At first glance, using AI for customer success (CS) might seem like a bad idea.
After all, successful customer success is about building personal relationships with customers, and automation has a tendency to remove personality and warmth from client interactions.
But, smart customer success teams aren’t outsourcing their nuanced conversations to AI-powered chatbots.
Instead, they’re using AI tools to automate routine tasks and uncover customer insights so they can spend more time having high-quality conversations with buyers.
Today, you’ll learn five ways to integrate AI into your CS workflows to boost productivity, improve renewal rates, and enhance the overall customer experience — all while keeping your CS strategy human-centric.
Why use AI for customer success?
AI software tools and generative AI are becoming popular productivity boosters for CS teams.
In fact, a 2024 survey of Customer Success professionals found that 52% of CS teams are already using artificial intelligence in some shape or form.
The majority of respondents are using AI tools for tactical rather than strategic purposes — e.g., writing faster emails vs. using AI-powered data analysis to inform CS goals.
Going forward, however, AI will become a more popular tool for big-picture decision-making, providing CS teams with data-driven insights that guide the creation of effective onboarding, expansion, and save strategies.
In fact, in the same report, CSMs predicted that AI’s greatest impact will be on product engagement and customer onboarding:
When it comes to automation, Customer Success pros think AI will be most helpful for data analysis tasks:
- Pre-call customer research
- At-risk customer identification
- Deeper insight into customer preferences
- Customer journey mapping
Stronger analysis means a deeper understanding of your customers, which enables you to conduct more personalized outreach, upsell recommendations, and strategic advice (because the best CS managers act as trusted advisors).
Overall, AI helps customer success teams do more with less.
Mark Higginson, Chief of Customer Success at ScreenSteps, agrees:
“By automating routine tasks and providing data insights, AI allows our team to focus on higher-value activities, which helps us in achieving our customer success goals without burnout.” — Mark Higginson, State of Customer Success Report
5 ways to use AI for customer success
Below are five ways CS teams can boost productivity and performance with artificial intelligence.
1. Improve customer onboarding and training
Every kid learns to ride a bike differently. Some hop on and ride off with little help at all. Others need a lot of encouragement, instruction, and steadying.
The same can be said for your newly acquired customers.
The difference is that clients don’t scream, wobble, and tell you what’s bothering them. They just truck on and then complain later, writing on review sites that your company’s onboarding process is weak.
That’s where AI comes into play.
Customer success leaders can use it to better understand customer needs and provide more personalized onboarding experiences that deliver the right educational content for them.
Here are some ways to incorporate AI into your onboarding process:
- Analyze welcome email and onboarding survey responses to get a better sense of how much hand-holding the customer will need.
- Embed AI chatbots into apps and platforms so customers can ask questions about features and receive personalized guidance.
- Use machine learning to better understand product usage patterns so you can spot teaching and training opportunities.
- Measure the sentiment of customer answers to open-ended questions about their onboarding experience.
- Leverage AI-powered translation tools to provide onboarding in the customer’s native language.
- Create quality training videos with AI video generation platforms like Synthesia (without actors, cameras, or lighting).
By using these AI-forward techniques to personalize onboarding, your CS team will generate higher usage rates and less churn.
2. Automate simple customer support issues
According to the State of Customer Success Report, over 45% of CSM teams handle some or all of the company’s inbound customer inquiries.
That’s far too high a number — CSMs have better things to do than help customers recover lost passwords.
To lighten the load, consider building an AI-powered support chatbot that understands natural language.
That way, customers can get personalized answers to simple questions about billing and technical issues, without inconveniencing their CSM.
You can connect these chatbots to your company’s knowledge base so they can recommend tutorials and guides that solve the customer’s issue.
How do you build these bad boys?
Most customer service software tools now offer the ability to build custom AI chatbots.
For example, Salesforce offers Agentforce, which allows you to build AI agents in minutes using templates. You can even use generative AI to define the role of the chatbot:
With AI taking over basic inquiries, CSMs will have more time to focus on proactively building relationships with clients, developing account expansion strategies, and more.
Learn the six customer success automation rules that boost renewals.
3. Identify at-risk customers
AI has the potential to identify at-risk customers so you can swoop in and save them before it’s too late.
It does this by analyzing large amounts of customer data:
- Purchase history
- Product usage
- Feedback and survey results
- Email engagement levels
How do you set this up?
Churn prediction software is your best bet.
Akkio, for instance, automatically detects customer patterns that indicate an account is likely to churn. It can even spot when new customers might need extra onboarding support.
The machine learning algorithm bases its predictions on behavioral data, transaction history, customer demographics, engagement levels, and more. Users can upload this data from their CRM or other data sources, and Akkio will automatically clean and analyze it.
Now, if you’re a seasoned CS pro, your gut is still a strong indicator that an account has gone sour.
But these machine learning algorithms can interpret online behavior about as well as you can read into the facial expressions of an old client.
And with customer activity happening increasingly online, it’s best to have both prediction methods in your repertoire.
P.S. You can learn more about machine learning in sales here.
4. Form stronger relationships through more informed conversation
AI robots won’t be taking CSM positions anytime soon. Genuine trust is built on human conversation.
Cristy Rahman, Customer Success Specialist, makes this very clear:
“Good customer success involves knowing your clients at a personal level by disarming them and letting them lean on you to share more than they would with anyone else… all things that cannot be replaced by AI…” — Cristy Rahman, State of Customer Success Report
While CSMs shouldn’t have AI tools speak to clients for them, they should use these tools to better understand the businesses and industries they serve.
Because when you know your buyer’s situation, you can ask pointed questions and provide informed insights, which lead to conversations that make the client go “wow, they know their stuff. I like talking to them. I always learn something new.”
A simple way to use AI to become a better conversationalist is with Chat-GPT.
Before a client meeting or conference, ask the chatbot various questions about your industry (aka market research) that will prepare you for deep conversation:
- What are some recent trends and shifts in [industry]?
- My client is a [company type]. What are some problems they might be having in [year]?
- Who are the major competitors in this industry, and what differentiates them?
- What does the future of this industry look like in the next 3-5 years?
Let’s take an example.
Say you’re a CSM for a proptech company and you have a meeting with the new VP of Facilities Management for a warehousing company. Your old contact unfortunately left the company, and now you have to prove your expertise all over again.
To refresh your memory, you might ask Chat-GPT the following:
Prompt: “What are some of the biggest challenges warehousing companies have been facing over the last few years?”
After reading through these ten categories of challenges, select a few to ask about in conversation — “How have you been handling the [challenge]?” (it’s best to ask about a challenge that an upsell or cross-sell could solve).
In sum, AI chatbots like Chat-GPT are great for streamlining industry research so you can easily learn industry trends to have more interesting conversations with customers.
5. Personalize customer engagement
Whether it’s a pitch for an upsell or a simple check-in message, CSMs can use an AI-powered sales engagement platform to write more personalized engagement emails.
Mixmax, for example, offers an AI writing assistant called AI Compose. By feeding it text prompts, CSMs can generate high-quality email content and subject lines in seconds.
Mixmax also offers AI Smart Send, which uses machine learning to identify the best times to send emails to customers. The result? Higher open rates and better engagement.
Further, CSMs can use the AI sequence builder to generate multi-channel outreach sequences that align with specific customer success goals.
Simply submit details about your sequence’s target customer segment and your value proposition and voila — you’ve created a multichannel campaign with targeted emails that your success team can use to promote new products, re-engage customers, and facilitate renewals.
Check out Mixmax for customer success
Is your customer success team spending enough time engaging with customers?
Mixmax is an easy-to-use, AI-powered sales engagement platform for your entire revenue department, from SDRs to customer success reps.
It helps you reach your customers in a personalized manner via automated multichannel sequences, AI email generation, and more.
Sign up for a free trial below to learn how Mixmax can help your CS team do more with less ⬇️
