Gigya recently moved a few miles down the road from Palo Alto to Mountain View, CA, which meant that our staff needed new business cards. (Gigya provides online businesses with social sign-on, sharing and engagement tools to improve user registration and referral traffic.)

That’s when I discovered that half the people working in our implementation group have Client Services Manager as their title, while the other half prefer to be known as Client Success Managers. Yet they’re doing the same job!

What’s the difference, and does it matter?

The Client Services Manager, as the title suggests, focuses on providing implementation services that help customers get our social optimization platform up and running as quickly and effectively as possible. These are people who take pride in delivering high-value services that at times can get highly technical:

• listening to the client to understand the factors that drive their particular business;
• helping the client clarify their vision for leveraging emergent social business tools;
• making recommendations for implementing specific parts of the Gigya platform in appropriate parts of the client’s web site;
• reviewing clients’ implementations and making suggestions for improvement.

On the other hand, there are also advantages to viewing this process from the customer’s point of view, with a focus on the business results their organization derives from the Gigya platform. From this perspective, the Client Success Manager is committed not just to taking certain actions, but to ensuring that the customer achieves specific outcomes. These outcomes include:

• increasing the number of people who visit their web site, and the amount of time they spend on the site;
• increasing the sharing of their web site’s content across multiple social networks;
• increasing the referral traffic coming back to their site from social networks;
• increasing the way users engage with other users on their site, whether via chatting, commenting, sharing, or reacting to content.

So, is it services or success? Well, officially our team is part of Gigya’s Client Services department (alongside the Client Services Engineers and Creative Services). And we all use the same basic methodology, and deliver the same basic services to get customers launched with our social optimization platform. But we have the flexibility to use either title on our cards, and it turns out the reprint order was split just about 50/50!

I’ve got to conclude that the title really isn’t important; regardless of what we call it, when our team implements effectively, Gigya’s customers succeed. It’s as simple as that.