The Next Frontier for Bots: Customer Success

Bots Will Help Glean New Insights From Customer Data

Today, companies sit on volumes of data about customers that are internal and external to their systems, but they struggle to connect the dots and act in a timely manner. Let’s take a simple example: A positive response to a survey by a senior person in a customer account, just as a contract is up for renewal, may portend an upsell opportunity that needs to be capitalized upon as soon as possible. As you can see in this instance, there are multiple dots (“positive response,” “senior person,” “contract renewal”) that are relevant to different actors (customer success, sales), and therefore are likely to be missed. Bots will be critical to helping companies get better at predicting and acting on such future events seamlessly based on current data.

Bots Will Make CS Professionals Proactive

As companies look for ways to differentiate themselves in their customer experience, they will need to become proactive in their customer outreach. If there are parts of a product not being used, point users toward training material that explains how to quickly garner the benefits of using those features. If there’s a contract coming up for renewal, analyze product usage, support ticket volume, and survey sentiment to identify the right time to open the conversation with the customer.

Being proactive has another interesting dimension to it: A bot could serve as the intermediary between a company and its end users, ensuring that communication happens bilaterally. For example, support ticket concentration could indicate product quality problems or a usability issue. Unexpected click paths in the product could occur because of a usability or training issue. Today, such analysis is completed manually by humans—either in customer success or in product management—but imagine a world in which a customer success platform can study these signals and come up with these recommendations without human input.

Proceed With Caution

Despite their promise, bots are not the be-all, end-all for outstanding customer experience, for several reasons: First, customers have different expectations for each interaction. They may prefer automated responses to simple queries, but they may want a personal touch for more complex inquiries or when they are looking for an escalation channel. Second, despite advances in machine learning and natural language processing, the accuracy and context-awareness of automated systems still has a long way to go. Third, your customer profile may not lend itself to automation. The Millennial generation might be more comfortable with automated systems and may even prefer them. Older generations may prefer and appreciate a human touch. A caveat to always keep in mind before going too far down the bot road is that a human connection is generally more likely to be revenue-generating and therefore more profitable, so don’t take automation too far.

Despite these limitations, bots are here to stay and will become an increasingly large part of our lives. We may not be looking at bot-first products, but existing platforms will leverage bots to deliver efficiencies. Over the next year or two, they will revolutionize the way companies interact with their customers. As with any technology, there will be hits and misses, likely more of the former. The question then is, will you be on board or will you be left behind?

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Shreesha Ramdas is the CEO and cofounder of Strikedeck. Previously, Ramdas was the general manager of the Marketing Cloud at CallidusCloud, cofounder of LeadFormix (acquired by CallidusCloud) & OuterJoin, and general manager at Yodlee. Prior to that, Ramdas led teams in sales and marketing at Catalytic Software, MW2 Consulting, and Tata. Ramdas advises several start-ups on marketing and growth hacking. You can find Ramdas on Twitter @Shreesha.

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