I work as a Customer Success Manager, or a CSM for short. If you’ve never heard of one before, it’s essentially the relationship-building role between Software as a Service (SaaS) companies and their clients (Just to clarify, customer success is not the same thing as customer support). Being a CSM, I’m no stranger to the concept of automation or AI, but it did take me a while to see how they could fit into customer-facing roles like my own, and there’s a reason for this.
Everything is automated these days, and as someone who knows automation – I can tell. I know that the emails piling up in my inbox from every brand I’ve ever accidentally signed up for are not from real people. They may say my name and be tailored to my behavior, but I know it’s not someone who really understands me. It’s just a marketing guy with an automation builder.
So how could this possibly work when I have to speak to people every day? Building relationships is incredibly important to customer success, and I can’t replicate that with a robot. Don’t get me wrong, automation and AI are making our lives significantly easier across every industry, but I truly believe we are using them the wrong way.
The Biggest Mistake We’re Making
While automation and AI have made significant advancements over the past few years, we need to stop ignoring the fact that you cannot use them to replace real human connection. This is because everyone knows they exist.
In a world where these tools are freely available, people are quick to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not – I might even go as far as saying that we’re getting better at it, even though it’s getting harder to do. Maybe I’m biased because of the field I work in, but I truly feel that people are starting to catch on.
The main point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t look at automation and AI as entities that can replace the most important work we do, but rather a tool to make the little things go by faster.
How We Should Be Using Automation and AI
It’s very easy to be made redundant when everything can be done for you. There’s a lot of fear around automation and AI replacing roles. According to Forbes, the people who use AI are the ones who tend to fear that it will replace them. To me, that sounds like setting yourself up for failure – unless you’re smart about it.
Instead of using these tools to skip out on work, use them to make you work better. Of course, it’s easier said than done, but I’ve developed an approach that’s allowed me to stay disciplined and decide which tasks to use automation and AI for. So here are the four cases I fit tasks into to make sure I’m using and not abusing these tools:
- Saving time on the repetitive tasks
- Setting up reminders for the things I might forget
- Maintaining a standard
- Analyzing large amounts of data
I have to onboard clients quite frequently, and for the most part, it’s almost the same thing every time. For example, I will always need to send them a welcome email and schedule a kick-off call to help them get started.
While I could send every single person their own customized email, sometimes I haven’t gotten to know them yet, which means there isn’t much customizing to do. In this case, I would categorize sending a welcome email as a repetitive task. This means I can automate it guilt-free.
It is specific to Customer Success, but this really can apply to any customer-facing role. Is there a task that’s repetitive and doesn’t require a lot of customization? If the answer is yes, then it’s something you can automate without worrying about compromising a human connection.
If you’re balancing a lot of clients, it’s easy to lose track of what you need to do. For me, this has been renewals. While I’m focused on onboarding new clients and making sure they’re happy, renewing contracts can slip right past me – which is honestly quite dangerous since it costs 5-25 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.
Our renewal process doesn’t just start on the day a contract with a client ends, it starts about 90 days before with us sending them reminders (emphasis on the plural) that the day is coming soon. When you’re handling multiple accounts you can’t keep track of which stage every client is in, which reminder they’re on, and how close they are to the final day.
We all have our limits, and sometimes the cost is too high to try and overcome them. So I’ve started using a customer success tool that keeps track of my contracts and then automates sending renewals for each stage of the 90 days. If there’s something important that you might not remember to do – automate it.
I am a part of a team. This means I, and every single person I work with, represent one brand. Having a diverse team is great, but if you’ve worked in a customer-facing role before, you probably know that providing diverse experiences is not. If my colleague and I follow two different processes for handling the same client, we’ll stop looking like a team.
There is a level of professionalism and trust that comes with uniformity, so it’s something we like to maintain. My main example of this would be our tone when we communicate with clients. AI can’t help much when you’re on call, but it does help with emails. We use AI to scan through client communication and identify sentiment. Once it does this, it automatically recommends responses with appropriate tones.
While I don’t encourage my team to go with those responses every single time, it does help train them to understand what each tone encompasses and when they become appropriate. So if you’re looking to standardize an experience, it’s okay to turn to automation and AI.
Every company tracks some sort of KPIs for their clients to make sure everything is in order. In customer success, we combine these KPIs to create a health score that essentially tells us how a client is doing. If a client’s score falls below the lower boundary, we know something’s wrong.
Before we had a proper customer success tool, we did this with spreadsheets. While we didn’t need to calculate things manually, it did take some time to actually find the data and then make sense of all of it. Since we started automating data collection and analysis, things have gotten easier. Right now we have an AI tool that tells us when a customer’s health is something to be concerned about as opposed to skimming through data to arrive at that conclusion ourselves.
I still know how to analyze customer data, but I’ve allowed automation and AI to make the process faster. If you have large amounts of data that you need to make sense of, start automating data collection and looking into AI for interpretation.
These categories haven’t let me down yet. Before I worked with them, I tried to use automation AI for every single thing, and it only made me feel worse at my job. Today, I’m more selective and strategic with what I use it for.
In Conclusion: We Need to Stop Making the Worst of Good Tools
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of letting automation and AI do things for you, but as I said before, they cannot replace human connection. In whatever you do, do not forget the emails piling up in your inbox. In the same way you know what is real and what is not, others do too.
I still read my customers’ emails, type out my own responses, discern when they need my help, use my emotional intelligence, and do what’s needed of me. The only difference is now, I’ve embraced the tools that allow me to do more. Automation and AI have helped me scale as a CSM, but they haven’t replaced me.
What are your thoughts on the tools? Are you happy with how you’re using them? Do automation and AI make you better at what you do or worse? If you’d like to share your thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below.