Using digital customer success internally to enable your CSMs

Think fast – what’s the first thing that pops into your head when I say digital customer success? I’m willing to bet that you just conjured images of automated customer-facing communications. Regardless of any positive, negative, or indifferent emotions the term triggers for you, it’s likely where your thoughts jumped to first.

That’s an absolutely fair and logical thought pattern. Digital CS is most often focused in exactly that direction, automating messaging that helps you more effectively and efficiently communicate with your customers. 

But right now, I want to turn instead to one of the most underutilized benefits of this customer success practice: using digital customer success internally to enable your CSMs. 

Think about all the moments throughout your career when you’ve thought to yourself, “damn, if only I had known <blank> about that customer!” Or the times you’ve been up to your eyeballs in busywork, and wished desperately that someone (or something) could take some of it off your plate. 

I’m not going to tell you that some AI CS robot can come and do all your work for you. Maybe artificial intelligence will get there someday, but that’s not the current reality. As it stands, AI can be excellent at researching and analyzing, and is fast approaching competency in predicting, so it can be a powerful tool in your toolkit. 

What automation and digital can do from an internal perspective is keep you better informed on what’s happening with your accounts, better prepared for the meetings on your calendar, and perhaps my favorite, significantly reduce the number of times you have to copy and paste the same email to your entire book of business. 

Let’s walk through some examples. 

1: Use digital customer success to keep CSMs informed.

We all want to be more informed about what’s happening in our accounts. Whether it’s throwing up red flags that indicate churn risk or bringing expansion opportunities to the surface, I don’t know a single CS professional who would say they don’t want to hear about what their customers are doing and what it might mean.

But many CSMs are simply not equipped to to identify those things. To uncover them, they’d have to manually search through databases of usage data and account metrics. When just 40% of CSMs say their schedule and workload is realistic, there simply isn’t time in their day for that kind of manual work for each and every account. 

Instead, by setting up automated notifications and alerts, CSMs can identify critical activity (or lack thereof) happening with their customers in real time. 

CSMs should receive an alert whenever a “red flag” situation pops up with one of their customers, so that a save play can be enacted as quickly as possible. Some of the most common examples of this type of alert include:  

• When a customer hasn’t logged in for x number of days or usage drops by y percent.
• When a customer’s health score drops from green to yellow or yellow to red.
• When a customer has submitted more than x number of support tickets in y period of time.
• When a key stakeholder (like your champion, admin, and/or financial buyer) leaves the customer. 

On the flipside, automated notifications should also be set up for positive customer activities. Using these when usage or engagement rises to super-user status can help to identify both expansion opportunities and potential case studies or referenceable clients. Depending on the structure of your team, it may make sense for these alerts to go to CSMs, or to someone with a title like Digital Customer Success Program Manager, or both. These can be triggered from factors such as:

• A significant increase in product usage, including time spent in product or number of features utilized.
• Frequent usage of a known “sticky” product feature.
• High engagement with your community or customer advisory board (CAB).
• Repeated extremely positive survey feedback from multiple stakeholders.

 

2: Simplify your CSMs’ schedules and meeting prep.

Using automation to help manage your calendar requires a low level of investment from both a financial and time perspective, and has a huge payoff when it comes to repetitive manual  tasks and time savings. There are three distinct components to this category of internal automation. Each can make an impact individually, but when used in combination, they can be extremely powerful.

1: Scheduling software: Setting up each CSM with automated scheduling software like Calendly or HubSpot Meetings can be a huge time saver for CSMs (and bonus – time saver for their customers as well). Scheduling meetings manually via email may sound like a trivial thing, but you may be surprised just how much time is wasted going back and forth, confirming availability, and playing the game of calendar Tetris. 

2: Schedule reminders: Automated, time-bound reminders can keep CSMs on track with your ideal customer journey. Consider alerts when it’s time to schedule their next executive business review (EBR) or when they should start prepping for renewal conversations

3: Meeting prep: Pulling all your previous notes together to prep for a call can get messy; tracking down old emails and searching through notes in your CRM and Google docs just takes way too long. By keeping all your notes in your CS platform, they’re centrally located and easy to find and reference. You can take this to the next level with a conversation intelligence tool like Gong or Chorus to record and recap your customer conversations automatically, and ChurnZero’s native Customer Briefs feature, which uses AI to generate detailed summaries of any account’s history in seconds. 

3: Reduce copy and paste with repeatable, digital templates.

As a CSM, writing an email and then copying and pasting that same email to your entire book of business is quite possibly the most annoying time suck of them all. I know this crosses over from exclusively internal to customer-facing, but it’s worth including because it’s just that important. Your CSMs need email templates. They needed them yesterday. Ideally these are programmed into your CS platform, ready for CSMs to customize, or simply click send. But even if version one still includes some level of copy and paste, go create those templates!

Not using automation for an internal audience is one of the biggest missed opportunities companies make when rolling out a digital customer success program. Don’t get hung up on the idea that digital CS is only about automating customer-facing messaging and miss out on the power it has to streamline internal processes and get information to the people that need it faster.

Marley Wagner is a freelance Digital Customer Success Consultant and Fractional Chief Marketing Officer. Her work centers on helping B2B tech companies increase revenue and accelerate growth with both prospective and existing clients through organic channels that emphasize brand reputation and trust.