AI is rapidly being adopted by various teams within organizations to accelerate the velocity and efficiencies of achieving their objectives and outcomes. While many believe that product is the first place to implement AI to accelerate their business strategy, the reality is that most organizations can immediately enhance their customer-facing strategies with it as well.
Customer Success is and should be at the forefront of AI adoption. Today, Customer Success teams (Customer Success Management, Account Management, Renewals, Tech Support, Operations) are human heavy teams with technology to help organize their daily activities. AI and ML now allow the technology to not only organize activities but drive processes and workflows end to end for CSMs.
First, in its simplest definition, artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer system to emulate human thinking and behavior. Machine learning is a branch of AI that imitates the way human beings learn.
Here are four quick ways to install AI use cases for CS teams. Try one out!
Ticket Deflection
Potential Audience: Tech Support
Expected key outcomes: Increase ticket deflection, decrease first response times, decrease time to resolution, increase NPS and C.SAT, improve efficiency, improve ticket routing.
- There are a number of AI tools that can be purchased to help with ticket deflection.
- These products such as Zoom Virtual Agent or ada can decrease add up to 45% ticket deflection via their AI driven bot technology.
- They are easy to install and learn on their own, many times all you need to do is point them at your current product documentation and knowledge base articles.
- The best part is, most customers’ NPS scores go up when using these tools. Customers get faster responses and are more accurately routed to the proper support. representative since the AI bot collects enough information up front to know where to properly assign the ticket.
- Lastly, you can configure these tools to only allow the AI bot 2-3 tries to get the right answer, if it does not, it will default route the issue to your support team
Account Discovery
Potential Audience: Customer Success Management, Renewal Management, Account Management, Customer Success Engineers
Expected key outcomes: Improve efficiency, increase employee skills/knowledge, increase NPS and C.SAT, improve communication quality, increase revenue
- AI tools can quickly allow your team to do account discovery activities.
- For no reason anymore, should a CS team member not be able to quickly understand a customers full profile
- CS team members can use ChatGPT or any AI tool (Bing) to ask simple questions to prep for a call:
- What industry is X company in?
- What size is X company in revenue and employees?
- Who is the CXO of the company?
- What is the company’s 2023 mission?
- Who are their biggest competitors?
- Without spending hours on research, CS team member can now harvest copious amount of information about a company in just a few minutes
- This will allow your teams to be more efficient, better educated, and prepped to have productive interactions when approaching a potential customer.
Email Creation and Call Practice
Potential Audience: Customer Success Management, Renewal Management, Account Management, Customer Success Engineers
Expected key outcomes: Improve efficiency, increase employee skills/knowledge, increase NPS and CSAT, improve communication quality, increase revenue
- In addition to being able to quickly learn about company pre-call, they can have draft email text developed instantly. This can reduce preparation time so the team can rehearse how the meeting will run.
- Oftentimes, writing out well worded emails can be time consuming, by utilizing ChatGPT team members can put in simple parameters such as ‘I am meeting with X person from Y company, about Q topic, here are the topics we will cover, can you create an email for me’. This email outline tool is a great way to jump start email creation to C level executives and helps remove a lot of the extra words and emotions from the text.
- Teams can then utilize AI tools like ox for practice and receive real time feedback to ensure they have the right talk track ready.
- This type of AI coaching also reduces management overhead, improves employee soft skills, and helps drive better/more efficient customer conversations.
- On a recent podcast, panda doc displayed a 37 to 61 eNPS improvement post giving ox to its CS team to prep and practice for calls.
Healthscores
Potential Audience: Customer Success Management, Renewal Management, Account Management
Expected key outcomes: Improve efficiency, decrease customer risk, increase NPS and CSAT, improve automation, improve gross retention, improve proactive actions
- Healthscores can be automated now so data is taken in daily and a health score is created.
- Many CS tools now use AI on the backend to take your complex data models and create accurate customer healthscores for your team to utilize
- Tools like Gainsight, Planhat, Client Success, ChurnZero have or are introducing AI healthscores in which a customer can set the rules, point to the data and the AI formulates the proper health indicators, scores and even prescribes playbooks. AI can take it even further and prescribe a CSM how to proceed from there.
- This frees up the manual intervention and data collection and manipulation required in the past to create and maintain healthscores.
There are many more easy to use AI technologies out there like Loopio which uses AI for your RFP process or Consensus which creates demos to be automated and tracked with very specific targeted personas and areas of your product. A few hours of work setting up demo automation can save hours of human intervention.
As AI continues to advance, there will be even more opportunities for CS teams to leverage it to enhance their strategies to achieve better outcomes. A small investment in setting up AI automation can lead to significant long-term benefits, allowing your team to focus on providing exceptional customer service.
Other helpful articles on AI:
- AI for Sales or AI for Sales
- AI Assistant List
- CS + AI (onboarding help)
Read more from Pourmousa about why to create a Customer Advisory Board.