How four customer success managers use AI to improve outcomes

According to a report from Gainsight, 52% of customer success (CS) organizations are using AI in some capacity to address job functions like retention, training, or churn. That number is only anticipated to grow, as more CS leads jump on the AI bandwagon.

AI can aid customer success leads in myriad ways, ranging from drafting emails to identifying at-risk clients. Revenue Brew spoke with four customer success leaders across various industries to see how AI is helping their processes and improving their outcomes.

Know thy prompt

Mary Migiano, head of customer success at employee stipends platform Compt.io, uses AI for documentation, email templates, and building out processes. She cited Confluence as one platform her team uses, and explained the key to getting the most out of AI tools is knowing how to interact with them.

“What I have learned about AI is it’s really about how you prompt it,” she said. “Once you get really effective at what prompts and questions you’re asking it, it makes such a difference. People that I talk to day to day, one of the biggest things is they’re like, ‘what are you prompting it with? Why did you even think about typing that into it?’ What I say is just talk to it like it’s a person. You’d be so incredibly surprised if you just interact with it like a person—how much valuable information you’ll get from it in that way.”

She also stressed knowing when not to use AI, especially in a client-facing role that requires some level of human interaction.

Automate this, automate that

David Graham, SVP of customer success at Intuit, explained that at the financial technology platform, AI is used to improve automation for its employees and customers through its proprietary operating system, GenOS. The system helps Intuit’s customer success team access to customer data faster, which he said has helped them serve two and a half as many customers.

“We’ve been able to find significant value in what we’re calling, ‘done for you experiences,’” Graham said. “What that really means is where we’ve been able to automate tasks, end-to-end workflows and more in the last couple of years, entire functions with a view that we’re building and using AI to be able to connect our customers directly to more than 12,000 of our AI-enabled human experts. That’s the philosophy and the overarching strategy.”

Create to connect

At AI video generation platform HeyGen, enterprise account manager Joy Chen uses the company’s product to connect with clients and better understand the platform.

“For HeyGen, we help people create their realistic avatar,” she said. “For us, we also have our own avatar, so I can use my avatar to generate a video message to welcome the customer. Also, we can use the avatars to generate an onboarding tutorial to build up this kind of personal touch.”

Chen explained that using HeyGen to create tutorials and onboarding videos helps create a more personalized interaction with clients. It’s also helped her stay up-to-date with HeyGen’s latest features so she can continuously train her clients and make sure they have all the information they need.

Identify and plan

For Allison Carroll, chief customer officer at revenue management platform Clari, one of the biggest benefits AI has provided is real-time insights into how customers are doing. Carroll’s team uses QuadSci, an AI analytics tool, which has helped her team predict with 90% accuracy within six months of an event if a customer was going to grow or churn.

“We were able to determine what were the two biggest drivers for growth in our customer base and what were the two biggest drivers for retention in our customer base,” she said. “We took those two drivers and we turned them into plays for the year. We turned them into key initiatives.”

With QuadSci and Clari’s other AI tools, Carroll’s team is able to quickly identify customer pain points and create a plan to address the issues. She explained the tools have helped her team’s productivity, which in turn makes them faster to react.

“That allows us to either be super fast in reacting to it or even be proactive—to get ahead of it before it becomes an escalation, and therefore, you can retain the account,” she said. “You can make sure you turn them from maybe a detractor to being happy and then you can say, ‘what’s the next best product they might have?’ They may be over their number of licenses, so they may be using more than they’re actually at a tier for, which means there’s an opportunity for expansion.”