Why Customer Success is MORE Important than Customer Experience

Are You Mad?

A reasonable question for you to ask, and I realize that the above might seem a little contentious, but please bear with me whilst I explain why (and in what way) I believe it to be 100% true in most circumstances. To illustrate why I think customer success is almost always more important and sometimes considerably more important than customer experience, let me provide a scenario as an example…

You are getting married today, and you are setting off to drive to the wedding. Which is more important to you – how pleasant and enjoyable the journey is, or whether you arrive at the right place and on time?

I’d suggest that in most situations it’s the latter that is most important, right? “Results count” as they say. After all you wouldn’t even be undertaking the journey if it wasn’t for the need to get the results, so the journey is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The Journey is Important… but Outcomes are more Important

Of course I’m not saying that you wouldn’t prefer to have a pleasant, relaxing and just all round wonderful time whilst getting to your target destination, but at the end of the day the important thing is to get there. It’s the outcome you need, not the experience.

Is this any different in business to business sales? I would suggest not. Whilst the best possible customer experience is certainly something to strive for, the real value is in delivering results for our customers, those results being the realization of their outcomes, meaning they attain their targets on time and to the right standard (quality, quantity or whatever else they specify).

Am I saying we should not be passionate about delivering great customer experiences for our customers? No I am not saying that. The better we can make the journey, the better our customers will like us and will enjoy being our customer. But is that sufficient to ensure they renew their contract and/or make additional purchases in the future? I would suggest it is not. Particularly in the B2B world (though I’d suggest this rule stands for many B2C situations as well), customers will choose the supplier that helps them get the results they need over the supplier that is most pleasant to work with. It’s not that a pleasant customer experience is not a desirable thing to have, it’s just that the return on investment only comes if the customer’s target outcomes are attained. As a customer what I might want is a great customer experience but what I need is the right results from using the products and/or services I have purchased.

Isn’t it All the Same Thing?

Some people might criticize the above by stating that part of the overall customer experience is indeed the attainment of a customer’s desired results. I can understand that argument and I do not have a problem with it at all, in fact I agree. I would say that not only is customer success one aspect of the overall customer experience it’s the critical part of it. It’s not the only part which counts in any way at all, but because of the reasons stated above it’s by far and away the most important part – more important indeed than all the other parts combined; in fact in my upcoming book – Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for managers and professionals – I describe customer success as being “the jewel in the customer experience crown”.

So now we can finish our diagram…

The way I see it is that it’s a lot like Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”. In case you’ve not come across it before, the basic concept behind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that there are five levels of human needs. These range from the most basic physiological level of requirements at the bottom such as food and shelter, to the level of self-actualization at the top where things like mate acquisition and seeking happiness occur. The point of the hierarchy is that more basic needs must be met before a person stars worrying about the higher levels. So for example until you have enough to eat and a place to shelter from the elements you are unlikely to be worrying too much about pursuing personal interests or trying to increase your social standing. The same thing applies in comparing customer experience with customer success: if a customer’s outcome objectives are not being met by the product or service they have purchased, the “experience” they receive is largely irrelevant. You could give them the best customer experience possible, but if your products and services do not result in them attaining their goals they will not renew their service contract or buy more of those products from you again.

Customer Experience and Customer Success – Actually it’s a Balance

Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for customer experience. I think Jeanne Bliss explains it perfectly in her book Chief Customer Officer 2.0 when she states that one of the five key competencies for Chief Customer Officers and indeed for the whole C-Suite is to “manage and honor customers as assets”. Absolutely – and so should we all!

In short, I am a big fan of companies investing in the entire end-to-end experience that they deliver to their customers, and this should include everyone and everything within the company from product design to marketing to manufacturing to distribution to selling to supporting and more. Customer centricity is where it is at, and creating wonderful customer journeys is one important aspect of that. But customer outcomes are even more where it’s at, and creating meaningful customer outcomes is even more important, and that’s the thing – customers want great experiences but they need to attain success. Both are good, but success is gooder!

The Bottom Line

So the bottom line is that in reality the answer is no, customer success (which is specifically aimed at outcome attainment) is not more important than customer experience (which covers the whole customer lifecycle from beginning to end and therefore including customer outcome attainment). A better way of expressing it is that customer success is the most essential aspect of customer experience. That being the case, companies who are considering how to invest in improving their customers' journeys and/or improving their customers' successes (these being the two aspects of customer experience we have been describing and discussing) might want to ask themselves one simple question:

“Are my customers currently attaining and measuring the outcomes they hoped for from our products and/or services?”

If the answer can be proven to be “yes” then by all means invest in enhancing the customer journey. But if the answer is “no” or “we don’t know” then in my opinion there is a strong argument to invest more heavily in customer success management than in other aspects of the customer experience until such time as the above can be answered in the positive.

And the title? Well there is some truth to it, but I was also deliberately being contentious in order to provoke thought and hopefully also some debate, which is always a healthy thing. Please do leave your opinions in the Comments section below!

About the Author

Rick Adams is an independent author, trainer and consultant, specializing in helping technology companies deliver measurable business value for their customers. Adams has over 25 years’ experience of working in the IT industry, including owning his own startup software-as-a-service business which he sold in 2012 to focus on writing, training and consulting. Having delivering training and consultancy to many hundreds of businesses and thousands of technology professionals in over 30 countries across four continents, Adams is now based in the rural west coast of Ireland where he lives with his two dogs Zeus and Terri.

Adams’ recent work includes the development and delivery of a global certification program on customer success management for Cisco Systems Inc. He is currently working on a book titled Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for managers and professionals which will be published by Routledge in the summer of 2019. His current interests includes helping individuals and companies develop best practices in customer success management and in business outcomes focused selling.

He can be contacted via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickadams01/, via Twitter at https://twitter.com/RickAda84728077 or by email at rick.adams@practicalcsm.com.