The terms Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Success (CS) are commonly used within the service industry. Sometimes CX and CS are used to describe the same or similar things and other times to describe complexly different actions, activities and outcomes. This article offers definitions for each term and identifies similarities and differences between CX and CS.

There are many approaches to achieve service success and each company must chart its own unique course. Regardless of the path, there are five principles that all companies must embrace. Every company must have an established CX plan, attainable goals, well-defined service programs, optimized service capabilities and the means to measure and improve performance. These five principles establish the foundation from which to define, execute and achieve tangible, positive service outcomes.

Net Recurring Revenue is a comprehensive indicator that reveals the extent to which you are retaining, expanding and growing customer relationship value. Examining the specific underlying elements that contribute to the calculation of Net Recurring Revenue provides the necessary insights to identify the root causes of churn, attrition and contraction. In addition, examining the reasons for revenue growth presents opportunities to embrace and expand practices that encourage expansion of relationship value.

The term Customer Success seems to permeate the industry with nearly every company engaged in some type of success initiative. The focus and awareness of Customer Success is timely and refreshing. This does not imply that technology companies have not been focused on making customers successful in the past, but this emphasis on Customer Success creates a new level of awareness and commitment to truly impacting customers’ ability to derive benefits from technology. Customer Success has profound implications for the ways that companies engage, serve, and retain customers.
This article introduces four key milestones to help you define essential Customer Success capabilities.

Support Imperative: Track and Report Defects. If a customer took the time to report an issue, Support has the obligation to document this event.

Your customer base contains a diverse population of customers each with distinct needs and expectations. Implementing an effective service segmentation strategy will improve service sales, increase customer retention rates and create opportunities to offer new and expanded services. Here are tips for developing a service segmentation strategy.

The logical evolution of Support is to focus more effort on developing and sustaining long term profitable customer relationships. Many Support organizations want to be more customer-success focused, but few have the capacity to change. To make this transition, Support resources need to focus on high value activities such as helping customers adopt and succeed with the products they purchase. AI is a critical catalyst to enable this inevitable Support transformation. This article introduces 6 ways to apply AI to technical support.

Industry average performance is not good enough.  To maximize support and maintenance contract revenue you need a clear picture of your current situation or a plan to understand and mitigate attrition.

To successfully embrace subscription licensing models companies must adopt a subscription mindset. this article introduces the strategies and practices to make the successful transition to a subscription model.

Is it a good thing if customers need support or is this a problem? The need for support is inevitable and communicating with your customers is always a good thing. What distinguishes support as good or bad is based on how you respond and what you learn from each customer interaction.