Achieving customer success through automation is a great way to create personalized customer experiences, reduce churn, retain more customers with 12 Simple Engagement Automation, and free up your customer success teams to focus on more important tasks.
However, because every customer’s journey is unique, it may be hard to know which ongoing tasks should be automated. In this article, you’ll understand what customer success automation is, why you should automate for customer success in your SaaS company, and 12 simple Engagement automation tasks.
What is customer success automation?
Customer success automation involves automating specific tasks and processes in your customer’s journey so that your customers can use your products/service to meet their business goals. A primary reason why customer success automation happens is that it allows you to be proactive in identifying areas your customers may need help with and deploying automated solutions to address them.
4 Reasons to Automate Your Customer Success Tasks
Since new users are unfamiliar with your product, they will have questions and require some handholding to understand it. Unfortunately, most SaaS businesses lack the power to attend to every customer 24/7, but customers can easily access regular help with the right automation. Notably, customer success 12 simple Engagement automation will help you:
Drive customer engagement: When customers can get proactive and immediate responses to their questions, they will spend more time engaging with your products.
Increase sales and revenue: An engaged customer base will renew subscriptions and tell others about you. This way, your sales will improve, and you won’t have to spend more on acquiring new customers.
Improve business processes: Adopting customer engagement tactics through automation will help refine your business processes so things can run on schedule and without lapses.
Reduce churn rate: A sign that you have achieved customer success in your SaaS business is when your retention rate is high and fewer customers leave. Customer engagement automation can make this possible for your business.
12 Customer Success Tasks That Can Be Automated
While it may be tempting to automate every part of your customer success process, this is not advisable if you want the best results from customer success automation. Hence, it is essential to identify which customer success tasks you can automate. We share 12 simple Engagement automation tasks that you can boost the customer success:
Task #1: Self-Onboarding for New Customers
New users commonly have questions about navigating a product the first time they sign up. To help them succeed, create a well-detailed onboarding process that guides them as they explore the product.
While you may welcome each new user personally, it is not advisable since it involves a lot of manual work
Rather than relying on manual onboarding, you can automate it. Include product tours or interactive walk-throughs to help new users quickly learn your product and set them up for success on their customer journey.
Task #2: Welcome emails and training
Much like onboarding, you can automate welcome emails to welcome new customers and introduce them to your product.
Trigger an automated welcome email and send it to new users when they fill in their sign-up details. Use these series to teach customers about your product, collect more information about them, and include answers to any possible questions. You can also automate training videos and send them to new users on a daily/weekly schedule when they sign up.
Task #3: Product usage analytics and reporting
You can automate your product usage analytics to see which features are most and least likeused amongst customers and what they’re used are frequently used and what customers are using the features for. This information can help SaaS businesses know what areas to improve, what is working, where customers are/may face challenges, etc. That way, needed interventions can be deployed as necessary.
Task #4: Customer feedback collection
Knowing your customers’ thoughts and opinions is important to building a product that meets their needs. Information collected from customer feedback can help you identify what features to improve, which ones to sunset, or when to create new features. All of these will help your business increase revenue and reduce churn.
Automate customer feedback collection forms at different phases of the customer journey where collecting feedback is relevant. For instance, this could be after users interact with a new feature or after a specified period following their onboarding.
Task #5: In-app messaging and notifications
As users become familiar with your product, sending personalized messages at different times throughout their customer journey is important. Automation allows you to reach the users at the right time when it’s contextual–even if you’re not in the same time zone.
Examples of in-app messaging that could be automated are product updates, new feature announcements, or onboarding tutorials. Here’s an example of an automated tooltip from Aitrable.
Similarly, you can also automate push notifications to send promotional messages or re-engage inactive users. Make push notifications personalized, contextual, and relevant to where the users are on the customer journey.
Task #6: Feature adoption based on user behavior
Rather than randomly emailing customers to try out different features of your product, you can get them to try specific features based on their actions after signing up. For example, you can segment power users to test new features when running a beta test. These power users spend time on your product, know its strengths, and will gladly tell you if a new feature is necessary.
Task #7: Automate customer support for recurring issues
You’re likely to have recurring questions and issues that customers experience while using your product. Deploying customer success automation will make you proactive in resolving these issues and ensuring customer success with your product. This may involve using bots or other engagement automation tactics. That way, your customers can get the support they need when needed.Task #8: Churn prediction and prevention
When you introduce customer engagement automation for churn prediction and prevention, you will be able to identify customers who are not utilizing your solutions and are likely to leave. This would help you intervene to prevent such customers from churning.
Also, when a customer decides to leave, you can trigger an exit survey to find out the reason for leaving. This will be useful to gather more information on why users are leaving and offer customized packages if you can.
Task #9: Ticket routing and prioritization
Manually determining how support tickets should be routed or prioritized is a time-consuming task that can be improved by customer success automation. The use of automation can enable efficient classification and more accurate ticket routing.
When a user opens a ticket, it can be automatically labeled and delivered to the right customer support agent to attend to it. Issues of utmost importance, like payment errors, can be prioritized and routed to an appropriate agent who communicates with the customer and walks them through the error.
Task #10: Self-service resources for customers
Customers want answers to their questions immediately. While this may not always be possible if they wait for live customer support, an automated customer engagement solution can make self-service possible for them. This will work by providing troubleshooting videos or bots that customers can engage with for quick answers to their challenges.
Task #11: Product update and new feature announcement
Information about updates made/new features added to products can be disseminated to customers automatically. This will ensure they don’t miss out on updates or login to your platform and see a different interface.
You can trigger new feature announcements to display when users enter in-app or after they engage with specific features. This will ensure that the information is relevant to the user.
Task #12: Upselling and cross-selling based on the usage pattern
Creating customized upsell and cross-sell offers presents an excellent opportunity to increase revenue. However, it comes at a significant cost with an enormous workload, especially if you have thousands of clients. A simple way to reach every one of your customers is by automating the upsell process.
You can obtain customer behavior from your customer engagement data using features like the 360 view of customers in Churn360. This information will help you know which products you can introduce to your customers as a higher-priced or complementary solution to what they are currently using.
Once you have obtained customer behavior, segmenting them and creating customized pitches is easier. Show them the benefits of the upsell and how the additional features will help them achieve their goals faster.
How to Measure the Success of Your Customer Success Automation
It’s not enough to introduce customer success automation to your processes or tasks if you don’t measure its effectiveness. As such, tracking the success of your customer engagement solutions is essential. Here are some metrics to track:
- Track customer satisfaction: Tracking good and bad customer feedback can give you an idea of how users feel about their customer experience. Collect data on metrics like net promoter score (NPS), customer retention rates, etc. If your score is good, it indicates growth and a good churn rate.
- Measure time saved: the success of automation lies in the amount of time saved from recurring tasks. Comparing the time it takes to complete a task manually and with automation can help determine how much automation is needed.
- Consider team efficiency gains: Identify how automation has helped your team focus on creating high-impact work and eliminate expensive errors to generate better results. You can track efficiency gains by measuring important tasks like the number of customers onboarded and retained, the number of tickets resolved, or even the number of upsell and cross-sell opportunities created through automation.
- Monitor customer engagement: using automation can help you tailor the customer engagement of users to create a better experience for them. For instance, with automation, you can obtain users’ information during sign-up to personalize their experience.
- Gauge customer support effectiveness: Tracking how long it takes to resolve a support ticket, whether customers still complain about an issue after raising support tickets, and if they are using your self-service resource more will let you know how effective your customer support automation is.
- Revenue Influence: Tracking if more people have signed up through your upselling and cross-selling automation and how long customers stay with your product will give you an idea of your revenue influence.
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Tools for Automating Your Customer Success
What tools can you utilize for effective customer success automation? Check out the following:
Churn360: Churn360 is an AI-powered customer success platform that helps B2B SaaS companies turn data into actionable insights to reduce churn. Utilize our customer engagement SaaS to automate critical tasks, so you can retain, renew, and upsell to customers who will become your business’s long-term ambassadors.
Mixpanel: Mixpanel provides powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users.
Gainsight: Gainsight provides solutions to help SaaS businesses prioritize their roadmap, create value for users, and drive product-led, stable growth.
Conclusion
It is evident from the article that engaging with customers for service requires deploying customer success automation. The benefits that will accrue in the long run exceed the costs. Churn360 provides one of the best customer success automation solutions for SaaS businesses.
