On June 7, the flagship event for CSMs in France and beyond took place: Engage Paris.
During the day, several workshops were held, including one on a hot topic: artificial intelligence, or AI for short. For the past few months, AI has been everywhere, appearing in every aspect of our daily lives. So we wanted to know if this was also the case in the work of a Customer Success Manager.
During the workshop, the observation was clear: only 3 out of 30 participants use AI on a daily basis. Why shouldn't you? We're going to try to understand how, in your business, you can boost your performance and expertise thanks to AI tools and processes, and above all what good practices to adopt to get the best out of it.
Since the subject is so vast, we've chosen to look at the different stages of the CSM customer journey, from onboarding to renewal.
1- AI & Admin
To manage your customers in the best possible way, it's essential to be rigorous in your day-to-day organization.
How? By letting AI become your personal assistant.
You spend your time performing repetitive tasks: writing minutes and reports, scheduling meetings, organizing appointments, preparing content in advance, CRM reporting, customer follow-up, drawing up forecasts and QBRs. The list is not exhaustive, but all of the above can be automated with AI.
Hubspot for example, offers an automation module enabling you to create automated e-mail workflows not only for customer onboarding, but also for all other stages of the customer journey.
And what's in it for you? It saves you valuable time, which you can reinvest in more useful activities. You'll be able to concentrate more on more strategic activities, and who knows, you might even be able to advance in your profession.
2- AI & Customer onboarding
Onboarding is a crucial stage in the customer experience. It's often the customer's first interaction with your services or products, so it's a strategic step in ensuring customer success.
We're going to show you how AI can help you optimize it: the best practices to put in place, the tools to use and concrete examples that will make you want to get started.
As with the administrative side, you can use AI to automate certain onboarding tasks, such as sending welcome emails, satisfaction surveys and training reminders.
Email automation tools, such as Mailchimp, Hubspot or Brevocan integrate AI functionalities to personalize customer emails throughout the onboarding process.
And while we're on the subject of personalization, if you're dreaming of personalized customer onboarding, AI can deliver. Here's how:
Tools such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel can help you collect and analyze customer data at all stages of onboarding, with the aim of identifying patterns, trends and friction points to optimize your processes and personalize the customer experience.
To go even further, you can provide your customers with personalized recommendations (training resources, features to explore, actions to take, etc.) using Adobe Target or Optimizely.
And with the help of AI, you can even track customer satisfaction using Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey to collect and analyze their feedback.
Here are a few concrete examples of companies using AI to improve their onboarding:
➡️ Hubspot (marketing, sales and customer service platform): they have developed onboarding chatbots that help new users familiarize themselves with the platform's various functionalities. The chatbots provide instructions, answer questions and offer personalized advice, making users feel guided and supported right from the start.
➡️ Slack (team communication application): like Hubspot, they have integrated AI into their onboarding process by integrating chatbots that help new users configure their workspace, join relevant channels and discover useful features. AI helps provide a smoother onboarding experience and accelerate product take-up.
➡️ Zoom (video communication platform): to improve onboarding, Zoom has introduced an AI-based virtual assistance feature. This feature guides new users through the installation and configuration stages, and provides practical advice on how to get the most out of the application during meetings.
➡️ Microsoft 365: Microsoft has integrated AI into their Microsoft 365 application suite to improve onboarding for new users. It provides contextual suggestions and interactive tutorials to help users familiarize themselves with different applications and functionalities, helping them to get up and running quickly.
➡️ IBM Watson: IBM has used AI to improve customer onboarding on their AI platform, Watson. AI helps customers understand Watson's data analysis capabilities, configure their AI project, and start their modeling and deployment process.
3- AI & Customer loyalty
The question we're going to ask ourselves, and you, is: how can you leverage AI to build customer loyalty and improve your retention rate?
We've come up with some answers!
AI can play a vital role in retaining your customers by enabling a better understanding of their needs, personalizing their journey and anticipating any problems they may have. Here are a few tips on how to make the most of it:
First and foremost, don't forget that you have the best virtual assistants at your disposal for your recurring tasks. Automating them means your customers get answers to their questions faster, and keeping in touch with them prevents them from going elsewhere.
Secondly, here are the tools you can use to help you retain your customers:
➡️Exploitez recommendation systems such as Amazon Personalize or Optimizely to propose personalized offers and content to your customers.
➡️Intégrez conversational chatbots such as Dialogflow or IBM's Watson Assistant to provide instant, proactive virtual assistance.
➡️Analysez customer feedback with Lexalytics or Monkey Learnwhich use sentiment analysis and NLP (natural language processing) to understand your customers' feelings and opinions.
➡️Automatisez track inactive customers with Medallia or Adobe Experience Platform to re-engage them and avoid churn.
4- AI & Upsell
Part of the CSM's mission is to encourage its customers to buy more products and services, often referred to as upselling. Upselling is vital for the CSM's business, as it's important for its growth. But how can AI help? Here are a few strategies you can put in place quickly to generate upsell leads.
You can start by segmenting your customer base, using clustering software such as DBSCAN for example, to personalize your upsell offers.
Next, AI-based recommendation systems (which we've already introduced in the loyalty phase) will enable you to suggest complementary products or applicable upgrades to your customers.
Don't forget that you still have your super assistant to personalize your customer messages based on preferences, past purchasing behavior and upselling opportunities. Don't forget to include special incentives (exclusive discounts, free trials or additional benefits) to encourage them to choose a superior offer.
Finally, you can use tools to analyze customer needs and track the performance of your upsell actions:
➡️ Some Customer Success platforms, Gainsight, Totango or ChurnZero for example, will enable you to track your upsell performance, analyze your conversion rates and measure the impact of your loyalty campaigns on customer retention.
➡️ If you use Salesforce as your CRM system, its Sales Cloud functionality can help you track and analyze your upsell activities (sales opportunities, upsell conversions, sales team performance and detailed reports).
Here are a few examples of companies that have used AI to improve their upsell strategy:
➡️ Amazon: Amazon is well known for its effective use of AI for marketing and upsell. Their recommendation engine uses AI to analyze customers' past buying behavior, preferences and trends to suggest complementary or similar products that might interest them. This upsell strategy has helped increase sales and customer satisfaction on the platform.
➡️ Netflix: Netflix uses AI to personalize content recommendations to subscribers. Their algorithm analyzes users' viewing habits, ratings and interactions to suggest series or movies likely to interest them.
This upsell strategy helps to keep subscribers engaged and increase their viewing time.
➡️ Starbucks: Starbucks has developed a mobile application with AI-based personalized beverage recommendation functionality. The app analyzes customers' buying habits, flavor and ingredient preferences, and suggests drinks tailored to their tastes. This encourages customers to try new drinks and increase their average bill.
5- IA & Support/Care
How can you simply optimize your customer support activities by implementing simple AI practices?
So, as for all other stages in the customer journey, automation is your best ally: automate your standardized responses to common customer support queries (order tracking requests, return requests, requests to change personal information, rapid FAQ creation, etc.). Once again, this saves you time and guarantees a rapid response for your customers.
For the rest, here are a few tools that can help you optimize your customer support activities:
➡️ Integrate an AI-powered chatbot into your website or support platform.
If you use Zendesk as a CRM tool, its application Answer Bot application uses AI to provide automated responses. Salesforce's Service Cloud from Salesforce also offers AI capabilities integrating chatbots and personalized recommendation systems addressed to agents and customers.
➡️ Improve the management and accuracy of your tickets: with Helpshiftfor example, a customer service platform that will help you sort and analyze your tickets, and send them to the agents best qualified to answer them.
➡️ Anticipate problems: Zendesk Explore is a data analysis platform that can be used to monitor trends and anomalies in customer support tickets. In the same spirit, Einstein Analytics from Salesforce integrates AI functionalities for predictive analysis and anomaly detection.
You can then receive proactive alerts and resolve potential problems before they even arise.
➡️ Track and improve your processes with Freshdeska customer support platform that analyzes your support performance and identifies areas for improvement.
As you can see, the key to customer success is being able to deliver the right message, at the right time, on the right channel. And even if you're very good at what you do, why not aim for excellence and try to do it all even faster, more accurately and continuously, thanks to artificial intelligence?
The one that's making a lot of noise at the moment is generative artificial intelligence, and in particular chatGPT. So is it possible to integrate chatGPT and its API into your processes? The answer right now!
Here are some ideas on how you can use ChatGPT in your CSM work:
➡️ Real-time support: integrate ChatGPT into your live chat platform. Your customers will receive fast answers and solutions to their questions and problems.
➡️ Dynamic FAQ: use ChatGPT to create a dynamic, interactive knowledge base using the questions most frequently asked by customers.
➡️ After-sales support: send automated messages to your customers to help them get the most out of their purchase (tailored advice and instructions). These messages can be personalized via ChatGPT.
➡️ Training and onboarding: you can use ChatGPT to create interactive tutorials and guides for customer onboarding or internal training purposes.
➡️ Sentiment analysis: ChatGPT can be trained on positive and negative reaction patterns to analyze customer feedback and deduce their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This enables you to act accordingly and identify potential problems.
As you will have realized, ChatGPT can replace most of the tools mentioned in the previous articles. And this is just the beginning!
To make Chat GPT an effective part of your daily life, we're going to advise you on how to use it as effectively as possible.
ChatGPT can't guess what you have in mind, so you'll need to explain it as clearly and precisely as possible. This is what we call a prompt: the way you formulate your request will determine the quality of the response.
You need to give it the right context, at the right time, and make sure it understands your expectations. This is called "prompt engineering", the practice of shaping and optimizing prompts to get the best performance from AI.
Here are our tips for creating an effective prompt:
➡️ Be clear and specific in your request, to enable the AI to understand your expectations without ambiguity. If your request is too vague, the response may be inappropriate.
➡️ Use keywords to help the AI understand the context of your request.
➡️ Be concise and to the point: AI has been proven to perform better when given short instructions.
➡️ Ask specific questions, and avoid open-ended questions that might lead to too general an answer.
➡️ Use concrete examples or scenarios to guide the AI in its response.
➡️ Practice!!! Don't hesitate to try out different formulations and compare the results to improve your approach. The more you practice, the more you'll be able to refine the quality of your prompts.
