Customer Success Automation: Step-by-Step Guide

Examples of Customer Success Automation

The use cases where the Customer Success Automation model has been used are explained in detail.

1.Reminders

When it comes to a monthly subscription fee, and if the customers have forgotten to pay it for a certain period, an automated mail can be sent to the user requesting or reminding them to pay it. These reminders can also be sent automatically for any sale discounts or updates in the TOS (Terms Of Service) of the business.

2.Get Knowledge

Similar to querying a Generative AI chatbot such as ChatGPT, any problem from the customer and employee alike can have solutions from the AI, mostly simple ones. Companies assign categories to the problem and can use AI to solve simple issues if no nuance is needed.

Since you are aware of the use cases where Customer Success Automation is used, there are some common benefits you can glean from these examples.

1.Time Savings

The reduction of time taken to solve a problem or devoted to servicing the customer is one of the greatest benefits of Customer Success Automation in this day and age. Jobs such as customer/tool onboarding, organising data files and then storing their location and more can be implemented.

2.Improved Customer Experience

One of the important aspects of Customer Success Automation is the multi-lingual support and 24/7 connectivity. With Generative AI, you can make it so that the Customer Support chatbots can run at all times and accept queries from various parts of the world.

Many companies opt to do this because they can open their services worldwide instead of being bound to the time zones of their local area as is the case with the human employees.

3.Reduced Churn

With the power of Generative AI, customer behaviour can be analyzed and with that, patterns can be made. With this dataset, you can predict who will be leaving your business with Churn Prediction. With a Churn Prediction using Generative AI, you can provide them offers that they cannot refuse or find out the reason why they want to leave and appeal to their interests in such a way that they decide that they require your services.

4.Newsletters

With Customer Success Automation, you can automate sending newsletters, messages or Emails in bulk. Many companies offer software integration with your messaging apps to help send automated messages crafted with prompts using Generative AI.

5.Virtual Assistants

Employees in the Customer Support team can work side-by-side with an AI providing queries or sending bulk messages. They can also be used for automated voices through phone calls and can be set up easily with little to no human intervention needed.

Despite there being many benefits, deploying a Customer Success Automation model is hard to implement and use effectively without proper constraints and limits.

Learn About: Customer Service Virtual Assistant

1.Integration Complexity

Despite the automation processes boasting ease of use and less usage of human capital, there is a certain aspect of the customer success automation services that rely on software compatibility. Software incompatibility has little to no remedy other than changing the desktop you’re working on.

In recent times, it has gotten better with many companies providing Gen AI customer service assistants to messaging apps such as Slack.

2.Data Quality and Privacy Concerns

Another aspect of concern when it comes to Customer Success Automation is data quality and data privacy. If AI is used, it will have the storage of the user’s details which can be pried out by malicious users who are tech savvy and sell this PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to advertising companies. With prompt injections or other ways, the information can be disclosed by the AI easily.

Another part of the problem is the quality of data. It is a golden rule that humans and AI must collaborate to ensure the greatest form of Customer Success. If left alone, the automation assistant will start collecting irrelevant information and start using up precious resources which will affect the business negatively.

3.Lack of Segmentation/Prioritisation

Many customers inform the company or Customer service virtual assistant of a problem only at the last minute. The problem may be so severe that it may take way more than needed to take care of the problem. Had the customer noticed before or did the Assistants monitor the service, this problem could have been preemptively taken care of.

4.Lack of Testing

When it comes to deploying a module of Customer Success that is automated, one of the biggest challenges comes during the testing part. It would be tempting to deploy without the fine-tuning but, this will prove to be a costly mistake. Untested Automation systems have a high chance of being extremely vulnerable.

5.Customer Frustration

There are many cases in which customers would become frustrated by contacting the virtual assistant. Due to Generative AI being prone to hallucinations, there is a high probability that when customers query for a certain problem they have, the chatbot would provide an irrelevant answer that would frustrate the customer and be wary of contacting customer service.

Now that you are aware of the significant challenges of implementing a Customer Success Automation model. Say you have deployed it and it is on standby. In what scenarios will this be useful?

1.Onboarding Process

Automating tasks required for including a new customer, their details and so on to a pipeline is a behemoth of a process, but fairly straightforward. You can imbue Generative AI with expert knowledge from the customer base and assist the onboarding process. This is also the case when you're adding a new product/tool to your team and need to fetch the files. Getting an AI expert to do all the banal tasks would help you stay focused.

2.Taking Meeting Notes

A very powerful functionality of AI tools is the ability to summarise a Meeting in a few words and highlight the important events that happened. Customer Success tools can scan through a user’s problem and assign tickets to the problem.

3.Answering Common Customer Queries

Another aspect of Customer Success Automation can be done by answering the users’ queries using Generative AI. Companies train Generative AI based on the data/problems these customers have had. This will help the Automation Assistant to craft messages tailor-made for customer satisfaction.

Once you are acutely aware of the benefits, drawbacks and popular use cases, how do you start with the automation process? Are there any prerequisites needed?

1.Know What You Want

Before automating the functionalities of Customer Success, you need to learn what exactly Customer Success is. It is the act of predicting any problems or challenges preemptively before the customer complains about them. This premeditated measure to ensure the smoothest experience for them is the act of Customer Success.

Now that we know what Customer Success is, how do we automate it?

2.Define Customer Success

Every business goes through a different set of problems. These problems can be defined preemptively into the system and look for telltale signs of these problems and nip them in the bud before they reach the customer. Problems such as unauthorised access, data leaks and so on can be looked out for Gen AI by some signs and acted on it without human intervention.

3.Identify Pain Points and Inefficiencies

This is an extension of defining the customer experience metrics. One of the ways to do so is to find out the lacking aspects of the business model and deploy preventive measures to prevent the weak part of the business model from being exploited by malicious users.

4.Convince Employees

When you introduce a model to Automate Customer Success, many Employees will be wary of the automation model. As much as building and training the Customer Success Automation model is, it is equally if not more important to reassure your employees that this is a way to help them and encourage its usage in the employee’s day-to-day activities.

Now that you’ve built a Customer Success Automation tool. How do you use it? Are there any metrics that need to be followed?

1.Churn Prediction

While it may seem counterintuitive, predicting the rate at which many people unsubscribe from the business will help the business eventually find the root cause of why many people want to leave or unsubscribe from the services. This also plays a huge role in retaining a loyal and dedicated customer base.

2.Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

One of the most important metrics to calculate is the level of satisfaction the customers have with your services. This can be done by sending an automated message asking the customer to rate the services that they have used.

 3.Customer Effort Score (CES)

One of the pressing metrics that may make or break a business model is to calculate the amount of effort that the customer needs to provide to solve an issue that they have with a particular service. The optimal number to aim for in a customer effort score is between 5 to 6 out of 10.

The customer success automation tools are provided by many services. This begs the question of what you would want to opt for.

Learn about other key Customer success and Customer experience KPIs

1.Automated Alerts and Notifications

Any messages and newsletters can be sent periodically using automation techniques. This involves, sending messages in bulk, and so on.

Learn more about: Bulk Messaging Tool

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2.Task and Workflow Automation

You can build workflows and pipelines with customer success automation with a predetermined step-by-step guide on how to do so.

Learn about: How to setup a AI Workflow Automation for your business?

3.Customer Success Analytics and Reporting

Metrics such as Churn Prediction, CSAT and CES can be analysed and their reports be sent to a data visualisation software to provide meaningful insights.

4.Integration with CRM and Other Systems

When a workflow is automated, keep in mind about the relationships made with the customer. To do so, integrating their data, their behaviour and their patterns into the model to automate messages and send notifications is an important aspect of Customer Success Automation.

Since we know so much about customer success automation? Which service promising the best Automation services can you rely on?

AI Copilot Support

It goes without saying that automating customer success can only be done to such a high degree using AI. Worknet’s AI Copilot, Zendesk, can be used for a variety of things such as defining emojis, text summarizers, bulk messaging and so on.

With AI Copilots, you can use Worknet’s service to send messages in bulk and automate it periodically. This Intercom Integration for your employees reduces a lot of time wasted by communicating and searching for the relevant data.