How to Scale Customer Success with Automated Touchpoints

Customer Support is a massively untapped resource.  

Just because you’re behind the scenes in a support role doesn’t mean you don’t impact revenue. Retention is now the easiest way to accelerate growth.

If you improve customer retention by 5%, you’ll see an increase in profits of 25%. 25% by building a long-lasting relationship with your customers!  

Why is NRR so critical? Take a look at this trend:

• 100-110% NRR: Growth rate of 35%
• 110-120% NRR: Growth rate jumps to 40%!
• 120-130% NRR: Growth rate climbs to 49%!
• Above 130% NRR: Wow, a 70% growth rate!

It’s pretty apparent Customer Support is a dark horse when you lay it out like that, but only if you can do it at scale.

Depending on how many customers they’re juggling, your Customer Success reps can get anywhere from 26 to 2 hours of “face-to-face” time with one account per year. 

2 hours a year? How are you supposed to establish a relationship in that time? That’s where demo automation can help. Not only can you create a smoother experience for your customers, it will be personalized for their individual needs.

How to Automate Experiences

We understand that Customer Success doesn’t deliver demos; they share experiences with their customers, but that doesn’t mean your customers wouldn’t benefit from having some of those enablement sessions automated.

And we really mean only some. 

Like we say about live demos, you’ll never be able to automate every part of customer experiences, nor should you! Having live interactions with your customers is how you build those strong relationships.

What we’re suggesting is supplementing the experiences you have with customers using product walkthrough software to provide a personalized asset that’s available 24/7.

Onboarding 

The onboarding experience will make or break the relationship with your customers. Now that the ink is dry on the contract, feelings of apprehension and remorse can start creeping in. Your customers have made a substantial financial decision, and now it’s time to see if you’ll deliver on all those promises sales made.

Providing personalized videos assures your customers that they made the right choice in trusting your organization, and you won’t abandon them during the implementation process.  

Types of Automated Enablement Sessions to Include with Onboarding:

1. Personalized Welcome Video. An authentic video where you address the champion by name and thank them for putting their trust in your business. Share your excitement for the possibilities ahead and briefly cover next steps. This video should be no longer than 2 minutes to respect your customer’s time.
2. Onboarding Overview Video. Provide a roadmap for the onboarding process. Again, be excited and enthusiastic and provide insight into upcoming implementation stages, applicable use cases, goals, and additional resources. This video should be 5 minutes or less since it’s only an intro, not the whole onboarding experience. Encourage key players to share this enablement session with everyone involved with onboarding.  
3. Migration or Integration Walkthroughs. Kickstart the larger lifts by covering the basics of migrating from one system to another or integrating your system with their existing platforms like email providers and CRM. There’s no set time for this experience because that will depend on the customer’s needs, but be authentic and don’t shy away from the challenging topics. This is where you can assure your customer you will be a team.

On-Demand Support

This is the best way to give every customer white glove treatment without putting lots of extra strain on yourself. Automated demos to provide on-demand support allows customers to solve their issues anytime and get your face in front of your clients without requiring hours of live interactions.

1. In-App Training Experiences. Provide easy-to-access training materials. The length for these will vary depending on the topic, but keep the length down by focusing on one feature at a time. These are especially effective if you pair them with interactive product tours to provide a hands-on walkthrough in addition to video. 
2. Knowledge Based Videos. Transform your most important written Knowledge Base articles into videos. This gives people options for how they want to consume content about your product.  

Customer Growth and Adoption

The best way to make your product “sticky” is to make it widely adopted. Customers are way more likely to adopt a product if they understand the core principles of how it works. This is another excellent opportunity to create a good customer relationship by providing guidance during a turbulent change.

1. Enablement “Warm-up” Videos. Before live training sessions, send an abbreviated version of what you’ll cover, including relevant documentation and training materials. This gives customers a chance to prepare before the event and gives you insights into which topics to spend extra time on.
2. Answering Emails with Video. Give your customers a personalized experience while answering their questions. These videos should be around 2 to 5 minutes, depending on the depth of information needed to answer the question. To save time, keep a repository of FAQs for quick responses.    

Renewals and Beyond

Just because a customer has signed a deal with you doesn’t mean their buyer journey is over. When it comes time for renewal, you must be prepared to enable stakeholders like your sales team did for the initial deal. That means knowing who is in the renewal group, whose approval is required to get a renewal signed, and what documentation secondary stakeholders need.

1. Renewal Overview Video. Provide your business case showing accomplishments and ROI based on customer stats. Ensure you include goals, usage metrics, success stories, ROI calculations, upcoming renewal costs, and a current contract review (or a new contract if there are changes). Include a copy of the contract so they can review it themselves. Try to keep the video around 5 minutes.
2. Security, Privacy, and GDPR. More and more renewals require a “Security Refresh” to complete the transitions. Having all the information attached to a video walking through the content will speed up the process. Encourage stakeholders to share this with the proper teams to get the ball rolling. This is another video that should only be 5 minutes long. 

Get the Most Out of Your Day

Customer Support can be a powerful growth engine if properly enabled. With renewals becoming a significant portion of revenue, investing in time-saving technology will benefit both Customer Success reps and customers. 

Demo automation lets Customer Success be proactive in how they interact with customers. Now, they can have automated experiences that make onboarding smoother, encourage wider adoption, and provide faster and more transparent renewals. Want to see what else demo automation can do for your organization? Check out our extensive resource center, view a webinar, or even watch your own demo on demand.