I’m hiring for my team at Saltbox. Scroll to the bottom for details.
A long time ago, the department responsible for addressing customer concerns and needs was called, rather simply, “customer service”. It’s a great name!
“What do we do?”
“Serve!”
“Who do we serve?”
“Customers!”
And then it became more or less the norm for large companies to do a very bad job of the thing they had called “customer service”, so if you were going to be in the business of actually serving customers, you didn’t name your department “customer service” because you didn’t want to scare off the people who were good at it.
At some point in the transition from the 90s to the 2000s, “tech support” evolved from pure “IT support” to more of a traditional service role for software-as-a-service companies. A lot of these companies called this department “customer support” and would aim to provide excellent transactional support over email and sometimes via the phone. But none of them wanted to be “customer service”. Calling your department “customer support” was a way to signal you were doing something different.
Success
Around maybe the mid-2000s, this new function called “Customer Success” started to emerge that was an evolution of what had been traditional account management and was dedicated to managing customer relationships after the close of sale1. To be sure, this wasn’t so much an evolution of customer service/support as much as it was an evolution of sales and account management. Large accounts needed someone whose mission it was to make customers successful—not just buy more stuff—so a dedicated customer success manager role was created to meet that need.
This is about when things started to get confusing. The customer success manager role was the hot new thing. If you were building out a customer-facing team at a new tech company, you didn’t dare name your team “customer service”, and “customer support” was already starting to feel stale2. Many managers went with “customer success” as the name of their team, even though everyone on the team spent 110% of their time in an email queue or live chat. If you had applied for a CSM job expecting to do relationship management, you might have been surprised to learn you’d be spending most of your time doing transactional support. Like I said, confusing.
Experience
“Customer experience” isn’t anything new. Brands have been delivering great experiences for forever—Disneyland opened in 1955, to name just one example—but “customer experience” as a discipline probably emerged around the time JD Power became a key player in the space in the mid-90s3. At this time, customer experience would have lived mostly in enterprises that could have an entire team of people focus on service and experience design. It wasn’t really about transactional support, nor was it about relationship management. It was something altogether different.
But once again, things got confusing. By the 2010s, “experience” had really started to catch on. Now it was time for “Customer Success” to start feeling stale, so functional managers at ecommerce startups started naming their teams “Customer Experience”. Where these teams spending their days doing service and experience design? Of course not. They were spending 110% of their time doing transactional support4. Oh well.
To be fair, this isn’t always the case. There are plenty of teams that role up to a “Success” or “Experience” function that do a good job of delineating between the various roles within the department. But as a candidate applying for a role, it can be hard to tell what you’re getting into from the outside looking in.
Saltbox is hiring
Anyway, the Member Experience team at Saltbox is growing. If you enjoy serving customers and geeking out about topics like this, you should consider applying.
I’m hiring a Customer Success Manager - E-commerce Logistics to own relationships with our highest-value members. This is someone who knows the ins-and-outs of customer relationship management and is eager to help build the practice from the ground up.
I’m also hiring a Customer Support Specialist to stand up systems that will enable us to be better at transactional support. This is someone who is an expert at help desk systems and is productive both in and out of the queue.
What about actual experience? Don’t worry, we’re doing that too. We have a Customer Experience Manager joining from another team at Saltbox. She’ll be focusing on things like service design and setting up feedback loops to ensure we’re consistently delivering a remarkable experience to our members.
And if you’re interested in being a part of what we’re doing at Saltbox but you’re not sure about how you’d fit in, please reach out.
There’s an anecdote in the book Customer Success that talks about how customer success originated at Salesforce as primarily a customer relationship management (fitting) problem.
This article offers a good history of the practice of customer experience.
The 2019 story about Away luggage provides a relatively recent example.