Exploring how automation can produce a deeper human connection.
Your definitive guide to the 150 software solutions used by leading customer success teams
As founders of a SaaS company with customer success rooted deep in our values, we’ve taken a different approach to CS than most — one that has so far has yielded amazing results.
When you look at how the subscription software economy has exploded, the growth of customer success is no surprise. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) have become a critical cog in the machine to retain customers, grow accounts and ensure that customers are consistently receiving value.
But most Customer Success teams can’t grow as fast as their businesses require. To make matters worse, their role is stretched across numerous accounts and there is a real need to triage customers and allocate their time effectively.
This is the origin of a now widely accepted approach of Engagement Models to categorize customers as being “high-touch,” “low-touch,” or “no-touch.” These labels delineate the degrees of contact, time, and investment spent with particular customers.
There’s a line of thought that has evolved in customer success that these different levels of touch should be used for specific customer segments:
This conventional approach gave rise to a now well-known graphic by Gainsight in late 2016:
There’s a serious problem with this idea, however.
Mid-market and SMB customers also want proactive assistance. Enterprise and SMBs can benefit from a community forum with answers to common questions and don’t always want to talk to someone for a solution or advice. And enterprise and mid-market customers can benefit greatly from tech-touch communication, which isn’t necessarily low- or no-touch at all.
Are we saying that we send enterprise clients automated emails, or let bots handle conversations with them? Yes! Because we do.
And while that may sound bold, here’s the thing: it works.
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From the perspective of a CSM, using tech-touch across the board makes sense. There are only so many working hours in a day to write emails, make phone calls, and attend meetings. If businesses truly value their high-priority customers, one obvious way to improve their experience is to ensure that personalized support is available whenever needed, or at least appears to be.
A CSM bogged down by emails, calls, and meetings is rarely able to truly communicate with their clients in real-time; they’re just too busy! Even when this isn’t the case, a customer may reach out to a CSM outside of working hours and have to wait for a reply.
These customers aren’t truly getting the best quality support; tech-touch can do better. This is especially true if some of the questions being answered and problems getting solved are repetitive, meaning initial responses can be automatic and instant.
The true value of a CSM is strategic: they offer a specialized service that includes consulting, giving personalized advice and support, and building a meaningful relationship with customers. Imagine how much more freedom they would have to do it best if manually addressing basic support issues and follow-ups were taken off their plate. Removing busywork and replacing it with tech touch enables better customer relationships.
Tech-touch should be for repetitive, low-value customer success tasks, freeing up CSMs for the real high-value work. Low-value doesn’t mean low-touch, however, and shouldn’t be limited to lower-spending segments of a customer base.
Hugo uses tech-touch for all customer segments for four reasons:
What does tech-touch at all levels look like?
Here are our most successful non-standard tech-driven strategies that set us apart and, honestly, make our lives easier:
One example of our automated communication is an email that gets triggered when a customer is using the Hugo app on the weekend. Using casual language, the email lets the customer know that their CSM knows what it’s like to have to “catch up” on work over the weekend. It also offers tools that can help streamline that work so that it gets done quicker, leaving more free weekend time.
Our team, of course, is hopefully out enjoying their own weekend. (Ha! — You can pry this laptop from my cold, dead hands.) But with a little imagination, we have a very person, high-touch level of service for everyone, not just our enterprise customers during working hours. Success is now on-demand: available to all of our customers, all of the time.
Best of all, people reply to these emails a lot. We end up having the option to have a lot of fascinating exchanges with customers on the weekend — something we don’t pass up. But the core of the program is all automatic, which means we just handle the fun part.
This same approach can be used when analytics detect a problem with an account. An email asking “Is everything ok?” and offering solutions makes it feel like someone is there, in real-time, ready to help. And if they reply, a human can easily swoop in to solve an issue with the first steps already taken.
As long as it feels like human interaction, these initial tech-touches can be just as good as the real thing for many customers. And, best of all, customer success now has an inbox full of customers to respond to, rather than the far more difficult task of outreach to start conversations.
The idea that proactivity is limited to high-level customers has never sat well with us. We just don’t think it’s true. Businesses of all sizes want to get ahead of issues, and we use automated, personalized messages to communicate how we help them do exactly that.
When our error logging software detects that a customer has just experienced a bug while using Hugo, for example, they receive a friendly message from us. This message communicates that we noticed an error occurred and that we are looking into it — and our system is, in fact, doing just that, without human help.
This is arguably even more proactive than a human CSM, who might not be aware that a customer experienced an error until the customer communicates it. Even if an automated alert is sent to the CSM, it may not get addressed until they have handled everything else on their list. Even then, we’ve connected the customer experience to our engineering team, leading to a faster, better solution anyway.
Welcome to Hugo swag pack
Perhaps the most fun tech touch we do is one that uses tech to provide some real-world tangibles for customers to enjoy: swag!
After signing up and achieving in-product goals, new Hugo customers are sent a package with Hugo t-shirts, socks and helpful content for their team learn new methods of teamwork and business growth. This very high touch service is automated; the team doesn’t have to worry about making it happen. This way, all customers get a red carpet experience. There is no human time cost and our valued customers are reminded that they are all valued.
Tech touch is no longer about “low” or “high” touch; it’s about employing tools, processes, and technology to be more proactive and available, and remove busywork for CSMs. This reserves time for high-value relationship building and consulting—true value-adds for customers.
Customer success management is the hub to the many spokes in a business. Without happy customers, a business can’t scale and without capturing and centralizing customer insights, the rest of the business can’t be truly customer-centric.
Scaling customer success is a pain point many of our clients approach us with. With our Connected Meeting Notes Software powering CSM teams globally, our goal at Hugo is to maximize value from customer conversations — which counter-intuitively means using automation to start or eliminate a lot of those communications.
Every time our customers have a meeting, they take notes, share insights, and plan action. They collaborate on agendas. They elevate conversations to allow businesses to scale. Meetings are important, but scaling requires strong customer relationships, too. Tech-touch is one way to build that strength.
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This article is an excerpt from our book 10X Culture. To read more, download your free digital copy or order in paperback on Amazon.
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