Customer support vs. customer success jobs: The key differences for transitioning educators
While these two roles are similar in title and may work closely together on certain goals, there are several key differences between them. Customer support and customer success jobs are excellent positions for transitioning educators in the EdTech space, but it’s essential to understand their unique functions.
You don’t want to show up to a job interview unclear of the different key roles within a company. Or worse, you are unclear about the role you applied for.
For this post, I was inspired by an article I saw on Medium from Goalbook discussing the differences in their specific customer support and customer success roles. This article does an accurate job identifying these teams and their roles for themselves and for most companies, but I wanted to dig a little deeper.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
In a customer success job, you will be responsible for working with a customer (in EdTech, likely a school or district) to ensure the product or service is properly implemented and maintained. What does this mean?
Customer success often begins before the customer signs the contract on the dotted line. Many times, members of the customer success team will accompany the sales team to meetings during the sales process to answer questions about the implementation of the product to ensure that the customer has appropriate expectations for timelines and success of the product.
Once the contract is signed, the customer success team (or sometimes called the implementation team) sets into high gear to set up all technical components of implementation as well as successfully train all team members (teachers, administrators, tech teams, coaches). Here, they ensure a smooth rollout and launch of the product for the customer.
After the launch, the customer success team must communicate with the district or school’s stakeholders to set metrics for success. They will also communicate regularly with the company’s internal team and the school district’s stakeholders about whether or not those metrics are being met. If they are not, the customer success team member is responsible for escalating the issue(s) and put into an action plan to correct the issue.
To summarize, as a Customer Success account owner, you will partner with your customers to set up your product or service from the beginning. You will then continue to ensure they aren’t experiencing any issues, maintain a relationship with them, and get them to renew, upgrade, etc.
One misconception by many transitioning teachers is that customer success is not sales. Most customer success positions have renewal and expansion goals - which means you will be talking about money and contracts at some point in your job!
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Customer support roles are instrumental in ensuring customers can successfully use the product or service they purchased. In most education companies, the customer support team works within the customer success team and is closely tied to the product team. They communicate with customers to understand their issues, perform back-end tasks to resolve issues, and communicate more significant issues to the company’s product teams.
Entry-level customer support roles include responsibilities such as answering customer emails, online service tickets, and phone calls. This is a wonderful job for a transitioning teacher looking to learn more about how an education company works - you get to learn the company’s products inside and out.
Once you get the hang of this type of role, you can advance into a role in which you are performing more analytical work looking at trends and data from the issues and questions coming in from your customers, which can impact the decisions made by the product and design teams.
Customer support roles are gateways into roles in data analysis, product, learning design, and, most naturally, customer success.
Do you need tech experience for this role at an EdTech company? It would help, but it’s not required. Primarily, you need to be organized, capable of learning tech systems, and able to answer customer questions.
HOW ARE THESE ROLES SIMILAR?
To be successful in either of these roles, you must be an excellent problem solver. You will need to not only listen to customers to learn their needs, and concerns, but you will also need to anticipate their needs, concerns, etc.
These roles are also largely customer-facing - the whole job - so you will need stellar people skills. Your verbal and written communication skills must be greatly honed and aligned with the company’s values. And you, of course, also need to be patient, kind, and able to align with a company’s voice.
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHICH ROLE IS FOR YOU?
If you’re a transitioning educator with little other experience, you’ll want to assess your existing skills. Are you good at public speaking and frequently communicating with others, or does this work exhaust you? If it exhausts you, customer success may not be for you. Can you quickly learn new tech and navigate it easily, or is tech a weakness for you? If it’s a weakness, customer support may not be for you.
Those in customer success typically have more of a business mindset and are ready to sell what they’re representing at any moment. Those in customer support may have more of a mind for systems and navigating problems to solve them quickly.
You know yourself best; however, you can sometimes surprise yourself with skills you didn’t know you had.
In my new community, I’m always offering the unique chance for transitioning educators to gain real-world experience by completing real, industry-related challenges. You can use these tasks as talking points in your next interview or as a way to determine whether a job might suit you. If you’re interested in joining the community, you can learn more here.
