Customer Support vs. Customer Success: Key Differences [2025]

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 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.

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 support team, who can instantly help them 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 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 satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

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 agent steps in to—review the account and data and proactively reach out to explain and educate them 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 focus on different KPIs yet shares a common goal: ensuring customer satisfaction.

While both teams focus on solving customer’s problems, there is a subtle difference in how they function. Let’s break that down in a table for a more precise understanding:

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 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 necessary resources

While the functions of customer success vs support may differ, their focus will always be the same: satisfying customers and building a sustained relationship, ultimately for your business growth.

However, to achieve this, it is important to build an equilibrium environment between the teams, with appropriate customer success and customer support software that complements their skill sets and makes them even more productive, keeping the scale and needs of the customer base in mind. This approach will help ensure your operations run smoothly and support your overall goals.

Provide appropriate training and development to the teams

In business, success goes beyond making just a sale. It’s about building a long-term relationship with your customers. 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 teams

For businesses focused on customer experience and satisfaction, bridging the gap between customer support and success teams is important, as both play important roles in solving customer problems.

For instance, let’s say a customer contacts a support agent about technical issues with an account upgrade, and the issue is resolved. Your success team isn’t aware of this, they continue to reach out to the customer with follow-up recommendations or upsell offers that are no longer relevant. This wastes time, creates confusion, and leads to angry customers.

This situation between the two teams could have been avoided if they had worked together. They can also better anticipate customer needs, resolve issues faster, and provide a more seamless experience at every touchpoint.

Measuring the success of the teams with KPIs:

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).

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.

Ready to empower your teams with the right tool? Book a demo now.