Important Customer-Operating Roles For Your Business

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It is vital that your business/company implements the ideal customer operating roles/functions necessary to achieve positive customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, retention, positive reviews, and referrals.

There have been instances where companies have hired the wrong customer-facing role that is not ideal for their current business goals or operations. And it is common for companies to interchange and merge these functions which usually leads to disappointing output that affects the business' overall productivity. All functions are equally relevant. Each has unique responsibilities and sometimes similar ones, but all serve the same end goal: to delight customers. 

The following are some critical functions that should be considered when dealing with customers: 

• Customer experience management

• Customer relationship management

• Customer service management

• Customer success management 

• Customer support management  

Customer Experience Management

Q: What is customer experience management?

A: Customer experience management involves managing the perception and impression of a brand, its products, services, and workers at every stage of the buyer's journey. 

A buyer’s journey simply refers to the interactions and experiences of a potential or existing customer before, during and after purchase (i.e from enquiries to after purchase). 

How people perceive your brand and company can either make or mar your business. 
It is the job of the Customer Experience Management unit along with other key business functions like the Marketing unit (Public Relations, Strategic Communications, etc) to control the narrative.

Customer Relationship Management

Q: What is customer relationship management?

A: Customer relationship management (CRM) involves businesses actively engaging and managing interactions with potential, existing and previous customers in order to enhance their experience and foster positive long-term relationships.

Customer relationship management is not the boring robotic messages companies send to their customers on holidays or on their birthdays. It’s about intentionally building a rapport with your customers to know and understand them better to make key business decisions. 

Depending on business size and other factors, some businesses use CRM software to achieve this function. I highly recommend you improve your customer relationship management practices to avoid losing your customers to your competitors.

Customer Service Management

Q: What is customer service management?

A: Customer service management involves businesses providing assistance and advice to their potential and existing customers, at all phases of the buyer’s journey. It also entails answering enquiries, (sometimes) receiving orders, providing information about products or services and teaching customers how to use products.

Businesses provide customer service through phone calls, emails, social media, chatbots, self-service, mobile messaging, video calls, website searches, FAQs, online help forums and in-person. There are some excellent customer service management software platforms such as Zendesk, Intercom, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, etc. 

Whichever route your business takes, ensure that your customer service unit or solution is rooted in attentiveness, emotional intelligence, clear communication, empathy, respect, professionalism, resourcefulness, problem-solving and timeliness. 

Customer Success Management

Q: What is customer success management?

A: Customer success management involves ensuring customers understand, experience value and get the desired outcomes from the products or services throughout the customer’s journey. It also entails proactively anticipating and providing answers and solutions to customer enquiries and challenges.

Over the years, customer success has been “mistaken for a tech role” and interchangeably tasked with customer service or support responsibilities. Customer success isn't any of those. It may appear to be technical because it operates as a cross-team effort between sales, support, service and product. 

The customer success team prioritizes reducing churn rates and enhancing customer retention which in turn leads to renewals, repeat business and increase in revenue.

Customer Support Management

Q: What is customer support management?

A: Customer support management involves the process of handling activities set out to solve specific issues a customer is experiencing when using your product or service. It is technical assistance given to customers. Another name for this function is Tech support/help desk. 

Customer support entails support tickets, troubleshooting, planning, maintenance, upgrading, training, installing & disposing of a product, responding to enquiries, and complaints and assisting customers with a specific product or service.  

Some businesses interchange or mistake customer service for customer support. Customer service is relationship focused and is measured by customer satisfaction. While customer support is technical value-focused and is measured by (product/service) efficiency. 

Although the software platforms that serve customer service management can do the same for customer support. The two functions might be similar but have distinct goals, metrics and outcomes. 

I suggest you review your current business operation and adopt the best customer-operating function(s) your business needs. Below is a summary comparison to help stirr you in the right direction.