Unleashing the Power of AI in SaaS Customer Success: What you must know

Read Time:
minutes

Imagine a company that spends money on customer success initiatives. The customer success managers are doing their best too. But the customer churn rate is high. 

Customer turnover is a common problem for most industries, and SaaS is no different. Finding root causes and fixing them is challenging. 

But today, you can increase customer retention and boost revenue with AI tools. These tools can maximize customer success efforts. In this article, we will unearth how. 

What is customer success?

Source

According to conventional marketing theories, a happy client purchases the product without complaining. Understanding what customers want, without mentioning or complaining, measures customer success.

Customer success is your actions to ensure that your customers win in two key areas: using your products and running their businesses.

Taking charge of all sides of customer success is not easy. You need a skilled person or team to pave the way for the success of your consumers. 

Why should businesses care about customer success?

Source

According to the Gainsight 2022 Customer Success Index, 95% of B2B businesses now have a customer success section. In addition, 6% of sales is allocated by the typical SaaS business to customer success and customer success operations.

In recent times the subscription model has overtaken the bulk discount approach. Products in such a framework must show their worth at each contract renewal. Renewing depends on making customers realize the product's worth and success.

North Highland found 87% of corporate leaders now credit most of their success to great customer experiences.

Statistics reveal that for every customer who asks for help, another 25 silent ones have the same issue. Research also showed that 91% of consumers who don't complain still churn if a company doesn't address their concerns.

By addressing issues and meeting customer needs, customer success increases customer retention. When done right, it helps keep customers longer, encourages them to buy from you again, and increases ROI. 

How Does AI Improve the Customer Success Process?

As AI becomes increasingly widespread in customer success, companies who realize its benefits will have an advantage. Data analytics, machine learning, and customer success tools will transform and improve customer success.

⭐Onboarding

AI in customer success

Customers interact with customer success after the sales handoff during the onboarding process. Customer success teams handle account setup, data transfer, and personalized training and support. A smooth onboarding procedure is important to the product's success and users' happiness.

But traditional onboarding takes the time of customers and companies. Consumers spend several hours watching tutorial videos or reading through documentation. Creating and upgrading these kinds of materials is a time and cash drain for the business. Businesses provide the same guidance and resources regardless of the situation.

AI tools can help customer success solve traditional onboarding issues. So, customers no longer have to spend as much time reviewing manuals or watching tutorial videos. AI-powered chatbots can respond to questions in no time.

Again AI technologies create smooth, rapid client interactions more than a customer service manager (CSM ) can do on a typical day. AI-powered customer onboarding is flexible. It effortlessly fits the ever-changing and individualized demands of your diverse worldwide clients. If your company is from the United States, but you have an Asian consumer that requires onboarding out of hours, AI can help.

Userlane facilitates engaging onboarding for new users. Customers can get the most out of the product or service with the use of features like in-app chat, tooltips, and interactive walkthroughs.

🤩 Education and Training

Onboarding is the first step in gaining user acceptance of your product. And ongoing education is the most excellent approach to guide them to these undiscovered treasures. Customers are more likely to abandon if they no longer get any benefit from using your product. But, they could be missing out on the benefits your product provides. Education and training consumers regularly to show the value of your product and help them get the most out of it. According to Forrester, customer education increased retention by almost 7.4%. 

Old training and teaching process can be tedious and repetitive. This might prevent customers from mastering the service and reaching their goals. It takes a lot of work to measure resource efficacy. Customers need to get helpful feedback and insights in this process.

AI and ChatGPT can build dynamic and engaging training materials like chatbots or virtual assistants to help consumers through the training process. To better understand how consumers are utilizing the product and where they are having trouble, these tools offer data collection and analysis. This data enhances product and training quality. By making learning fun and accessible, AI and ChatGPT can boost consumer retention and comprehension.

To help users learn fast and efficiently, Qstream offers individualized, bite-sized instruction. Qstream is an AI-powered microlearning platform. Qstream follows neuroscience algorithms. More than 20 peer-reviewed clinical studies and years of use in the real world validated it. With AI, the platform tailors training to the user's requirements and offers feedback and reinforcement.

GPT-4's natural language processing and machine learning can assess customer data. Thus, it also produces high-quality training materials and provides real-time chatbot help. 

😊 Communicating Proactively

Successful communication with customers is an art. CSMs are responsible for managing their customers' expectations and engaging with them. Each customer is unique. The communication varies based on the stage of the customer lifecycle and their progress toward their goal.

But, keeping up with the latest information through email, phone, or SMS is challenging. Some issues are repetitive but are not severe. CSM wastes time on this.

Source

AI chatbots use current resources like FAQs or articles to respond to consumer inquiries. They adopt the tone and voice of the brand and can distinguish variations of the same inquiry.

Intercom is an AI-powered consumer communications platform. Intercom's chatbots answer a question using your source content when a consumer asks it. Intercom's Resolution Bot replies depending on what customers are typing - even before they touch the enter key.

GPT-4 can better grasp client needs and preferences than ChatGPT. Credits go to its superior natural language processing. Machine-learning algorithms provide individualized messages and suggestions for each client for better communication. GPT-4 can handle and analyze more customer data. 

✅ Data and Measurement

Measuring the many factors that either directly or indirectly affect customer satisfaction is a crucial part of the customer success component. Use metrics, goal metrics, and communication-based metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) are all examples. NPS reveals whether or not a client would recommend your business to others. Referrals are valuable to businesses because they provide quality leads cheaply. Still, the chance that a consumer would recommend your product or service also provides insight into the quality of their experience.

Another important measure is monthly recurring revenue, which reveals how much money clients spend regularly. Subscription-based businesses may benefit significantly from this measure. The value of a client over time is the final metric. The lifetime value of a client tells you how much money you can bank on from a single user of your product.

Clients can be divided into groups using AI based on their behavior, needs, and preferences. As a result, customer success teams can better serve each subset of customers and enhance their overall experience.  AI can discover customer success program strengths and weaknesses. AI may aid customer success teams in optimizing their programmes by evaluating data on key performance indicators (KPIs).

Mixpanel is an analytics platform driven by AI. It provides valuable insight into company customer behavior and engagement. It helps customer success teams boost customer satisfaction and retention through predictive analytics, segmentation, and retention analysis.

Chatgpt's machine learning algorithms analyze vast client data to improve customer success KPIs. It predicts demand and makes data-driven judgments. GPT-4 analyzes social media and user feedback to understand client needs better.

🤩 Recognize potential consumer exit points

Earlier, it was not possible to predict when a customer might leave. But AI and ChatGPT are helping businesses to do that. It tracks data about client activity and stores it in machine-learning programs. 

CSMs can learn about customers' preferences and tendencies by analyzing AI-generated data. Is there a disconnect between the product and the consumer? Have they waited so long to use the product after buying it? Customer success teams use this data to identify at-risk customers and prevent them from leaving. 

ChurnZero uses machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data. Then it provides insights into their behavior and needs. This tool allows businesses to predict customer needs and provide proactive support early. 

ChatGPT and GPT-4 use natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to check large volumes of customer data, such as customer care interactions and product use trends. So they discover customer churn indicators faster. They generate custom messages or offers in real-time to retain the customer.

👀 Customize experience 

A CSM's capabilities have limits. Be it exhaustion or the need for a social life. But artificial intelligence assistants are not. Rapid learning and constant improvement allow an AI system to adopt new responsibilities. AI learns to better serve customers with each encounter it has with them. 

By integrating ChatGPT into a website or app, businesses can tailor suggestions to each customer. ChatGPT improves the customer support experience by evaluating client data. So they recommend items and services that are most likely to pique the interest of each consumer. 

ChatGPT's machine-learning algorithm automates segmentation. So companies can send personalized messages to specific subsets of their client base. ChatGPT identifies who will most likely upgrade to a paid plan and communicates directly with them.

Planning to integrate AI into your customer success journey?

Do you want to utilize AI benefits in your current system? Ionio takes care of the grunt work so you can focus on your business. Ionio helps businesses like yours with AI product ideation and consultation.

Let's get on a call to unearth all the potential your business can have with AI!

Book an AI consultation

Looking to build AI solutions? Let's chat.

Schedule your consultation today - this not a sales call, feel free to come prepared with your technical queries.

You'll be meeting Rohan Sawant, the Founder.
 Company
Book a Call

Let us help you.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Behind the Blog 👀
Moumita Roy
Writer

Moumita Roy is a Content writer & has been working in SaaS and AI industry for the last 3 years. When she is not at her computer, you can find her hiking in the mountains, binge-reading fiction, or cuddling up with her fur baby. She shares her content marketing journey on LinkedIn.

Writing about customer success was like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube with one hand while juggling avocados. It had me questioning my sanity, but hey, I managed to untangle the mess [happy dance]!
Rohan Sawant
Editor

Rohan is the Founder & CEO of Ionio. I make everyone write all these nice articles... 🥵