining customer success and good impressions from the company. It’s not about micro-management. Customer success is about the bigger picture.
- The team should also help with the sales process. In many cases, the customer success team can affect the sales and sales process, too.
- If any big issues can’t be technically fixed, it’s the task of the customer success team to suggest options and ease the tension.
It’s the widest process that controls the way clients see the company. If there are major situations to be fixed, this is the responsibility of the customer success team to take on the challenge and understand what is going wrong.
Conclusion
As you can see, these are all different terms related to one concept. You need to know and understand your customer or client; these techniques simply help meet the client’s needs in various situations.
When a company needs to win the client’s trust and be seen as a reliable partner, all these notions must be used by different departments. Your business will win more and get better positions on the market if you learn the differences and implement them into your working process correctly.
