New Trends in Customer Success You Need to Know About

Keeping up with new trends in customer success can help you promote repeat business and prevent customer churn. Here are four of the latest trends you need to know about:

• Automating customer success with out-of-the-box templates
• Incorporating artificial intelligence for smarter success solutions
• Optimizing customer experience with personalization
• Reducing customer churn by detecting risk 

Read on to learn how these important new trends in customer success can help you retain more customers.

Automate Customer Success with Out-of-the-box Templates

One of the most exciting new trends in customer success is the emergence of out-of-the-box solutions that allow you to automate the implementation of optimized customer journey maps. This technology provides you with pre-designed templates for each stage of your customer journey, from lead acquisition to retention.

Out-of-the-box templates automate the process of defining measurable customer goals, establishing key performance indicators, promoting best practices and tracking performance. This makes it easy for you to guide your customers smoothly from one stage of their journey to the next, or to intervene proactively when a customer encounters a snag on their journey. You can promote best practices for each stage of the customer life cycle, and you can set up automated procedures for intervening when customers are at risk of churn. Implementing this type of technology throughout your organization can help your brand become more customer-centric, delivering customer success and promoting higher satisfaction and retention.

The Totango Spark platform incorporates this innovative strategy into modular SuccessBLOCs. You can choose SuccessBLOCs corresponding to different stages of your customer journey. For example, there are different modules designed to promote digital onboarding, encourage adoption and reduce churn risk. SuccessBLOCs are like potato chips or popcorn, you won’t be able to stop with just one! Choose the modules that meet your current needs, and scale up by adding new modules as a need emerges.

Incorporate AI for Smarter Success Solutions

Another of the most important new trends in customer success is the application of big data analytics methods powered by artificial intelligence. AI works by spotting trends in large amounts of data which would be invisible to the naked eye when viewed manually. Utilizing AI helps eliminate overly complicated excel sheets and data being cobbled together from multiple sources. Once identified and analyzed, such trends can be used to extrapolate to future scenarios and make adjustments to bring about desired outcomes. Applied to business intelligence, AI has transformed every area of business automation, including customer success management providing a true 360-degree view of the customer. 

AI supports customer success management by helping you align trends in your customer data with outcomes desired by your customers. To achieve this, AI taps into the Internet of Things to review customer data collected from all your communication channels. You can feed in data from any channel you use to communicate with customers, including live chat, text messaging, email, and phone calls. By storing these data streams in a centralized customer relationship management database, you provide your AI tool with a complete 360-degree view of your interactions with your customer.

The data you collect can be categorized in terms of key performance indicators that reflect customer success levels. For instance, you can track Net Promoter Score (NPS) to find out how likely customers are to recommend your brand to family and friends. You can then group scores into scorecard ranges which tell you at a glance how healthy a customer account is and how well your customer is progressing towards the desired outcome for that stage in their journey.

Using this method of data classification, you can spot variables that correlate with high customer satisfaction. This helps you determine which steps to take to promote satisfying experiences, and you can define triggers that automatically orchestrate these actions at the appropriate point in the customer’s journey whether it be human, digital, or both. AI transforms customer success into a step-by-step procedure you can replicate and scale.

Optimize Customer Experience with Personalization

Another way AI promotes customer success management is empowering organizations to deliver customers more personalized experiences based on their individual data. Using AI to track key performance indicators allows you to segment customers based on where their score falls within a designated range.

For instance, customers who have not completed the onboarding process might fall into a different range than those who have. Alternately, the process might be subdivided into stages to create a more detailed view of customer progress. You can then create and automate procedures for prompting customers who need to complete different stages of the onboarding process. For example, if a customer has not activated their account within 24 hours of purchase, an automated reminder can be sent to them.

You can implement this type of personalization at every stage in your customer journey map. This helps you optimize the experience of each individual customer based on their current progress in their journey.

Reduce Customer Churn by Detecting Risk

AI can also help you improve customer retention by automating the detection of churn risk warning signs. Using Totango’s Detect Risk SuccessBLOC, you gain instant visibility into customer signals and critical events that detect a customer is about to churn. You can then segment customers who are at risk of churning and take actions to promote retention.

For instance, you might notice that customers who have not actively used their account over the last six months have a churn rate twice as high as those who have. You can set up an automated procedure to flag accounts in this category and send out notifications encouraging account reactivation. This can help you retain a percentage of customers who may have otherwise churned without the additional effort of manual outreach to communicate the value of your product.

You can set up similar procedures to reduce churn for customers who have not completed onboarding or who have experienced customer service issues. Use your customer journey map in conjunction with AI data trend analysis to identify points in your customers’ experience where you can take actions to reduce churn. Then set up your system to automatically detect churn risk and implement corrective procedures.

Leverage New Trends in Customer Success to Keep More Customers

Keeping up with new trends in customer success gives you a cutting-edge advantage over the competition when it comes to keeping customers. Out-of-the-box templates, artificial intelligence, personalization, and proactive customer service can help you minimize churn and maximize retention. Leverage these technologies to improve your customer success management and promote repeat business.

Totango provides state-of-the-art customer success solutions that let you automate any customer journey easily at whatever scale you need. Register for a live demo or sign up to try it for free and see for yourself how we can help you can promote your customers’ success.