why great CX doesn’t guarantee customer success 🤔

"We're focused on delivering a great customer experience, so we're all about customer success."

I hear some version of this statement in boardrooms and strategy sessions frequently. It sounds reasonable enough — who doesn't want happy customers?

When I first started consulting in the customer success space, this was often the first question people asked. Usually, it came from investors who wanted to clarify what they were hearing from their portfolio companies and technology vendors in the ecosystem.

But this casual conflation of customer success (CS) and customer experience (CX) reveals a fundamental misunderstanding that's costing B2B companies millions in misallocated resources and missed opportunities.

Customer Success and Customer Experience are not synonyms. They're not even two sides of the same coin. They're distinct disciplines with different objectives, metrics, and organizational impacts.

Let's untangle this confusion once and for all...

Same Building, Different Floors

The easiest way to understand the distinction? Customer Experience is about how customers feel during interactions with your company. Customer Success is about the outcomes they achieve using your products.

Take Slack, for example. Their intuitive interface, smooth onboarding, and responsive support create a positive customer experience. But whether a customer achieves success with Slack — measurably improved team collaboration, reduced email volume, faster project completion, etc. — is an entirely different matter.

Here's how they differ across key dimensions:

The Dangerous Overlap

The confusion stems partly from the fact that there is some overlap between CS and CX. Both disciplines care about customer sentiment. Both impact retention. Both require cross-functional coordination.

But this overlap creates a dangerous trap: assuming that excellence in one automatically implies excellence in the other.

Consider these scenarios:

Scenario 1: A SaaS company provides white-glove support, a beautiful UX, and frictionless processes (great CX)... but customers still fail to implement the solution effectively, never achieve their business goals, and churn (poor CS).

Scenario 2: A complex enterprise platform delivers massive business impact (great CS) but has a clunky interface, a complicated setup, and slow support (poor CX).

Neither approach is sustainable (although I’d argue that scenario two is more sustainable than scenario one). The first company loses customers despite satisfaction; the second retains them despite frustration, but remains vulnerable to competitors offering both.

Why This Distinction Matters Now More Than Ever

This distinction isn't just academic — it's critical right now:

1. Budget Scrutiny: When every dollar is examined, "feeling good" isn't enough justification. Companies are looking at the total cost of ownership, including how many people it takes to operate tech and get value from it. And customers need measurable outcomes to renew.

2. The AI Transformation: As AI handles transactional experiences, human-led CS — including strategic guidance and outcome engineering — becomes the key differentiator.

3. Competitive Pressure: The pressure continues to mount for business technology interactions to be as frictionless and elegant as our interactions with personal technology (consider iPhone/Android apps). In mature markets, CX is table stakes. CS becomes the battleground for retention and growth.

4. Changing Buyer Dynamics: PLG models demand both intuitive experiences and immediate, tangible value realization without human intervention.

Companies Getting It Right

Leading companies maintain this distinction while ensuring collaboration:

Salesforce has separate Customer Success and Experience teams. Their Experience team focuses on journey mapping, friction reduction, and support excellence. Their Success organization concentrates on adoption, ROI achievement, and growth strategies.

HubSpot embeds CX within Product/Support, focusing on usability and responsive help. Their Success team acts as strategic advisors focused on customer goals, maturity progression, and business impact.

Zendesk distinguishes its CX function, which owns support, UX, and journey optimization, from its CS organization, which owns outcome planning, expansion, and strategic guidance.

The Way Forward

In order to properly align your CS and CX functions, you have to build out a comprehensive view of the customer. On one side, you need service blueprints to show the path we design for customers to follow (for our measurement and efficiency). On the other side, we need customer journeys — the natural path they are already on to solve their problems.

If you have both the service blueprints and the customer journeys, then you can overlap CX and CS motions.

The companies that thrive in the next decade won't just have the best CX or the best CS. They'll be those who recognize that these are different disciplines requiring different strategies, skills, and organizational structures — and excel at both.

Where does your organization stand on this critical distinction?

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