“51% of customers find out about customer impacting issues directly from their customers.”

In this episode, Hadijah Creary breaks down what Customer Service teams are versus Customer Success teams. What do they care about? How can they each get more proactive to improve the overall customer experience? And why is it PagerDuty Customer Service Operations and not Customer Success Operations?

Watch a version of the “Happy Agents, Happy Customers” talk referenced in the conversation.

Summary with support from chatGPT:

In this conversation, the host welcomes Hadijah Creary, a Product Marketing Manager for customer service operations products at PagerDuty. They discuss the distinction between customer success and customer service teams. Hadijah uses analogies like umbrellas and coins to explain their roles. Customer service teams handle real-time operations and immediate problem-solving, while customer success teams focus on long-term customer satisfaction, business growth, and strategic planning. They emphasize the importance of collaboration and communication between these teams to provide the best customer experience.

“If [customer success teams] don’t know that something had happened with their customer and their customers had an impact, they’re left in the dark in terms of how to support them in the long term.”

The conversation continues with a discussion about the challenges that customer success teams face when they are not informed about customer issues by the customer service team. It is emphasized that trust can be compromised if the customer success manager is not aware of customer support interactions. They should be on the same page as their team and use information proactively to support the customer. The host also raises a question about how customer success teams should make use of PagerDuty’s customer service operations application. Hadijah suggests using status pages to stay updated on incidents and keep customers informed.

“You need to be on the same page as your whole team so that you can use that information to proactively reach out and say we notice that you’re having an issue.”

The conversation then shifts to the priorities of customer success teams. Hadijah highlights that they are primarily concerned with reducing churn and downgrade, especially in the current economic climate where customers may be looking to cut costs. The focus is on demonstrating the essential nature of the product and ensuring that customers understand its value in solving their problems. Customer success teams aim to maintain the integrity of the customer experience by identifying the right levers to pull in order to keep the customer satisfied.

“Customer success: they are on the peacetime side of things where […] they’re more concerned about churn and downgrade and how to keep their customers happy.”

The conversation delves into the distinction between customer success teams and customer service in B2B organizations. The host points out that technology companies and B2B organizations often have customer success teams, while a wide range of companies, both B2C and B2B, have some form of customer service function. The discussion focuses on how customer success teams in the B2B world handle incidents and cases, and why customers might reach out to customer service instead of their account team.

“If you’re a company and while you’re reaching out to customer service, it’s because you need help now… you’re losing money.”

Hadijah explains that customers typically contact customer service when they need immediate assistance, such as when something is broken and impacting their business operations. The customer service teams then escalate urgent issues to the engineering team for resolution. On the other hand, customer success teams aim to stay informed about such incidents while concentrating on strategic planning for accounts. They emphasize the importance of leveraging data to improve customer satisfaction and address churn. Using data, both teams can collaborate effectively, with customer success showing clients how they’ve been helped in the past and how they can continue to improve going forward.

“The data is one of the things that kind of links both teams together.”

The conversation explores the development of customer success teams in the context of B2B relationships, subscription-based business models, and the need to focus on renewals. Customer service, which has been around for some time, deals with immediate customer issues and is now expanding to cover various communication channels. Customer success, on the other hand, is a more proactive approach aimed at helping customers succeed by optimizing the use of products or services.

“The whole idea I think is the idea of proactivity. How proactive can I be with my customers? How can I see things before they see it so that I’m helping them solve their problem hopefully before they become a bigger problem?”

Hadijah and the host discuss how the rise of subscription-based business models has led to a greater emphasis on post-sale customer relationships and the need for teams that can handle this. The host seeks insights into emerging best practices for both customer service and customer success teams.

“How do we spot something that’s already happening, know that it’s not just a one-off, link it to an incident that’s already happening, and follow that from start to finish.”

Hadijah suggests that customer service teams should aim to be more proactive by using data to connect cases to ongoing issues and follow them through. Happy agents lead to happy customers, resulting in a better customer experience. For customer success teams, the focus is on finding ways to pull them into a collaborative environment where they can access data and work closely with customer service and engineering teams to function as one cohesive unit.

“Giving them the information that would pull them in to make it one team, not just three separate teams all functioning separately.”

The conversation concludes with a focus on automating visibility and data access for customer success teams. The host raises concerns about the potential inefficiency of manual data gathering, especially during challenging economic times when customer success teams are under pressure to ensure customer retention. Hadijah suggests using status pages and subscribing to customer updates to stay informed about their status and address any issues proactively. The ultimate goal is to provide a better customer experience by being proactive and connected across all teams.

“For a better customer experience you have to get more proactive.”

Watch the interview: