Many people are concerned about using artificial intelligence (AI) in both business and daily life. The main issue is that technology has clear advantages over people in many fields, which poses a danger to the current workforce. The truth is that the workforce we currently know will change, but not in the manner you might anticipate.  

AI can improve customer success strategy rather than erasing the human component of it. In the upcoming decade, the human-machine collaboration will be crucial in deciding future economic success. 

Definition of Augmented Intelligence 

The standard definition of Augmented Intelligence explains it as a design pattern of a partnership between humans and artificial intelligence with humans at the center of decision-making. The most important thing about this partnership between humans and artificial intelligence is that the partnership is ‘human-centered.’ This partnership is meant to enhance cognitive performance, including learning, decision-making, and having new experiences.

Contrary to the view implanted by a few ‘sci-fi’ movies, Artificial Intelligence has been designed and is capable of enhancing human performance and experiences rather than replacing humans. Augmented Intelligence is a sub-division of AI machine learning. It functions to enhance human intelligence. It is neither meant to operate independently nor can it replace human intelligence.

Augmented Intelligence utilizes machine learning and deep learning to work out actionable data and provide humans with their results. The decision-making or the right to take action on the data remains in the hands of a human. Augmented Intelligence, in such cases, can be easily understood as a virtual assistant to humans.

Relevance of augmented intelligence in enterprises 

The relevance of Augmented Intelligence in businesses is increasing every single day. It will not be an overstatement if we say augmented intelligence is the future for many things, including business enterprises. As discussed above, Augmented Intelligence is a partnership model that enhances decision-making. Business leaders utilizing Augmented Intelligence are already at a competitive advantage as this partnership enhances the prowess of the workforce in many areas.

Augmented Intelligence can enhance business performance in the following ways –

• Building a high-trust network by equipping new employees to take responsibility without the seniors having to supervise at every small step. In the absence of augmented intelligence, seniors will supervise new employees at each step, thus creating a low-trust network in the business.
• Augmented Intelligence helps prevent blind spots by providing 360-degree views of information required by the business. The management and business leaders might have all the information regarding their business, including customers, competitors, market, industry, employees, national and international rules affecting their business, etc. But, still, they may miss one or the other point while planning and decision making.
• It can improve customer experiences by making the system faster and more efficient. An improved customer experience is a key to business growth.
• Improves the pace of decision-making by providing their human partners with affordable solutions to the problems that arise in day-to-day business. The pace of decision-making is faster with augmented intelligence as it can process massive amounts of data more accurately and efficiently at a faster speed. It can also establish cause and effect in the relationship to learn from a similar experience that may have happened in the past.
• It provides stringent cyber-security that no human intelligence can provide. Every business today needs to have a strong cyber-security system in place because the web is equally a risky place as it is important. The looming risks of cyber-attacks in their myriad form is a matter of concern for every business that has anything to do with the internet. And it is a fact that human intelligence is not enough to provide cyber security to an organization. It can be done only with the partnership of augmented intelligence.
• Augmented Intelligence can help in forecasting future trends. Businesses willing to thrive in the future cannot afford to limit their planning and decision-making to the current circumstances. Augmented Intelligence can deeply analyze the company’s available data, customer feedback, and social trends to forecast future trends. An idea about the future trend can be extremely helpful in making a smarter decision for the future.
• It can help in real-time financial tracking. The traditional system provides historic data on your finances. It helps you know your financial mistakes after committing the mistake. In today’s swiftly growing and changing economics, the traditional method of finance tabs are not enough. Enterprises can use augmented intelligence to monitor their finances and provide warnings and real-time suggestions for effectively utilizing them.

Benefits of augmented intelligence in customer success 

Augmented Intelligence is beneficial in customer success management as in other business sectors. It improves the decision-making process and significantly reduces time spent on the process. Some of the benefits Customer success can leverage through augmented intelligence are –

• Troubleshooting without a hassle – Augmented intelligence can troubleshoot customers without hassle. This repetitive task can bore human representatives and make them feel unproductive. So, the task can be passed on to AI. This will be a win-win situation as human representatives would be freed from monotonous tasks, and customers will get their work done faster.
• Personalized customer services – One of the best practices for customer success is to provide customers with personalized services. With its capability to handle massive amounts of data and keep them separated wherever required, Augmented intelligence can provide highly personalized customer services.
• Precise recommendation – Augmented intelligence in customer success reduces the time spent on decision-making by providing precise recommendations. The less time you spend on decision-making and planning, the faster customer service will be. Reducing the time taken to resolve customer queries can boost your customer satisfaction ratio.
• Scaling-up business operation – An enterprise equipped with the partnership of augmented intelligence can easily and effectively scale up its business operation. When a business has only human representatives to handle customer success, it can serve only a limited number of customers. On the other hand, businesses equipped with AI can serve way more customers without degrading the quality of the service.

Benefits of augmented intelligence in account management 

Account management is especially important for any SaaS (Software As A Service) business. And the good thing is that Augmented Intelligence can be used to manage your accounts better and provide your prospective clients the experience of having a ‘personal assistant’ with regard to your company and offered services. With AI, you can give each of your clients highly personalized recommendations based on their unique goals rather than disseminating general information that may or may not be useful for them.

While augmented intelligence brings a variety of benefits to account management, we can broadly divide them into three parts –

• Identification of opportunities – Through augmented intelligence, opportunities can be identified easily and effectively. Augmented intelligence not only identifies the opportunities but also alerts the user in real-time.
• Motivates consistent engagement – Augmented intelligence has the capability to understand users’ needs and preferences. Based on the understanding, it can nudge and motivate users to engage with your product consistently. This is beneficial for the clients as well as the business.
• Advance optimization of products – Augmented intelligence is capable of predicting the future demands of users and optimizing the product service even before the users ask. This is a notable feature that keeps the users satisfactorily connected with your business.

Case studies highlighting the importance of augmented intelligence in customer success and account management 

Now, let us provide a few case studies to show how Smartkarrot practically helps its clients with augmented intelligence.

Case Study 1

Client’s Issue: One of the largest technology providers to global police, fire, and emergency departments with a revenue expansion issue. The company had a steady renewal rate of 89%, which is really good, but it was struggling to expand its revenue from its existing customer base.

Reasons behind the issue: There were a number of reasons that caused the above-mentioned issue for our customer. The key factors included –

• Lack of visibility – The existing system created a visibility issue in key areas like product account views, financials, support tickets, product usage insights, etc.
• Decentralized customer journey tracking – The other issue we pinpointed was that the customer journey tracking was decentralized and was managed manually in silos.
• Lack of a focused list for up-sell and cross-sell – One major drawback with this client was that they lacked a focused list of customers for up-sell and cross-sell.

Solution by SmartKarrot: After a thorough analysis of the aggregated data we created an automated expansion playbook by correlating multiple signals to identify focused customer segments easily.

• We created multiple dynamic segments across multiple product lines for tracking product usage and utilization.
• We provided the customer success managers of our client company with guided one-click access to high-priority account lists.
• We have provided them access to intelligence nuggets and alerts for improving their decision-making for the focus areas.
• We have included the attribute of consistency in the tasks and actions of our clients through our automated playbooks.

Result: As a result of our intervention, our client is now in control of managing and achieving the expansion of their revenue.

• They achieve 110% of net revenue retention and are hopeful to take this to 130% in the near future.
• They have also achieved an increase of 28.5% in adoption rate across their core product line.

Case Study 2

Client’s issue: This customer approached SmartKarrot with their specific need to transform their customer onboarding and renewal process. This was one of the fastest-growing organizations providing innovative retail analytics and space planning technology.

The reason behind the issue: We noticed some extra challenges apart from their initial requirement. The major challenges we noticed here were –

• The company had inconsistent data and processes that caused multiple challenges.
• Their poor onboarding experience was resulting in declining promoter scores.
• The longer onboarding cycle also resulted in a longer wait time for revenue realization.
• They had a low renewal rate of 87%

Solution by SmartKarrot: We mapped multiple onboarding roles and stages with playbooks. A similar procedure was done for renewal processes.

• We created account views and alerts using multiple data signals across product usage. These data signals included –
  a. Customer sentiment
  b. Finance
  c. Engagement, etc.
• We created a custom playbook for each phase of the customer journey.
• We are now working to enable more collaborations and intelligence in CS (Customer Success) operations.

Result: As expected by the clients, they are achieving faster onboarding, and their renewal rate is also growing. Now, they are turning their focus toward revenue expansion.

• Our client has achieved an 18% reduction in their onboarding time with the automated playbooks.
• Their renewal rate has touched 95% with steady growth. Their next target is to achieve 110% NRR (Net Revenue Retention) through expansion.

How SmartKarrot uses augmented intelligence in customer success and account management 

Augmented Intelligence is SmartKarrot’s approach to combining Analytics, workflow, and Automation and applying them to solve our clients’ most complex problems. For B2B businesses in any industry… with a special focus on solving Customer Success and Account Management problems.  

For example, let us focus on the team responsible for handling “Revenue Expansion.” 

 Our Augmented Intelligence uses Analytics to go through financial and licensing data to generate upsell and cross-sell opportunities, Workflow to templatize the most appropriate playbooks to handle Expansion at scale, and Automation to trigger the process on time, every time. And that is only the tip of the iceberg of what Augmented Intelligence can do. 

Augmented Intelligence is ushering in the New Age of Customer Success & Account Management, and we are using it to advance our capabilities.

Final Words 

Your company can enhance sales, cut costs, and obtain more actionable insights if it uses augmented intelligence to acquire insights into its business data for customer success and account management. Using these priceless insights, they can accelerate growth and remain ahead of disruption. 

 The correct data analytics approach for your company’s objectives can produce outcomes supporting your leadership position for decades. A strong analytics technique is necessary for comprehensive digital transformation. 

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