6 Customer Success Automation Rules to Increase Renewals & Save Time

Customer success pros thrive when they can proactively build relationships with customers.

They burnout when the opposite is true—when they’re always reacting, too overburdened by administrative tasks to do something like randomly place a call to a top client to inform them of a new industry best practice.  

Unfortunately, overworked is the status quo for most CS teams. 

According to The Secret Lives of CSMs Report, 66% of the surveyed Customer Success Managers (CSMs) said they spend much of their working day on repetitive administrative processes, and 63% wish they had more time to put towards client engagement. 

Being solution-oriented, 72% of CSMs said there are aspects of their work they’d like to automate. 

In this article, you’ll learn the six 6 customer success automation rules and processes all CSMs should automate, as well as some tools for doing so.

Automate task reminders & communications

Customer success automation can be used to create task reminders that keep CSMs alert to—and involved in—the customer’s experience. 

This way, whenever a customer reaches a certain milestone or behaves in a certain way, they get a notification telling them what happened, and what to do next. 

For example, in your sales engagement platform, you could set up a reminder automation that automatically notifies you one week before a quarterly business review (QBR) with a client, so you can start preparing early. 

Taking it a step further, you could configure the software to send you a task along with that notification, as well as materials needed to complete the task, such as a templated email that you’ll personalize and send to the customer so they can start preparing for the QBR as well. 

Here are some other task reminders you might want to set up:

• Overdue invoices 
• Client onboarding meeting scheduled 
• Low feature usage
• Minimal email engagement 
• Free trial ending in a week
• Missing details to set up the customer’s account
• Upcoming renewals and check-ins

There may be some reminders that you feel might be better as automated follow-ups. Trigger-based communications that go to a contact without human intervention. 

For example, when an invoice is overdue, you might create a rule in your dedicated platform that makes it so an email is automatically sent to the client after a certain number of days past the invoice due date. 

For larger accounts and delicate situations, however, it’smart to keep the reminders internal, triggering your CSMs into action, so they can use their intimate knowledge of the account to take the best action. 

Quickly personalize customer outreach

CSMs have to send a lot of emails to customers, and all these emails must be personalized to the customer’s situation and business. Otherwise, the customer will feel like just another number.

The problem: crafting these messages from scratch every time is incredibly time-consuming, not to mention prone to human error. This is where customer success automation comes in to save time and reduce errors.

Client: “Thanks for the email, but it’s spelled Elaina, not Alana…” 

Oops! 

To save time without rushing, CSMs can create email templates for recurring scenarios. 

In a tool like Mixmax, you can add fields into the template that auto-populate with the recipient’s information, be it their first name, date of renewal, or current product package.

For example, here’s a templated email in Mixmax for onboarding new customers. 

Thanks to the integration with DocuSign, the task and templated email go out automatically to the CSM account owner when the customer signs the contract:

Other scenarios ripe for templated emails include:

• Sales handing off accounts to CSMs
• Scheduling QBR or recurring check-in meetings 
• Sending product training documents and tutorials to new customers
• Scheduling meetings to discuss upcoming renewals 

Templates aren’t the only way to personalize client communications and improve response rates. Artificial intelligence can help, too.

That’s likely one of the reasons why 66% of CTOs and CIOs in a Bain survey stated that using AI for customer success is a top priority. 

For example, Mixmax users can leverage AI Smart Send to identify dates/times when their customers are most active in their inboxes. This increases the likelihood your messages are read and replied to. 

Going forward, consider adopting more machine learning tools like this that can automatically analyze data about your customers to help you identify their interests, needs, and behavior, so you can interact with them in a more personalized manner.    

Standardize the onboarding and renewal processes

Customer success teams often set up automated workflows in their customer engagement platforms to provide CSMs with a series of steps, templated communications, and action items to achieve a certain goal. 

This way, CSMs know exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to perform the action. 

Workflow automation is especially useful for recurring critical scenarios like onboarding and renewals, where customer success automation ensures consistency and helps avoid errors.

Here’s an example of an automated renewal sequence in Mixmax that was automatically triggered due to an upcoming renewal date: 

Now all the CSM has to do is click send on the email template to get things rolling. 

The recipient’s response to the embedded poll in the email will then determine and trigger an action item to the CSM. 

(Btw, you set these rules up in the system so it aligns with your process). 

In this example, if the customer answers No, Mixmax will tell the rep to add the client to “Renewal for Q4”, a sequence designed to automate the renewal process. 

If the client clicks Yes, Mixmax would auto-send the CSM a templated email for scheduling a renewal meeting, which, like the last email, they can send as. 

With the Sequences feature, the CSM doesn't have to think about what to do next. They know exactly what to do and can focus on execution according to your company’s best practices that you’ve hardwired into the workflow. 

Track customer engagement 

As a CSM, it’s critical that you monitor how customers are engaging with your outreach because it can inform you about what actions you should take to save or grow the account. 

Low engagement in your new feature emails, for instance, can be a sign of product apathy. Spotting this early can help you relight the fire before it’s too late and the customer churns. 

Therefore, invest in email tools that offer email tracking and analytics, thus automating client engagement monitoring. 

A tool like Mixmax will even crunch the numbers and give each customer an engagement score:

With this intel, you can focus your energy wisely. 

Customers with consistently low open, click, and reply rates might need a bit more attention from your team. Meanwhile, you can focus on upselling highly engaged customers. 

On a larger scale, email analytics help you fine-tune your email templates. 

For example, you might notice that a certain email subject line that you tried out in your last batch of onboarding emails had a higher click rate than previous subject lines. 

Now you can change the subject line of the template and share this new and improved template with team members so they also reap the benefits of your discovery. 

Lastly, in a tool like Mixmax, you can also set up automated alerts that update you on customer activity in real-time. 

These immediate glimpses into the behavior of your customers help you act quickly.

For example, if you see that a customer downloaded the report you sent them, you can shoot them an email asking them what they thought of the report, thus nurturing the relationship.

Easily schedule meetings (& take notes)  

Sending proposed dates and times back and forth with customers is a waste of time, not to mention a mood killer. 

A customer who started out excited about the QBR meeting might, by the third scheduling email, give up on it entirely. 

Customer success managers can make scheduling a breeze with a one-click meeting scheduler that allows you to insert your availability into any email with clickable dates and times.

The customer can then simply click on the time slot that works for them. 

And if you’re coordinating with a large group, you can share multiple meeting times and have attendees vote on the time that works best for them.

Many customer engagement platforms also help you reduce no-shows via auto-reminder emails that go out to meeting attendees a specified number of hours before the meeting.

But customer success automation doesn’t have to stop helping when the meeting starts. 

When talking with customers, you can use an AI-powered meeting assistant like Fireflies.ai to create automatic meeting notes, summaries, and transcriptions. 

That way, you can give your customers your total attention and make the conversation flow more naturally—without those random pauses and abrupt clacks on the keyboard that accompany manual note-taking. 

Smooth sales to customer success hand-offs 

The hand-off from sales to the customer success rep is typically a buyer’s first experience as a customer of your brand. 

First impressions matter. They set expectations about how you’ll treat them going forward. Therefore, you want this to go smoothly and to make the customer feel taken care of right from the get-go. 

But sometimes there’s a disconnect between customer success and sales. Sometimes sales will forget to loop in the agent, and at times the customer success rep (yes, sales isn’t always the bad guy…) will forget to reach out to the next customer. 

Rather than cared for, the customer feels neglected and confused, like a lost duckling. 

By automating the hand-off with onboarding workflows, internal notifications, and templated emails—which trigger when a deal is marked Closed/Won in your CRM—your customers automatically receive introduction emails from their new CS rep. 

Never again will you have to have that awkward encounter with the sales rep who closed the deal where they ask “how’s onboarding that new client we signed last week?” and you say, “huh?” 

Bottom line: Automating customer success tasks 

To consistently turn customers into brand advocates and power users, your customer success team needs to provide ongoing support, guidance, and expert insight into how to best use your solution. 

But these critical functions produce a lot of administrative overhead, from sending follow-up emails and scheduling meetings to managing multi-step processes like onboarding or renewals. 

Mixmax’s customer success automation features handle that overhead for you.

With renewal workflows, automated email sequences, one-click schedulers, embedded polls, and other automation features, you can focus more of your time on tasks that directly grow relationships and expand revenue. 

Meanwhile, your customer feels like they’re at a 5-star restaurant, impressed and satisfied.