“There aren’t enough hours in the day!” It’s a common phrase that many Customer Success (CS) professionals repeat to themselves as they sift through their to-do list. The customer experience has evolved in the last few years to require more from CS teams in a faster timeline.
Add to that the renewed interest in driving new revenue from existing customers–it’s a lot for Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to pay attention to and prioritize. Rather than adding headcount or compromising the customers’ experience, companies are looking for solutions to help CSMs make the right decisions effectively.
No solution will improve efficiency and drive revenue more than implementing AI as an analyst to support CSMs and their workflow. Not only does AI organize data faster than people can, but it can also evolve with your customers, so you never miss an opportunity.
To get you started, here are some quick-win strategies your CS team can use right away:
Do More with Comprehensive Health Scores
Traditional customer health scores worked like a pass/fail metric. Either a customer was in the green, and no proactive actions were necessary, or they weren’t and CSMs needed to pay attention to that account. That philosophy doesn’t translate into modern customer relationships. Signs of a healthy customer show up in emails, in product use, on community boards, and so much more.
To get the entire picture of what your customer thinks of your product, you need to analyze exponentially more data—from product usage to email tone to what isn’t being said. Post-sales signals like a disengaged champion, a sudden shift in tone, or an RFP request can reveal early risk—but they’re easy to miss without AI trained to spot them. Post-sales signals like these are critical to understanding customer sentiment from the get-go, and preparing accounts for expansion—not churn.
Or, take a play from ReviewPro Reputation’s book, and automate customer engagements to ensure that customers always feel connected and receive the right information. This is particularly useful during onboarding, when customers are most likely to form negative opinions of the value your product delivers.
Create Early-Warning Strategies to Reduce Churn
The decision to churn never happens overnight. It is expensive and time-intensive to move from one platform to another. Customers don’t want to do so without careful consideration. And still, some organizations treat it like an instant decision.
This reactionary strategy puts CSMs in an impossible position. In that moment, they can either drop everything to prevent imminent churn or let the account go to focus on more stable accounts. Neither of those sounds like a sustainable option. So, companies are now using AI to flag certain behaviors sooner in the customer journey so CSMs can be proactive about churn risks (or expansion opportunities).
Branch, a Gainsight customer, created a churn report that gave their CS team visibility into risky behaviors that may lead to churn. As a result, they were able to proactively correct the customer experience before the first thought of churn ever enters the customer’s mind. With Staircase AI, everyone had real-time updates on the status of each customer and action items they could use right away to positively impact accounts.
Improve Forecasting and Proactive Engagements
Finally, with AI solutions teams can build strategies based on the most relevant and updated information, no matter when they look into a report. Without AI reporting, many CS teams have to download the information and create reports to send out. By the time the information is shared and a strategy is outlined, the data could be entirely different. Companies are making revenue-driving decisions using obsolete data.
AI solutions not only allow for instant reporting, but they also automatically update. The result is every decision made regarding any account uses all the best information. For Sendcloud, creating a single source of truth with Gainsight made an immediate and lasting impact. When all teams, especially Revenue teams, can access and leverage the same customer data, they can collaborate effectively and in real time. In terms of creating a memorable customer experience, nothing is more important.
Revolutionize Your Customer Success With Gainsight AI Solutions
Your CS teams are situated in exactly the right place to build customer relationships while leading revenue-driving strategies. All they need to scale their efforts is the power of AI solutions. You can get them started right away by contacting us today. We’ll show you how easy it is to get started.
