Customer Success: Grow Your Footprint

Customer Success is a pretty awesome gig. You get to help customers get the most out of their investments in your products and services—and better still, you get to watch that guidance turn into real results. Folks that excel in Customer Success tend to be personable, clever, and problem solvers.

But that’s not to say that it’s an easy job. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) often oversee dozens or even hundreds of accounts. This makes it difficult to deliver consistent customer experiences across the board. Fortunately, technologies like Conversational AI can make a world of difference. By automating two-way, human-like conversations with existing customers, CSMs can scale repetitive (albeit vital) tasks—which allows them to focus on proactively addressing customer needs. This includes onboarding new customers, collecting customer feedback, and motivating renewals.

But what about growing your footprint by upselling and cross-selling customers?

Upsell and Cross-Sell Your Customer Base With Conversational AI

Customer Success is ultimately a revenue team. And in terms of returns on investment, it’s an especially effective one. Keeping an existing customer is five to ten times more profitable than bringing in new customers. If that’s the power and profitability of simply retaining a customer, then imagine the financial windfall of expanding engagements with your existing customers.

Successfully instigating upselling and cross-selling opportunities requires healthy rapport relationships with customers. You can’t just ask for more money from an indifferent client. Establishing quality relationships built on trust is mutually beneficial for your company and theirs. Plus these kinds of close interactions give you a keen understanding of their needs and opportunities so you can recommend relevant products and services to push customers to that next level of success.

All of this requires proactive attention from CSMs, who—as we’ve already mentioned—wrestle with large swaths of customers. This is where AI Assistants offer a major advantage to thinly stretched Customer Success teams.

AI Assistants—a specific form of Conversational AI built to act as a digital team member—are crucial tools in helping CSMs expand capacity, deliver stellar customer experiences, and ultimately drive more revenue.

AI Assistants deliver personalized, two-way conversations with customers over email, website chat, or SMS. These polite and persistent conversations match specific use cases—like addressing low product usage, collecting feedback, setting meetings with a CSM—and inviting customers to engage with your company.

Taking things a step further, AI Assistants motivate upsell and cross-sell opportunities that benefit your customers and boost revenue for your business. By autonomously delivering the right message at the right time in someone’s customer journey, AI Assistants help increase customer lifetime value (CLV).

This includes:

• Ensuring product consumption and healthy adoption,
• Driving interest to buy more,
• Encouraging capacity expansions,
• And instigating upgrades to existing products in the same or different products from different buying centers.

If you’re ready to proactively give your customers what they need to succeed—without over occupying your already busy CSMs—AI Assistants make all the difference by delivering a better experience, helping revenue retention, and (most importantly) growing your footprint.

Want a deeper dive into how Conversational AI and Intelligent Automation augment Customer Success teams? Explore the 451 Research Report: Augmenting Customer Success with Intelligent Virtual Assistants.