A Guide to AI for Customer Success

CSMs and their managers report having too many accounts and too many demands on their time to be able to devote enough resources to key accounts and churn risks, let alone upsell opportunities. Fortunately, AI tools can offload a lot of the grunt work and even serve as skilled mentors.

Here are six categories to explore to give customer success team members more time and more headspace to grow revenue.

Administrative Tasks

AI can play the role of an excellent assistant, from taking over mundane tasks (say, scheduling a meeting) to skilled duties (e.g., drafting customer communications). Offloading administrative tasks frees CSMs from boring tasks and allows them to focus on more valuable activities.

Here’s a list of administrative tasks that AI can handle:

Creating meeting agendas, incorporating standard topics and custom requests
Creating meeting summaries from recordings, suitable to be shared with customers
Following up on unanswered emails
Scheduling meetings of various kinds
Automating data entry
Drafting personalized emails
Drafting personalized QBR decks

Automation

AI can automate a variety of repetitive tasks, including sophisticated ones. As for administrative tasks, automation allows CSMs to move away from monotonous iterations to more creative and profitable pursuits.

Here are common automation targets:

Delivering automated, personalized onboarding sequences. This is commonly done for lower-end customers but can be used as an adjunct to a custom program delivered by an onboarding specialist
Delivering automated ongoing communications that incorporate personalized elements

Customer Self-Service

I consider self-service more under the domain of support, but even CSMs who rely on a separate support team do get some support requests. Self-service tools allow customers to get faster support while freeing up CSMs’ time.

Think about:

Chatbots
AI-powered search

Signal Analysis

Getting into more advanced use cases, AI can aggregate customer signals and make bespoke recommendations based on the signals. The signals can be internal (e.g., this customer has stopped using a particular product feature) or external (e.g., the customer’s parent company has announced a reorganization). They can be limited to a specific interaction, for instance analyzing customer sentiment in real time or they can encompass a wholistic view of the customer and the customer relationship.

Think about:

Detecting customer sentiment in real time or in aggregate
Identifying churn signals based on product usage, support cases, interactions with the CSM, corporate events such as reorganizations or acquisitions, contact changes, etc.
Identifying upsell opportunities, including from other potential buyers within an account

Coaching

In this category, we’re going beyond simply presenting recommendations to CSMs to actually working with them to increase their skills and confidence. We typically think that managers provide coaching but their time is limited and they also inspire a certain level of fear in their team members, which makes it difficult to have a completely open coaching relationship. An AI-powered coach is infinitely patient and does not judge.

Here are some coaching areas for AI:

Helping to develop strategic plans for individual customers.
Coaching CSMs through account reviews
Coaching CSMs on acquiring new relationships within the account, especially with key executives
Coaching CSMs for specific interactions, e.g. objection handling
Onboarding CSMs