Customer Success Strategy 101: Conversation Automation

Customer Success teams are key to customer retention and long-term growth. In fact, 60% of Customer Success leaders say growing revenue by selling more to existing customers is one of their top priorities. The more customers they can engage with (and help), the more they can drive renewal and expansion, adding to a company’s top-line growth. While this critical team may go by different names within your organization—Customer Success teams, Customer Operations teams, Customer Account teams—the bottom line is, well, driving the bottom line. Customer Success teams manage and grow customer relationships, collect customer feedback, encourage expanded product usage, request referrals, drive customer health, and recover lapsed service customers.

A winning Customer Success strategy maximizes the customer experience at every stage of the customer lifecycle. So, how can you set your Customer Success teams up to thrive? In this post, we’ll discuss the tenets of an effective Customer Success strategy and how Conversation Automation can help you optimize the overall process. Spoiler alert: integrating this framework into your business is much more manageable than you might think.

Accelerate Revenue Growth and Reduce Operational Costs

Because the average Customer Success Manager spends almost 40 hours a month sending emails to customers, oversees over 50 accounts, and manages over $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), it’s nearly impossible to scale these teams’ outputs without increasing headcount. By augmenting Customer Success teams with Conversation Automation, however, enterprises can scale customer engagement, boost customer loyalty, drive revenue, and increase productivity without adding more employees to the team.

Conversation Automation is exactly what it sounds like, a way to automate human-like, two-way conversations with leads and customers. By leveraging a concert of technologies—Nature Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence—Conversation Automation can deliver the right message, at the right time, on the right channel to motivate leads to progress through the lifecycle. Let’s explore how Conversation Automation supports each of the following Customer Success initiatives:

1. Drive Customer Health: Your Customer Success strategy drives revenue by nurturing customer relationships. From that first touch, regardless of channel, a customer relationship begins to form. A positive experience with a brand or service can lead to upsell and cross-sell opportunities. By adopting innovative technologies like Conversation Automation, businesses can proactively reinforce customer relationships. Conversation Automation allows businesses to drive consumer health with personalized communications to customers to ensure engagement and healthy product adoption. Revenue Digital Assistants for Customer Success can autonomously schedule reviews, address low usage, reinforce relationships including account team transition, and invite clients to connect at events. Improved relationships are reflected in customer retention rates and higher net promoter scores. What used to be merely transactional evolves into customer advocacy and testimonial, which ultimately becomes another tool to bring new customers into the revenue lifecycle. 
2. Analyze Customer Feedback: The ability to collect, interpret, and analyze customer feedback is crucial to optimizing your Customer Success strategy. Applying customer feedback and learnings create a stronger bond with existing customers and improves the CX for future customers. Customer feedback becomes actionable at scale with support from RDAs, allowing Customer Success teams to implement targeted product and service offering solutions. Additionally, Conversation Automation can request customer referrals to grow your reputation, instigate customer case studies, and discover customers willing to share their experiences with others. 
3. Retain Existing Customers: It’s 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer. This is a figure you’re probably familiar with. But did you know that boosting customer retention by just 5 percent increases revenue by 25 percent all the way up to 95 percent? Retaining existing customers, or reducing customer churn, ensures that dollars spent attracting and converting customers are kept within the business and garner even higher returns on initial investments. Conversation Automation improves net retention with proactive personalized outreach to determine which customers will renew and which need attention before they churn.
4. Expand Product Usage: In addition to new customer onboarding, Revenue Digital Assistants™ drive interest in expansions and upgrades with current customers. Personalized communications, deals, and promotions help ensure the full use of your products are enjoyed by your customers, encourage the adoption of key capabilities, and drive proactive product consumption. 

Make the Most of Every Relationship at Every Stage

Because Customer Success teams are dedicated to helping customers experience the best use of a product and achieve their goals, Customer Success strategies take a number of forms across a customer’s lifecycle. But the objective to instill and preserve a positive experience and impression of your company every step of the way never wavers.

Imagine your Customer Success team’s bandwidth if the majority of administrative tasks were autonomously handled. Revenue Digital Assistants can proactively schedule account reviews, collect customer feedback, renew existing customers, and onboard new customers. Augmenting your Customer Success team with an RDA proactively drives product usage, manages customer health, and provides appropriate upsell opportunities to existing customers. 

RDAs complement the skills of a human workforce, allowing for a deeper and more continuous connection with customers that leads to better outcomes. This empowers your human employees to do the work they do best. By adopting a Revenue Digital Assistant for Customer Success, you can help your organization make the most of every customer relationship. It’s good for your reputation and your bottom line. 

Are you looking to retain and grow your customer base? Explore our eBook, Customer Success, It’s Your Time to Shine. You’ll learn how adding a Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant to your team increases capacity, drives higher engagement rates, and ultimately generates more revenue for your business.