5 digital Customer Success tactics that ChurnZero makes easy

You can’t build or scale a high-performing team if process gets in the way of productivity. Is your Customer Success (CS) team stuck in a copy-paste-repeat cycle? While the human aspect of CS will never fully disappear, automation can free your team of repetitive processes and customer engagements. When thoughtfully applied, automation makes digitized touchpoints and human touchpoints indistinguishable. Digital CS strategies can emulate the best parts of human-led interaction while compensating for its constraints: our inability to multi-task, be everywhere at the same time, and remember everything. Automation keeps the machine running—scheduling meetings, sending emails, and monitoring performance—so we have the headspace to be more creative in our thinking and consultative in our approach.

If you want to dip your toes into a digital approach for onboarding and beyond, here are five ways you can ease into automation with ChurnZero.

1. Be at your customer’s side with in-app communications.

Think back to the last time you received a positive acknowledgement from a friend, a team member, a boss, or even a friendly pedestrian. It felt good, right? Recognition and kudos go a long way and they cost nothing to give.

Imagine being able to personally recognize each one of your customers—in the moment and in your product—every time they complete a milestone or significant event. In-App Communications give you that power: to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right message, and when your customer is in the right mindset.

Compared to traditional outreach channels like email and phone, in-app communications is less intrusive: it displays directly in your application. When a customer sees a message while using your product, they’re already in the state of mind to engage with you. Whether it’s a welcome greeting for a first-time login or a quick congratulatory message for completing onboarding, it’s easy to make sure your customers’ efforts don’t go unnoticed.

Reassurance is an especially effective motivator when trying something new. Use in-app communications to offer positive reinforcement and additional support to new or stuck customers. Highlight a new feature tutorial or a knowledge base resource to guide customers to success.

Be sure to personalize your In-App Communications at scale using merge fields based on any data field in ChurnZero, such as customer name, CSM name, renewal date, user role, total contract value, usage data, and more.

2. Keep your customers on task with in-app checklists.

We all know the power of a good to-do list and the sweet satisfaction that comes with checking items off it. Use ChurnZero to turn your customer onboarding journey (or any journey created in ChurnZero) into an interactive checklist that displays directly in your application. Customers can tick off assigned tasks, such as watching a webinar or completing a training course.

In-app checklists prevent CSMs from having to continually remind customers of next steps or resend links that get lost in email. They put the onus on the customer by showing them exactly what they need to do to progress through the journey, without requiring one-on-one CSM consultations and outreach.

When a customer’s checklist tasks become overdue, you can automatically send a reminder to the customer using in-app communications to notify them of their outstanding items and next steps.

3. Create a dedicated space for collaboration and learning with Success Centers.

Don’t let information or CSM accessibility be barriers to your customers’ success. Use Success Centers to direct customers to resources that they’d otherwise need to contact you or dig through your knowledge base to find.

Success Centers are spaces that support the unique success paths of individual customers, and that centralize where CS teams communicate and collaborate. They live directly in your application, so customers never have to search beyond their account for the information they need.

You can configure Success Centers to show a customer’s important to-dos, announcements, FAQs, best practices, blog posts, upcoming conferences, account contact details, journey checklists, dashboards, NPS surveys, and more.

When different customer types in different journey phases require different support, you can customize Success Centers based on customer segment (e.g., digital versus high-touch) and lifecycle phase (e.g., onboarding versus adoption) to ensure your resources’ relevancy.

4. Guide customers from sign-up to success with WalkThroughs.

CSMs cannot serve as strategic advisors to your customers if they spend most of their time demoing product features. Empower customers to become self-sufficient learners and to focus on the features that drive the most value with WalkThroughs.

These in-app tutorials display in your product’s interface and guide customers through your application, step by step, without the need for human intervention. They integrate directly with ChurnZero, so you can tailor and target them based on account data (e.g., product type or annual contract value) and contact data (e.g., role type or usage behavior).

WalkThrough reporting helps you make sure that no customer falls behind in training. Track the status of each step within a Walkthrough including its start date, last date of action, and last step taken, as well as the number of times a customer views, completes, abandons, or clicks on a step. CSMs can then reach out to at-risk customers or set up additional automation to provide supplementary training resources and support.

5. Involve customers in their own adoption success with account insight reports.

As a ChurnZero user, you have a ton of customer insights at your disposal. You can see usage trends, engagement changes, support tickets, and more to monitor customer health. But how do your customers know where they need to improve if they don’t have this same data?

Creating routine progress reports for every customer isn’t scalable across an entire book of business. Account Insights enable you to build one dashboard template and apply it to a segment of accounts, such as customers who are on your enterprise plan or customers who have been with you for more than a year.

Customize the dashboard to show key account details and adoption data, including who from a customer’s team is using your application, how they’re using it (broken down by event types), and a contract snapshot with their renewal date, license count, and more. Customers can identify their own internal champions and those in need of additional help without having to ask their CSM for details and updates.

Give customers access to their real-time data by sharing the dashboard, which instantly creates a dynamic report so they can easily track their adoption and usage of your product. Automate the report distribution by setting it to send on a recurring cadence, e.g., every week or bi-monthly.

Lighten your CS team’s workload. Leave the legwork to automation.

Automation helps CS teams work smarter and scale. If your team spends their days having the same customer conversations, resending the same emails, retraining the same features, they’re not doing the job they were hired to do. It’s a disservice to the CSM, the customer, and the business to not use the CS team to its full potential. ChurnZero lets you automate away the monotony and focus on the strategic work that makes a meaningful difference.

Looking for more ways to get started with a digital CS strategy? Check out our roundup of the most common use cases where CS automation can lend an extra hand (or 20) in our blog, “12 quick and easy engagement automations for Customer Success.”