Guy Nirpaz is founder of leading customer success platform, Totango. He authored Farm Don’t Hunt—The definitive guide to customer success.
When I wrote Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success a decade ago, my focus was on how living in a digital-first world had changed the paradigm of how we do business. As the concept of “farming” our customers has grown to become a central tenet of customer success, I’ve also come to understand that the customer journey itself is a business’s most important product. It encompasses the holistic experience customers have with companies, from exposure to brand touchpoints to interactions with products or employees, which means it must be continuously iterated upon so that it is always improving.
Now, the emergence of generative AI is forcing us to yet again rethink the way we do things. After years of turbulence in tech and the economy, and amid the increased pressures of an always-connected hybrid workforce, I believe the accessibility of this groundbreaking technology offers a renewed promise of possibility. Smarter, more agile technology empowers us all to become hyper-efficient.
As we find ourselves catapulting into a new era, what does this mean for customer success, which many associate with the human touch in business relationships?
A Shifting Landscape
In a world in which we’re always connected and always on, remote and hybrid workloads push many of us far past a 40-hour work week. We have too much to do and not enough time to do it. However, we are now on the cusp of a groundbreaking shift in generative AI that I believe will change the world—not to mention customer success—in much the way industrialization changed the face of America: by increasing our productivity and, ultimately, shortening our work week.
Back in the early 1900s, a large portion of Americans lived on farms, laboring manually for over 70 hours a week without electricity or power equipment. By the 1950s, the tractor had replaced the ox and, along with other mechanical equipment, provided three-quarters of the power needed out on the field. Beyond new equipment to augment productivity, scientific knowledge and technology improved methods of production, with iterations continuing today.
Just as technology once increased productivity on farms and brought the U.S. down to a 40-hour week, I believe AI is about to make tending to our customers a lot more manageable.
Nurturing Our Customers
To thrive today, businesses must retain and grow their customer base. That means it’s never been more important to nurture our customers so they can achieve their desired business outcomes and grow, no matter what is going on in the world. While composable customer success practices and technologies empower us to shift quickly in the face of change, AI brings new opportunities for companies to deliver amazing experiences and value—and do it at scale.
Especially when it comes to customer success, “scale” does not mean “without personalization.” Instead, it’s about information and intelligence at scale. By letting AI augment our work by helping us automate customer journeys, monitor customer health, recognize trends, friction and opportunities, and more, we give ourselves the bandwidth to get creative and strategic as we craft powerful and personalized automated practices.
With tools that automate the tilling of our customers or reduce the effort required to water them for growth, we have to again rethink the way we work. What does customer success with greatly increased productivity look like?
The Power Of Humans+Technology
If an AI assistant is integrated into the platform your teams use, that certainly doesn’t mean you should now water your customers ten times as often. Instead, your trusty assistant can help you determine the best cadence, even as it also helps you identify customers who need extra attention. It can provide your customer success managers (CSMs) with deeper insights on roadblocks, churn risk, or new opportunities by synthesizing a variety of data collected on a specific customer account—and then zoom out to see how that compares with trends or anomalies in your broader customer portfolio.
Perhaps most importantly, all this critical information is now easily accessible. Using a natural chat interface, team members no longer need time to fully ramp up and train in this new tool before they’re effective. They can, for example, simply ask the assistant how to surface the customer segments that have low health scores or a decrease in usage over the last 30 days, and take action from there.
Instead of watering customers ten times as much or drowning in data sources and spreadsheets, your teams can devote their interactions with customers to more strategic discussions and activities—so that customers are not only watered properly but also receive the specific nutrients they need to thrive.
Embracing This New Era
None of us wants to be disrupted; we want to be the disruptors who define the next generation of customer success. This is why I believe now is the time to invest in learning how to use AI responsibly and well.
Consider creating small, internal innovation pods dedicated to testing, experimenting, iterating and integrating AI into your systems. With agile mindsets and composable customer success technology, they can experiment with modular components or integrate wide-sweeping changes. Beyond exploring the benefits of AI internally, it’s also important to stay involved in the larger conversation by participating in discussions about how businesses can responsibly and safely use AI to augment their work.
As more businesses become familiar with AI and integrate it into their systems, I believe we will see an increase in margins due not only to getting more accomplished, but also to doing it all better. With more bandwidth to focus on customers, you can nurture them well and deliver the outcomes they need.
Whether you’re running a business or you’re one of the tens of thousands of tech workers affected by recent layoffs, now is not the time to sit on the sidelines. The next evolution is underway—are you ready to help lead the movement and shape the future of AI in customer success?
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