![Customer success vs. customer support: Align teams to drive growth [2025]](/studio/assets/344ce62875920266f1c32a7d8850a67c0125704d-3024x1512.webp?w=1440&fm=webp)
For many SaaS businesses, the difference between customer support and customer success often blurs. Companies that don’t count or balance these two functions have a higher chance of creating a ripple effect on their business, such as unhappy customers and missed opportunities, which can eventually hamper the business growth.
Now, where do you draw the line here? What sets both customer success and customer support teams apart, and how can combining both work for your company’s growth?
It all boils down to your customers and their needs. Some might need immediate solutions to their problems, while others look for guidance to achieve their long-term goals.
Let’s dive deep to see how the two functions differ, where they overlap, and how customer success vs. support can work together to transform your business.
Key pointers:
- Customer support is reactive and focuses on immediate problem resolution, regardless of the channel, while customer success is proactive. It aims to build long-term relationships and provide excellent customer service that ultimately drives business growth. Both aim to improve customer experience but differ in their strategies and goals.
- Support teams measure First Response Time, Ticket Resolution Time, and Customer Satisfaction Score, while customer success teams measure Customer Lifetime Value, Net Promoter Score, and Product Adoption Rate to measure long-term success and growth. These KPIs reflect each team’s focus on short-term resolutions or long-term customer growth.
- For growth, businesses must bridge the communication gap between customer support and customer success teams. This is key to preventing misaligned efforts and enabling continuous training within the teams. This collaboration ensures smooth customer experiences, boosts retention, and drives higher lifetime value (LTV) and annual recurring revenue (ARR).
What is customer support?
Customer support refers to the support businesses provide to customers with inquiries, issues, or product-related problems before, during, and after a purchase.
It involves communication channels like phone, email, live chat, and social media, aiming to resolve issues, improve satisfaction, and ensure positive experiences.
Let’s say, for instance, your customer is experiencing a bug while accessing a feature or needs billing assistance.
The one immediate go-to person they look for and who comes to their mind is the customer service team, who can instantly help customers troubleshoot the problem.
However, this support can be through various channels via email, chatbots, phone, or automated ticketing systems, reflecting the dynamic nature of modern support.
In fact, 96% of customers believe exceptional customer support is important for their choice of customer loyalty toward the brand.
What is customer success?
Customer success refers to a proactive approach that foresees and addresses customer challenges before they arise, ensuring maximum value from a product.
It involves knowing their needs, offering guidance, and fostering long-term value, leading to improved customer retention, satisfaction, loyalty, and the entire customer lifecycle.
For instance, let’s assume one of your key enterprise customers on a basic subscription actively uses your product. They could benefit from upgrading to a higher plan to access powerful features that could boost their ROI.
This is where the customer success teams work to ease the customer journey by reviewing the account and data and proactively reaching out to explain and educate customers on the benefits of upgrading before they’re frustrated with your product results.
Research by Forbes shows that brands that prioritize and offer superior customer experiences with their products can generate 5.7 times more revenue than competitors , highlighting the impact of a strong customer success strategy.
Customer support vs. Customer success: 12 key differences you should know
Customer success vs. support is the teams working closely with your customer’s needs to improve their overall experience with your products. While we can see each team focuses on different customer success metrics, yet shares a common goal: ensuring customer satisfaction and customer retention.
While both teams focus on solving customer feedback and ease the customer journey, there is a subtle difference in how they function.
Let’s break that down in a table for a more precise understanding:
Aspects | Customer Support | Customer Success |
|---|---|---|
Approach | Reactive–address the immediate issue | Proactive–anticipates customer needs |
Role | Problem-solving | Strategically focusing on business growth |
Responsibility | Analyze and give an instant fix to the customer issues | Training, cross-selling/upselling |
Depth of relationship | Transactional and focuses on tickets | Relational and long-term relationship |
Primary goal | Solves the current problems instantly and quickly | Ensure long-term success by understanding the overall interest and goal |
Key interaction | Short-term and episodic | Ongoing and strategic |
Prioritize | Prioritize operational performance | Prioritize the product value and business growth |
Satisfaction analytics based on | Level of customer satisfaction based on the interaction | Building sustainable customer relationships and customer loyalty |
Role dependence | Works independently | Depends on the teams for inputs |
Metrics | First response time, post-interaction customer feedback survey | Regular check-ins, retention rates, and CLV |
Tools used | Ticketing software | CRM software to connect customers end-to-end and health scoring tool |
KPIs | First Response Time (FRT), Ticket Resolution Time (TRT), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) | Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Net Promoter Score (NPS) Product Adoption Rate Customer Churn Rate Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). |
Now, you must have understood the difference between how the two teams function, which can help businesses better structure their teams and create a more holistic customer experience.
Implementing customer success and customer support in your business
To implement customer success and customer support in your business, you must first develop a strong cross-team collaborative environment. Customer service agents and customer success focus completely relies on resolving customer requests, building satisfied customers, and retaining existing customers with the right software, training, and performance assessments.
It is necessary that both teams should be equipped to nurture customer relationships and achieve business growth.
Let’s see how we can implement both the support vs customer success team in your business.
Build a winning and efficient team with the necessary resources to build strong customer relationships
While the functions of customer success vs support may differ, their focus will always be the same: helping customers, satisfying customers, and building a sustained relationship, ultimately for your business goals.
However, achieving this requires more than an equilibrium environment between the teams—it needs the right customer success and customer support software. That equips both teams with a unified platform that complements their strengths and scales with customer needs, you create an environment where efficiency and impact go hand in hand.
Like how Atomicwork achieved with DevRev—a single platform for knowledge, issue tracking, and customer conversations. With AI-powered PLuG and ticket deflection, they shifted from reactive support to proactive experiences, boosting satisfaction and trust at scale.
Provide appropriate training and development to the teams to improve customer experience
In business, success goes beyond making just a sale. It’s about building a long-term relationship with your customers, retaining existing customers, and solving customer issues.
In order to do this, both teams should be equipped, empowered, and possess a comprehensive understanding of their roles and outcomes.
Sometimes, one or two team members can slip away, but regular performance assessments for and within teams are crucial to identifying areas where teams may fail.
However, consistently nurturing the skills of customer success teams vs. support teams through customer service training ensures they operate at peak performance. This strategic approach not only enhances the team’s capabilities but plays a key role in attracting, retaining, and maintaining stable relationships with your customers.
Bridge the gap between customer success teams & customer support teams to offer a seamless customer journey
For customer-centric businesses, aligning customer support and success teams isn’t optional—a much-needed one. As both teams play an important role in solving customer questions and empowering customers, operating in siloes only makes your customers suffer.
Your customer runs into a technical snag while upgrading their account and contacts support. The issue is resolved, but the success team—unaware of the interaction—continues outreach with upsell emails or product tips that no longer apply. This leads only to confusion, wasted time, and angry customers who feel unheard.
This disconnect can be avoided. When success and support collaborate, they gain a shared view of the customer’s journey, anticipate customer needs, resolve issues faster, and provide a more seamless experience at every touchpoint.
Take Uniphore, for example. By adopting DevRev, they not only connected support, engineering, and product teams in one unified workspace. Also, migrate 16,000+ tickets and 70,000+ comments in just 6 hours using Airdrop. With Jira bidirectional sync and Rocketlane integration, support gained real-time visibility into product issues, allowing customer-facing teams to operate with full visibility, identify issues before they escalated, and turn support into a strategic advantage—not just a ticketing function.
Measuring team success with KPIs for customer satisfaction
Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is essential for any business success. This practice is equally important for teams to ensure they are working effectively.
Customer support and customer success have distinct KPIs:
- The customer support team has First Response Time (FRT), Ticket Resolution Time (TRT), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
- The customer success team has Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Product Adoption Rate, Customer Churn Rate, and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
Although they have different KPIs, still common goal remains the same. Here’s a quick breakdown of differences and opportunities:
Areas | Customer support | Customer success | When they unite |
|---|---|---|---|
Focus | Troubleshooting & reactive help | Strategic growth & proactive guidance | End-to-end customer journey |
Metrics | CSAT, FRT, TRT | NRR, Product Adoption Rate, Churn, CLV | Unified CX, better retention, higher upsell potential |
Common gaps | Repeated queries, lack of context | Blind spots in product usage or support history | Closed-loop learning, seamless hand-offs |
Tracking these customer service metrics is also essential to provide your teams with the right tools to facilitate easy measurement and analysis.
This streamlines their workflow and helps avoid the hassle of switching between multiple tabs.
Success needs support—bring two teams together with the right tool
We all know that as your business expands, so does the complexity of both teams. With a growing number of customer tickets and some choosing to troubleshoot on their own, it’s a valuable strategy to provide them with well-curated, knowledge-based content that empowers them in their journey.
This is where DevRev steps in.
DevRev’s Turing AI curates articles through semantic keyword searches and generates articles for unique customer inquiries. This proactive approach meets your customer’s expectations and helps reduce the ticket load over time.
Simultaneously, it is important to empower the relentlessly working success team to build long-term relationships with your customers to stay ahead. With DevRev’s predictive analytics, you can swiftly identify these ‘at-risk’ customers, allowing your customer success team to leap into action and stop the churn.
Together, these two teams are like two sides of a coin: They drive your business forward, foster growth, and build customer-centric products. Connecting them with the DevRev Workflow Engine is important to allow your team to work efficiently and effortlessly.
If you’re ready to connect the dots between customer conversations and outcomes, it’s time to explore tools that unify—not divide—your teams. Book a demo now.
