AI is transforming the day to day functions of so many roles especially within Customer Support and Success.
To help leaders in both departments keep up and stay ahead of best practices and takeaways, we hope that you agree: learning from peers is a great starting point. Until you’ve done it yourself, secondhand knowledge is the best way to review AI approaches and uncover how to drive adoption.
Ever the champion for educating CS teams Gainsight, in partnership with TheLoops AI, hosted a webinar to do just that: provide Success (and Support leaders) with real-world advice. This blog is a quick recap of our online session featuring the wisdom of Gainsight Customer Success leader Mike Maday, Genady Rashkovan, VP of Support at Tricentis, Somya Kapoor, CEO+Co-Founder of TheLoops AI and Remco De Vries also of Gainsight.
The webinar was aptly named Strategic CX In Action and the takeaways imply just that. How can you set up your Support and Success orgs to benefit from productivity gains, accurate, real-time contextualized customer data and all around process improvements and efficiencies which lead to NRR?
Read along to find out.
Why AI Is A Hot Topic In CX And Won’t Cool Off Anytime Soon
When you think about Customer Experience in B2B SaaS, two predominant teams come to mind: Customer Support and Customer Success.
In B2C, CX is often it’s own department, working alongside Support, Sales and even Marketing.
Historically, Customer Support and Customer Success teams have both been under constant pressure. There’s often overlap between each department needing to:
- Deliver exceptional experiences
- Proactively and reactively balance customer needs
- Manage essential customer data and details
- Work across siloed operations and systems of record
While the traditional methods of handling these functions were initially deployed as manual tasks, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI, has shown just how many processes are inefficient, and can now be overhauled.
Today, AI is more than an acronym. Depending on who you ask, AI means something different for Support, Success and your customers. In fact, when the panelists for the webinar were asked how they define AI for themselves, each had various definitions for what it means…starting with TheLoops Co-Founder and CEO Somya who shared unequivocally that AI means productivity gains.
How Else Is AI Defined When It Comes To Customer Support and Customer Success?
Genady’s definition of AI is that of strategic advisor and intelligence behind the scenes. He’s using it specifically through TheLoops AI to unify and contextualize Support data across systems such as ServiceNow, Slack, and Gainsight. TheLoops has helped Genady’s team with predictive case intelligence, AutoQA and prioritization of agent queues.
Genady’s a prime example of how various forms of AI for CX can help you:
- Build your roadmap
- Have a hierarchy that decides what to do with customer usage data, support data and even your sales data then,
- Aggregate and contextualize that data for your Support, Success, Product and Leadership teams
Watch his clip below where he elaborates further how AI is not just limited to chatbots.
Mike’s definition of AI differs. He defines AI as a coach that guides or tells CSM’s what they don’t know. It’s also available to make large data much more succinct and leverage this data to better complete customer health scores.
For Remco, AI in CX means summarizing notes and customer history. From his purview, the reduction of manual work helps CSM’s focus on building deeper relationships with customers instead of toiling away with admin work.
Predictive, Proactive, and Personalized: The Cornerstones of AI-Powered CS
There’s one way you may not think about AI for Success or Support yet…but after this blog and webinar, you will soon: proactive!
Genady and his team have been using TheLoops together with Gainsight to create proactive CX. Cases come in to ServiceNow, data from Salesforce is also brought into the AI engine then predictions are made on things such as customers and revenue at risk, alerts are set for Slack and all of this goes back into Gainsight for CSM’s to see and action on in real-time.
This new workflow, simplified for examples sake, highlights the importance of using AI to predict customer needs and address them before they escalate into issues. Why wait for churn or a QBR to hear a customer is not getting value from your software? There’s a better way to meet their needs now.
“Leveraging AI to analyze usage patterns, sentiment analysis beyond positive, negative, neutral, and other data points allows us to identify potential risks and opportunities for intervention, ensuring a proactive approach to customer success,” Genady shared.
As your customer volumes increase and your business grows, there is no scalable, sensible, manual way to have a pulse on which customers are obtaining value and those who aren’t even using your product. Some customers will never file a support ticket as time goes on, they’ll just abandon their adoption and usage then cancel when their contract is up.
Remco described this new approach towards CX and retention as a “crystal ball effect.” A crystal ball that helps you reach out and completely change the trajectory of your customer’s experience.
Proactive CX Isn’t Just for Your Customers. It Helps Unify Teams, too.
Mike went on to expand upon the benefits of this further.
“Disconnected departments hinder information sharing and impede effective customer support. AI can bridge these gaps, creating a unified view of the customer and enabling seamless collaboration across functions, ultimately leading to improved customer outcomes.”
Genady also echos, “Think about support or support case data as symptoms, right? Those symptoms can show me as a Support leader all the problems and the challenges of any function in the business.”
These very ‘symptoms’ are also essential for Success to know about right away, too. Here’s why: data from SaaS Capital’s SaaS Retention benchmark report shows that, “increasing NRR from the 90% to 100% range to the 100% to 110% range improves growth rate by 9 percentage points.” Their report goes on to say, “revenue retention is one of the most important metrics for ensuring medium- to long-term business health due to its compounding effect on growth.”
In the image above, Support insights contextualized by AI help make NRR a team sport. In this example, various customer interactions are being summarized through TheLoops AI in real-time then distributed to each team’s system of record with the proper context:
- Support uncovers a major incident
- Engineers pick up a product feature request or bug
- Customer Success obtains real-time detailed sentiment with a quick summary
The examples shown here and discussed in this webinar drive home how Support and Success teams can go far beyond the AI of chatbots and even Chat-GPT.
As we close this recap out, we’ll leave you with this. AI for CX is multi-faceted. It can help your business with NRR, minimizing churn, predicting escalations and also recuperating overhead being spent on inefficient, manual processes.
Eager to pick up some additional ideas and new ways of bringing Support insights to your Success or Product teams? Sign up for the full replay of ‘Strategic CX In Action’ here. You can also read our case study on Tricentis complete with KPI’s and what they deployed when here.
Did you know? TheLoops team will be at Gainsight Pulse. Stop by and see us at booth B7 if you’re St. Louis bound.
