A customer success team is there to reach customers on a deeper level. A CS team’s job is to offer a personalized customer experience so your brand attains a loyal following. Sounds nice, right? We all want our customers to grow more confident and knowledgeable to get the most out of our product. But those are all some pretty lofty goals, and you can’t (and shouldn’t) do it alone. With some customer success support tactics in play, help your customers and your team reach their goals without stress.
That’s where automation comes in to help.
Automation is the new frontier. With the help of AI-powered tools, companies are making strides in productivity, cost savings, and more. With automation, businesses report that they can:
- Move faster: 34% of businesses say automation allows them to spend less time on administrative tasks.
- Offer better customer support: 35% of businesses say automation allows them to provide better customer service and support.
- Reduce human error: 34% of businesses say automating tasks like data entry reduces errors.
Clearly, automation has its benefits. That’s why we’re digging into how you can use automation in your customer success support tactics to drive efficiency.
Why you need a customer success strategy for your business
First of all – what do I mean by customer success strategy? The main idea behind a customer success strategy is to help customers reach their goals. This goal is based on the belief that your company will win if your customers also win. Customer success looks a little different from customer support. While customer support is about reacting to customer problems, customer success is all about being proactive.
Customer success teams have a bucket of responsibilities. Some of them include:
- Onboarding customers
- Educating customers
- Helping customers adopt the product
- Advocating for customer requests and feedback
- Engaging customers proactively
- Cross-selling and upselling
- Relationship maintenance for customer retention
Whew! That’s a lot! But it’s worth it. When your team can shift from reactive to proactive engagement with customers, you can drive loyalty, loads of internal sales opportunities, and renewal for longer-term revenue security.
Customer success models result in better retention over time. Data shows that for every customer who contacts customer support, 26 customers with a problem don’t reach out. Those are all customers a business stands to lose if it doesn’t fix its problems. But with a CS team at work, you can reduce the number of potential issues by recognizing your customers’ needs early. Customer success drives intimate customer knowledge, ultimately creating a healthier, more risk-resistant customer lifecycle.
How automation meets customer success support needs
So you want to boost your customer success support strategy. But what if your team is small? Or what if your customer base is so large that juggling each relationship feels impossible? Automation makes supporting your customers – each and every one of them – more attainable.
But hold on. Customer success is all about human interaction and relationship building. And I’m telling you to add in artificial intelligence? Yes, yes, I am. Let me break it down.
Automation reduces the number of manual, monotonous, and repetitive tasks your team needs to do. With that in mind – start brainstorming where your customer success or support teams are doing manual, monotonous, and repetitive work. Is your team doing any of the following?
- Manual: Tasks that require your CS team to manually navigate through different tools and actions to complete work.
- Monotonous: Work that takes up a considerable amount of a CS team’s time that could otherwise be invested in more essential tasks.
- Repetitive: Tasks that have to be performed over and over again by more than one team member.
Now, let’s consider the stages of your customer journey to think through where these kinds of manual, monotonous, or repetitive tasks exist.
5 areas to add customer success support automation
Here are five areas where automation can help your customer success team thrive:
Customer onboarding
The onboarding stage is when your relationships with your customers are most delicate. It’s their first impression of you and your brand. If they get stuck without help, they may run.
Automation can help your customer success team by making onboarding faster and easier. Send automated messages across channels with support tools in those initial stages — like help guides and video tutorials. Automation can also help your CS team track which customers have finished their onboarding journey. Then your human agents know when to check in on the customer relationship.
Customer education
A customer success team ensures that customers continue using the product or service. If you onboard them and then leave them hanging, that’s where a lot of customers will drop off. Instead, sustain the relationship with continued education. Give customers uses cases or fresh ideas on where to use your product or service in their company through training and educational content.
That’s no small thing. With automation, you can build workflows into your product to give customers the help and nudges they need along the way, even after onboarding. Create automated messages that trigger when customers take specific actions in the product, giving them valuable tips and tricks. Or, create messaging and content that gets sent at critical stages of the customer journey, providing customers with pre-made educational content. With AI-powered tools, you can also offer custom product tours within the app or website to guide users toward new features in real-time.
Gathering customer feedback
Feedback is crucial for the growth of your product or service. Gathering input and sending surveys is essential to be proactive with customers. But following up with customers can be time-consuming for your CS team. They have to draft emails, make phone calls, and send texts. Then, once you get the surveys back, your team has to sift through all the data, organize it, and analyze it. But with automation, it can all go faster.
Automating customer feedback collection through surveys or in-app prompts can save you time and provide the clarity you need to create a better product or service. Automated feedback can also help your team create customer advocates by prompting satisfied customers to leave reviews or refer your product or service to others.
Cross-selling and upselling
CS teams show their value most when they can cross-sell and upsell. Customized and personal upselling shows your customers that you’re invested in improving their experience. Plus, it’s a fantastic way to boost your revenue goals.
Customer success support automation helps you identify opportunities for cross-selling or upselling to customers already engaged with your product or service. Through data analytics, target customers who might be interested in other products or services you offer. Then, automate messages to introduce new products and services or promote upgrades to existing ones.
Customer health management
Customer success teams are often measured on the health of customers. How happy are your customers? If you don’t know the answer to this, automation can help. Let’s say you’re already using a customer success platform to track your customers’ health. Enhance this process with automation.
For example, you can receive an automatic notification when a customer’s health score falls below a certain point and take action to improve it. Or, you can set up an automated workflow that sends CSAT score surveys to your healthiest customers based on their scores so you can gather insight into what’s working best with your happy customers.
How to implement customer success support automation
Now with some ideas flowing, let’s talk implementation. Once you’ve identified where automation can support your customer success team, you need to pick the right tools and provide your team with sufficient training. Let’s break it down.
Selecting the right automation tools for your team
Implementing automation in your customer success support strategy requires the right tools and technology. With so many options available, choosing the right ones to fit your business needs can be overwhelming.
Here are five factors to consider when selecting automation tools:
1. Integration
Choose tools that can integrate with your current CRM, support platform, and other systems you use. If the tools can’t work together seamlessly, automating your customer success support strategy will be more challenging.
2. Customization
Look for tools that allow for customization and flexibility. They should enable you to configure workflows, set up triggers, and customize messaging to meet your business needs.
3. User-friendliness
The tools should be easy to use, even for non-technical members of your team. Complicated tools will slow down onboarding and the overall implementation process.
4. Analytics
Choose tools that provide valuable data and analytics. These insights will help you measure the effectiveness of your customer success support strategy, identify areas for improvement, and track customer behavior.
5. AI capabilities
Look for tools with AI capabilities, such as natural language processing, chatbots, and predictive analytics. These tools can help you automate tasks, provide personalized support, and anticipate customer needs.
Need a place to start? Check out Capacity, an AI-powered support automation tool with all these features.
Providing your team with training and support
When implementing new tools, you must provide your team with the proper training to ensure they understand how to use the tools effectively. Your team should also clearly understand the goals and objectives of the customer success support strategy to align their efforts with the automation tools.
To get started, consider the following steps:
1. Provide Detailed Documentation
Documentation is critical for giving your team a clear understanding of how to use the automation tools. In addition to providing written guides, consider creating video tutorials or conducting live training sessions. Ensure your documentation is easy to understand and covers all aspects of the tool’s functionality.
2. Offer Hands-On Training
While documentation is helpful, there is no substitute for hands-on training. Consider offering your team a chance to practice using automation tools in any environment. This hands-on practice will allow them to familiarize themselves with the tool’s features and functionality and help them feel more confident when using it in a real-world situation.
3. Set Clear Expectations
It’s important to set clear expectations for how your team should use the automation tools. Make sure that your team understands the goals and objectives of your customer success support strategy. They should know how automation tools fit into that strategy. Provide your team with key performance indicators (KPIs) to help them measure their effectiveness.
By following these steps, you can ensure that your team is fully prepared to use automation tools to support your customer success strategy. Take advantage of the benefits of automation. Drive efficiency, offer better customer support, and reduce errors on your customer success team.
Want to get started today? Try Capacity for free, or request a personalized demo!
