For more scalable customer success, you need to incorporate some high-touch practices. High touch CSM is one that involves human capital more. There is more face-to-face interaction, on-the-go decision making, and high-level strategy with equal focus on process. High-touch customer success is where CSMs know their customers well. Customer success automation is quite normal to ensure high-touch customer success happens. CSMs are faced with multiple challenges including bad fit customers, forced conversations and lack of compatibility. In this article, we will talk about high-touch CS and how automation can scale success.

What is High-touch Customer Success?

High touch strategy is one where regular, one-on-one assistance from a customer success manager is essential. High-touch is used for high value customers who are considered strategic because they are complex and require assistance. It is more of a personal guide for customers. A CS manager is an important part of the customer experience and digital engagement. High-touch customer success teams manage huge accounts with significant revenue.

Leadership teams want regular updates on account health, onboarding results, implementation journeys, customer adoption trends, and more.

Benefits of Automation

Automation can be personal

Usually automation is very impersonal. However, in high touch scenarios you can involve automation without loss of personal touch. Setting your playbook emails to be reviewed and modified as per customer is possible. Automating high touch messages is possible with high level personalisation. This makes it easier for customer success managers to make customers happy.

Example: Wishing a customer for a birthday. With automation, you can wish and send a personalised message to the customer. This will build engagement and create a good image with the customer.

Make Every Customer Important

All user types have various goals, needs, and engagement styles. To make sure customers feel seen, they need to be segmented. By segmenting, you can automate prescriptive communication for users to get success in adoption and onboarding.

Example: Prioritising one customer over the other is wrong. However, you need to make sure you understand their segmentation truly. Targeting a customer from a certain gender can be made easier with automation.

Simplify Workflow Management

Tracking every user’s training, concerns, and feedback will be relevant to reduce human errors, inefficiencies, and issues. With automation, it is possible to simplify and align expectations with customer progress.

Example: Answering a certain feedback will be easy if we are aware of the customer’s background and concerns. Automation can help simplify and trigger alerts accordingly.

Drive more effective Customer outcomes

When you automate customer success actions, you can drive better customer outcomes. Customers are more aware, engaged and invested. This helps in the long run with customer success. Incorporating automation can create an engaging customer experience.

Example: A customer can reach his ultimate experience when they help reach the same outcomes they signed up for.

Repetitive messages can be easily automated

There are parts of any job that can be automated. This included messaging of high-touch customer success teams. Repetitive messages in high touch can be exhausting. So automating these messages can help save time and energy. This can be panned out across the customer lifecycle. What is the introductory mail for the customer? How are customers getting notifications? What is the reminder message for billing issues? Look for messages that are consistent, they should be easy to automate. These messages can be automated to come from the CSMs handle without actually wasting a resource.

Example: A message detecting and solving a bug can be automated. Since every customer in this issue gets the same message, it can be automated.

Leverage Health Scoring

Automation in customer success can help create and use customer health scores to get customer health insights. With this, the team can take a proactive method to manage account health. The key to this is by automating health score alerts. Health scores are a great way to ensure customers are satisfied with the process. You can automate health score changes and get alerted for this.

Example: If a customer has dipping health trends, they can be heard. With automation, you can know of all the touchpoints and create a business that is truly customer-centric.

Can Tech-Touch be High-touch?

Customer success managers are critical in the customer success machine as they show customers value, help retain customers, and grow accounts. This means for an enterprise, one needs to have a proactive high touch strategy. For a mid-market segment, a mid-touch just in time strategy would suffice. For an SMB segment, automated tech-strategy is the key to proceed. This is the old idea. However, all segments of the market want proactive assistance.

Tech touch is for repetitive, less value customer success tasks. They aim to free up customer success managers from real high value work. As a high-touch CSM you need to optimise your skills, workflows, and customer onboarding plans for proactive success. Use resources, online help, blogs, videos, and more to improve performance and drive results. Tech touch or automation can set a company apart from the competition. Here are the other benefits-

• Can help scale a business more easily
• Can create spikes in sign-ups
• Can help expand accounts better
• Can support customers 24/7
• Can offer better service
• Can mobilise and make better use of resources

Scaling customer success is a pain point which can be made easier by using automation. This will eliminate excessive communications, reduce bombarding of customers with messages, and maximise value. Automated communications that build your brand image will help trigger engagements that can impact each and every stage of the customer journey.

Bottom Line

Understand that automation is an ongoing journey and keep the variables involved in mind. The key to understanding and achieving high-touch success is via automation and human interaction. By supplementing high-touch programs with automation, you can align and attain brand promise by focusing on relationships of value. A great way to do that is by automating your customer success team with some aspects that can reduce the load of CS teams.

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