How Customer Success Can Use AI to Enhance Customer Experience

The adoption of AI in customer success (CS) is experiencing rapid growth. According to Gainsight’s recent Stateof AI in Customer Success Report, 52 percent of CS organizations now use AI to enhance their operations.

Among these, 73 percent use AI to drive Customer Success Manager (CSM) productivity, while 55 percent rely on it to mitigate customer churn. Nearly half (48 percent ) of respondents reported utilizing AI to free up time for deeper, more meaningful customer interactions, and 44 percent deployed AI to identify customer risks proactively. Additionally, AI is fueling revenue growth, with 36 percent of organizations leveraging it to uncover expansion opportunities and 23 percent using it to optimize efficiency by avoiding the need to scale headcount.

Interestingly, AI remains largely a “bottom-up” tool, with employees leveraging it to boost productivity. However, as organizations increasingly add AI tools to their technology stack, more customer success managers will be able to leverage the benefits offered, including decreasing the time spent on routine and repeatable tasks, providing more personalized experiences and supporting activities that increase customer revenues.

Personalized onboarding

Onboarding is one key customer success function with many repeatable, structured tasks and processes that benefit from the inclusion of AI-enabled tools.

AI in digital adoption platforms can create guided tours that analyze user behavior and preferences to deliver product walkthroughs that adapt to a user’s actions, skill level, and preferences in real time. This provides a more personalized experience and can help pinpoint friction points, understand where users abandon processes, identify common errors, and provide data-centric interface design and functionality enhancement recommendations.

Product Fruits, WalkMe, and Userpilot are examples of AI-enabled tools that enhance user onboarding, engagement, and product adoption through interactive in-app guidance and personalized user experiences.

Product Fruits promises to enable businesses to create interactive product tours, checklists, hints, in-app announcements, and feedback surveys without requiring technical expertise. WalkMe says they are an enterprise-grade digital adoption platform for interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and real-time analytics. At the same time, Userpilot helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

Personalized assistance

AI-enabled chatbots are powerful tools that guide new users through onboarding with step-by-step instructions. They also enhance the customer journey by offering 24/7 support for customer queries, such as troubleshooting issues, answering frequently asked questions, or guiding users through product features. This not only provides real-time and personalized assistance, but it also reduces wait times and allows human agents to focus on more complex issues that require a personal touch.

In addition to supporting the onboarding and product walk-through process, AI-enabled chatbots are excellent tools for gathering and analyzing customer feedback. They can engage users through automated surveys, polls, or conversational prompts to collect insights about their experience.

When combined with sentiment analysis, AI can automate the identification of patterns or trends, such as common pain points or areas for improvement, enabling customer success teams to act proactively and free up the customer success team to focus on strategic initiatives such as relationship-building and account expansion.

Examples of chatbots include Intercom’s Resolution Bot, Ada’s Automated Customer Experience (ACX) Platform and LivePerson’s Conversational AI. Intercom’s Resolution Bot automates answers to common customer queries so human agents can focus on more complex issues. Ada’s Automated Customer Experience (ACX) Platform handles various tasks like answering FAQs and assisting with account management. Finally, LivePerson’s Conversational AI assist in resolving customer issues, guiding product usage, and collecting feedback.

Less time on 1-1 training

Another area where AI can increase the productivity of customer success teams is by enhancing the quality and quantity of self-serve training materials so that CS teams can focus on friction points rather than training customers on essential features.

AI can reduce the time spent creating training materials such as eLearning, microlearning and videos. It can also reduce the time spent (and cost) translating content into different languages, producing videos with avatars, and building personalized learning paths.

For example, OpenText used various AI tools to enhance its customer education process and reduced the time spent building training content by 50 percent. Tools like LEAi were leveraged to generate learning objectives and knowledge check questions and provide guidance on building content tailored for learning. Video tool Synthesia provided speech-to-text, virtual avatars and video production capabilities, and DeepL provided translation services. OpenText also used its own virtual teaching assistant.

AI also allowed the company to repurpose existing assets into new modalities. For example, Miki Ishikawa, Learning Experience Director at OpenText said his team was able to reduce the time it took to convert recorded instructor-led training to eLearning modules by 57 percent.

Gather sentiment analytics

Collecting and analyzing feedback during the customer journey can be time-consuming. AI tools can analyze feedback from various sources, such as surveys, support tickets, and social media mentions, to quickly gather insights into customer sentiment and experiences.

Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool to identify at-risk customers. By monitoring these signals, customer success teams can proactively address concerns before they escalate or the customer churns. Conversely, identifying positive sentiment to identify loyal clients and advocates for testimonials, case studies, or referral programs.

Sentiment analysis also plays a crucial role in providing real-time assessments of customer interactions, like recognizing when a conversation is taking a negative turn and needs to be escalated to a human representative or a higher support tier.

Qualtrics XM is an example of a tool that uses AI to analyze survey responses and other feedback to identify critical trends and sentiments in real-time. This empowers organizations to adapt quickly to user needs and enhance their onboarding experience effectively.

Increase productivity

Finally, AI can help with many day-to-day activities. Customer success managers often spend considerable time on activities like data entry, scheduling, and responding to routine emails. AI-powered tools, like Microsoft Copilot or Google Workspace AI, can draft emails, schedule meetings, and organize calendars so they can focus on more strategic responsibilities and reduce mental fatigue.

Natural language processing (NLP) tools, like Jamie.ai and Otter.ai, can transcribe and summarize meeting discussions, while AI-powered platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams can prioritize messages and suggest relevant resources. Both features reduce miscommunication, help employees stay organized and enable them to focus on productive work.

Finally, AI tools offer inspiration and streamline the creative process. For example, AI writing assistants like ChatGPT can help generate ideas, draft content, and refine messaging, while design tools like Canva’s AI features can automate graphic design tasks.

More to come

From boosting productivity and reducing churn to enabling deeper customer connections and driving revenue growth, AI is today an essential tool for modern CS organizations. As adoption continues to rise, AI’s potential to deliver operational efficiency and elevate customer experience will only expand. Embracing AI is no longer just an advantage; it’s becoming a necessity for the long-term success of customer teams.