How To Leverage Automation For Customer Success

Mathilde Augustin — October 28, 2016

What’s the point of automation?

Customer Success Managers are people and because of that, they are very good at doing people things. For instance, Customer Success Managers have the opportunity to bring value to their customers thanks to their domain expertise. By being experts in their field, Customer Success Managers are able to directly impact their customers’ ability to reach their goals, and they are able to build strong and lasting relationships with customers by proactively coaching them on a daily basis.

That’s exactly when automation comes in: to help Customer Success teams leveraging their unique capabilities, and empowering them as people to create more value and help customers achieve better outcomes. Leveraging automation helps Customer Success teams in becoming true proactive coaches, advocates, and partners for their customers, by taking care of all the things that do not require human sensitivity. Here are three ways to leverage automation to empower your Customer Success team.

Data
Automation works very well — better than humans — with all things data.

First, data collection can be reliably automated and save CSMs incredible amounts of time. On top of being fastidious, data gathering also requires a high level of reliability. The quality and heterogeneity of the data collected are what enable proactive Customer Success down the road. This data is then turned into insights, and automation reliably turns that data into valuable information to be used by your team. Automating data insights allows you to avoid missing any opportunity to start a conversation with the right customer, at the right time. Finally, automation is a great way to synchronize your data between all platforms used throughout the customer journey. This is a massive source of wasted time for CSMs and is something that can be dealt with incredibly easily with technology.

Processes
Onboarding, implementation, adoption, renewal, upsell, and escalation processes… all it takes is a day of planning with your team, sit down and draw out your strategy. Leverage automation, sit back and watch it run. Of course, it will take some adjustments here and there, some trial and error, and some unexpected results. The amount of time and efforts needed to make those adjustments is still much lower than it would be had your team been manually managing each process.

Most of us have very diverse customer bases and a huge challenge for many Customer Success teams is to work with tiers of customers effectively. Where there are many customers at a lower price point, 1 to 1 coaching might not be exactly feasible. Automating different workflows for different user segments is the best way to deliver value and proactively assist customers without monopolizing your team’s efforts and your resources unwisely.

Communication
Reporting to your customers on how well they are doing because of your product is essential in building trusting relationships. A great way to report on the value you are creating for them is automatic emails: if they are doing great, that’s a perfect way to remind them how indispensable you are. If they aren’t meeting their goals and their performance is going down, it’s an opportunity to start a conversation with them and to position yourself as their coach and partner.

Another amazing way to leverage the power of technology is by automating trial conversions emails. Based on your users’ behaviour, there are certain things that should be said at the right time, and computers are very good at doing so.

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