Top ways AI powers Customer Success

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are the frontline warriors when it comes to customer satisfaction and loyalty. The scope and responsibilities of this team are seriously broad. They need to be proactive, deeply understanding customer needs, drive customer outcomes and minimize churn. Luckily AI can be hugely beneficial in multiple ways. Here's a breakdown on how CSMs can master AI for their roles.

Repetitive Tasks and AI

One of the most significant benefits of AI in customer success software is its ability to handle repetitive, administrative tasks. Tasks like meeting notes, follow-ups, documentation, and internal communications are necessary but time-consuming. By automating these through AI, CSMs can free up valuable time to focus on building deeper relationships and driving customer outcomes.

Identifying Time-Consuming Tasks

Ask yourself: which tasks are consuming most of your time? Research and find customer success software tools that can alleviate these burdens. A few areas where customer software tools can be helpful are:

1. Summarizing notes

2. Structuring notes - AI can categorize notes into various topics

3. Providing  sentiment analysis on chats or tickets

4. Creating company summaries

5. Categorizing NPS comments into pre-defined buckets

6. Translating content if team is using multiple languages

AI should be seen as an enabler, so CSMs remain strategic while automating mundane tasks like those listed above.

Generative vs. Predictive AI

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can create content based on prompts. For instance, you can ask it to generate a risk plan or draft a newsletter. Predictive AI, on the other hand, helps you decide where and how to apply the generated content. Together these tools can help save a lot of time in your day-to-day, so you can focus on driving value..

Practical Applications

Many SaaS tools have AI capabilities that are underutilized. For example, Intercom's AI agent handles half of the support requests by sending relevant articles. Similarly, AI can help new CS team members quickly access information by querying the AI instead of searching through various documents.

Effective Prompting

To get the best out of generative AI, you need to give it context. For example, instead of a vague request, be specific: "Imagine you're a CSM working on an onboarding project for a large enterprise. Draft a weekly newsletter template for stakeholders, one page max." Practicing specific prompts significantly improves the quality of output.

Customer Journey and AI

Consider the customer journey and identify where you spend most of your time. AI can keep playbooks and frameworks up to date by adapting to different personas making sure your strategies are current and relevant. A great use case for AI is in preparing for QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews). It can help analyze data, highlight trends, and build compelling narratives, reducing the time spent on preparation.

Top Six Takeaways:

1. Start Using AI: Experiment with tools like ChatGPT or Gemini. Record meetings, use AI to summarize, and recommend actions.

2. Preemptive Preparation: Use AI to identify gaps in your meeting agendas and handle potential objections by considering the persona of the person you’re meeting.

3. Stay Agile: Customer Success is dynamic by nature. Use AI to make suggestions that can help you stay responsive to customer needs.

4. Effective Prompts: Take the time to develop and save prompts that work for you so that you can easily access and scale across your work.

5. Proactive Enablement: Use AI to increase proactivity by creating success plans, workflows, and templates.

6. High-Impact Questions: Develop a set of high-impact questions across your personas so that you can deal with different customer scenarios.