Are you looking to streamline your customer success operations and improve efficiency? Consider implementing a tech-touch approach in your strategy. This approach combines technology and personalised touches to effectively engage and support your customers.
This ultimate guide will delve into the core concepts of tech touch customer success, including its benefits, challenges and implementation strategies. By gaining a comprehensive understanding of tech touch, you will be equipped with the knowledge to harness its power and transform your customer success practices. So, let’s explore the foundations of tech touch customer success and uncover how it can revolutionise your business.
Understanding Tech Touch Customer Success
Tech touch customer success is a modern approach that blends technology and personalised interactions to enhance customer engagement and support. It revolves around leveraging technology to deliver automated — yet customised -– interactions with customers, ensuring their success throughout their journey with your company.
Tech touch customer success aims to create efficient processes that empower customers to solve their problems while providing them with the necessary support and guidance. By utilising technology such as automation, self-service portals, and data analysis, businesses can deliver a seamless and proactive customer experience.
The key to understanding tech touch customer success lies in recognising the importance of scalable and sustainable solutions. It’s about balancing personalised support and efficient automation, allowing your customer success team to focus on strategic and high-value activities while ensuring every customer receives the attention they deserve.
Tech Touch Vs Low Touch Customer Success
In Customer Success, low touch means minimal direct contact with customers. It's mostly about using automated emails and messages for essential support, making it a good fit for managing many customers simultaneously - especially when they don't need much help. It's cost-effective and used for smaller clients who can use the software independently.
Tech touch takes automation a step further. It's about using advanced technology to understand and respond to customer needs automatically. This approach analyses customer data to personalise their experience and solve problems before they even know they have them. Tech Touch is excellent for handling many customers because it's highly efficient and requires little human involvement.
The big difference between the two is how they use technology. Low touch still has many human elements but relies on simple automation for basic tasks. Tech touch, on the other hand, uses more sophisticated tech to automate customer interactions almost completely. It's more about personalising the customer's journey using data with minimal human help. Depending on the size and needs of your customer base, you might use one strategy, the other, or a mix of both.
Is Tech Touch Customer Success The Right Approach for My Company?
While many types of organizations stand to benefit from tech-touch customer success, this approach is more suitable to certain types of businesses. Organizations that are a good fit for this approach are:
1. SaaS (Software as a Service) Companies: Tech touch strategies align well with SaaS businesses where product usage can be tracked and supported through digital means.
2. Mid-sized to Enterprise B2B Companies: Businesses dealing with a B2B model often have a diverse customer base that can benefit from standardized yet personalized tech touch interactions.
3. Businesses with Highly Scalable Products or Services: Companies offering products or services that are easily scalable and cater to a broad market find tech touch strategies advantageous.
4. Digital Platforms and Marketplaces: Companies operating online platforms or marketplaces often have a wide user base, making tech touch strategies crucial for efficient and effective customer success management.
5. Tech-Integrated or Tech-Dependent Industries: Industries that heavily rely on technology, such as fintech, marketing technology, or e-commerce, can leverage tech touch strategies to align with their customer base's technological acumen.
6. Companies with Low-Touch Customer Journeys: A tech touch strategy is efficient for products or services with shorter implementation times or where customers can onboard quickly without extensive hand-holding.
7. Global or Geographically Dispersed Companies: Organizations with customers spread across different regions can benefit from tech touch strategies to maintain consistent and efficient support irrespective of time zones and locations.
8. Cost-Conscious Companies: For companies looking to optimise costs without compromising customer success, tech touch strategies offer a cost-effective way to scale support.
If your organization has a complex product and customers who require extremely personalized service, a tech touch strategy might not be for you. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t implement some tech touch elements in your CS operations - you just have to be careful to maintain personalisation and stay responsive to individual customer needs.
Benefits of Tech Touch Customer Success
Tech touch customer success offers numerous benefits for businesses looking to enhance their customer success strategies. By implementing this approach, companies can improve efficiency, streamline processes, and ultimately drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here’s a breakdown of why it might help you:
1. Scalability
One of the key benefits of tech touch customer success is scalability. With the use of automation and self-service portals, businesses can efficiently support a large number of customers without compromising on the quality of support provided. This scalability allows customer success teams to focus on strategic and high-value activities, such as identifying growth opportunities and developing proactive customer success plans.
2. Improved customer engagement.
By leveraging technology, businesses can deliver personalised interactions and resources to customers, enhancing their experience and ensuring their success throughout their journey. This level of engagement fosters a stronger relationship between the customer and the company, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3.Gathering valuable insights from data
Companies can gain insights into customer behaviour, needs, and pain points by automating customer interactions and capturing data at various touchpoints. This data-driven approach allows businesses to make informed decisions, identify areas for improvement, and deliver tailored solutions to customers.
4. Increase expansions
With tech touch motions in place, you can create flows that identify customers who could benefit from additional features or licenses. Tools like Velaris come with automatic trackers that help you spot opportunities, create them and assign them to the specific CSMs so they act on them quickly.
Overall, the benefits of tech touch customer success are undeniable. From scalability and improved customer engagement to data-driven insights, this approach empowers businesses to enhance efficiency, customer satisfaction, and their bottom line.
Implementing Efficient Tech Touch Techniques in Your CS Team
Now that you understand the concept of tech touch customer success and the benefits it can bring to your business, it's time to dive into the implementation phase. Implementing efficient tech touch techniques in your customer success (CS) team requires careful planning and consideration. Here are some strategies to help you successfully implement tech touch in your CS team.
1. Have the right tech in place with a trained team
Equip your team with the tools to implement tech touch techniques effectively. This may include automation software, self-service portals, and data analysis tools (find more about the tools we recommend in this section of the article). Invest in training to ensure your team has the skills and knowledge to leverage this technology effectively.
2. Map the customer journey
Identify the key touchpoints in your customer journey where tech touch techniques can be implemented. This could be during onboarding, adoption, ongoing support check-ins and expansions (upsells/cross-sells). By pinpointing these touchpoints, you can strategically implement tech touch techniques to enhance the customer experience at crucial stages of their journey. You can also use a Customer Success Platform like Velaris to track your customers’ progress through each stage of their journey.
3. Leverage self-service resources.
By providing customers with a comprehensive knowledge base, FAQs, and video tutorials, you empower them to find solutions to their problems on their own. This reduces the need for manual support and allows your team to focus on higher-value activities.
4. Implement automated onboarding and adoption processes.
By setting up automated workflows and email campaigns, you can ensure that new customers receive the necessary resources and guidance to achieve success at the right time quickly. This not only saves time and effort for your team but also ensures that customers have a smooth onboarding experience.
5. Maintain proactive communication with customers
Using technology to track customer engagement and behaviour, you can identify potential issues or opportunities and reach out to customers proactively. This allows you to address concerns before they become major problems and provides opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.
6. Gather feedback and data
Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your tech touch techniques by tracking key metrics and gathering customer feedback. This will allow you to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to ensure the success of your tech touch implementation.
7. Continuously iterate and improve
Effective tech touch customer success is an ongoing process. Continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies, gather feedback from customers, and make necessary adjustments to ensure your initiatives are.
By following these strategies, you can successfully implement efficient tech touch techniques in your CS team. Remember, tech touch is all about finding the balance between automation and personalised support, so it's important to regularly assess and adjust your approach to meet your customers' needs. With the right implementation, tech touch can revolutionise your CS practices and increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Measuring the Impact of Tech Touch on Your Customer Success
Once you have implemented tech touch customer success strategies in your business, measuring their impact is crucial to ensure they are driving the desired results. Measuring the impact of tech touch on your customer success allows you to track progress, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance your customer success practices. Here’s how to get started:
1. Select your KPIs
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as onboarding time, time-to-adoption of a feature or license utilisation. Self-service adoption rates can provide insights into the efficiency and effectiveness of your tech touch strategies. If you see improvements in these metrics, it indicates that your tech touch initiatives are streamlining processes and empowering customers to find solutions independently.
2. Monitor customer satisfaction
Implement surveys or feedback loops to gather feedback from your customers about their experience with your tech touch initiatives. You can use a customer success platform like Velaris to send regular updates automatically during different lifecycle stages. This will give you valuable insights into how well your strategies resonate with customers and whether they meet their needs.
3. Track customer retention and churn.
By comparing the retention rates of customers who have been exposed to your tech touch initiatives versus those who haven't, you can determine the impact of tech touch on customer loyalty. If you notice a significant improvement in customer retention among those who have experienced tech touch, it's a clear indicator that your strategies are working effectively.
4. Monitor revenue growth and upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
If your tech touch initiatives are successfully driving customer success and engagement, you should see an increase in revenue from existing customers through expansion or additional purchases.
Measuring the impact of tech touch on your customer success is essential for continuous improvement. Don’t know how to get started with measuring your progress? Velaris offers powerful analytics features that can help you track all these metrics and more.
By analysing data, gathering feedback, and tracking key metrics, you can optimise your tech touch strategies to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction. Regularly evaluate and measure the impact to ensure your customer success practices deliver the desired results.
Using Technology In Implementing Tech Touch Customer Success
“Tech-touch” doesn’t get its name out of nowhere. Technology is fundamental to implementing a successful tech touch customer success strategy. By leveraging the right tools and software, businesses can streamline their processes and effectively engage with customers at scale. Here’s the tech you need to get started:
1. Automation tools
By automating routine tasks and workflows, such as sending onboarding emails or scheduling customer check-ins, businesses can save time and resources while ensuring a consistent and timely customer experience. Automation also allows customer success teams to focus on more strategic and high-value activities, such as identifying growth opportunities or resolving complex issues.
2. Data analytics tools
Businesses can gain insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points by leveraging analytics tools. This data-driven approach enables businesses to tailor their interactions and offerings to meet individual customer needs, ultimately driving customer success and satisfaction.
3. Self-service support tools
Technology can also be used to provide self-service options to customers. By implementing self-service portals or knowledge bases, businesses empower customers to find answers to their questions or solutions to their problems on their own. This saves time for both the customer and the customer success team and empowers customers to take control of their own success.
There is a whole host of automation, analytics and support tools out there to help implement your tech touch strategy - it can be difficult to know where to start.
Our recommendation? Using a Customer Success Platform (CSP) alongside a customer self-service tool.
CSPs like Velaris have all the features you need to seamlessly execute your tech-touch strategy without paying for multiple tools to switch between different systems. Not only does Velaris carry powerful automations (we call them Scenarios), in-built survey tools and customer analytics, but it also integrates with customer self-service tools like Zendesk to help you keep track of recurring support issues and flag struggling customers.
Take this example of automated onboarding processes. Velaris’ Scenario automatically triggers when a new customer is signed and then allocates a CSM as the Primary Owner. Then, the automation checks whether the customer is high touch or tech touch.
Tech touch customers are then immediately sent a welcome email and, after 3 weeks, the Scenario checks whether the customer has reached a goal in product usage. If not, an automatic email guides them through a valuable feature. They are moved to a "Live" lifecycle stage if they use the platform heavily.
Conclusion
In conclusion, technology is vital in implementing tech touch customer success. Businesses can enhance efficiency, improve customer engagement, and drive overall customer success by leveraging automation, data analysis, and self-service options. So, embrace the power of technology in your customer success practices and watch your organization thrive.
PS - Want to see how Velaris can power up your tech touch strategy and save your CSMs 2 hours a day? Request a demo or get in touch with our team at info@velaris.io.
