CS automation isn’t only about efficiency. It isn’t just for your long-tail, small-business accounts, either. And it certainly isn’t about replacing CSMs with robots. 

Rather, CS automation is about giving customers the expertise, attention, content, and communications they need to save or earn more money for their businesses.

It’s 2024, and every CS leader should be looking to automation to scale up their program.

Not convinced? Keep reading. In this article, we’ll break down: 

• When your CS team should lean on automation vs. human intervention 
• What you need in place before you can use automation effectively 
• How to crawl, walk, and run with CS automation
• How to make sure CSMs adopt your new automated workflows 

If you’re ready to build a better, more relevant, and timely customer journey with CS automation, you’re in the right place.

When to automate your CS touchpoints

Automation is additive. It’s not there to replace your CSMs; it’s there to cut down on the amount of manual work they have to do. And there’s a lot of work to be done: Ella Dillon, the CCO at Conversica, added up all the demands placed on a typical CSM and found it would take around 5,000 hours per year to complete. If you think that sounds like a lot, you’re right—the average person only has about 1,800 working hours a year, or around 25% of what’s demanded. In the CS space, automated workflows typically serve one of two purposes: 

1. To remind CSMs to do something: You can set up automated reminders and notifications so your team knows when it’s time to reach out to a customer.

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2. To share information with a customer: You can build and deploy automated communication sequences—typically via email—that send relevant content to your customers at the right time.

Regardless of which purpose you’re working toward, ask yourself these three questions as you choose which customer touchpoints to automate: 

1. Would the customer want a human to do this task? 🪄

You want your CSMs to spend their time on tasks that need a human. However, for many routine or ongoing tasks, human intervention is not that essential — and customers couldn’t care less who produced the work.

For example, let’s say a CSM sends a regular email to their points of contact, showing them ways their team is using your product well and where there are opportunities for improvement. 

That’s absolutely a useful piece of content to receive—and it probably won’t matter much to your customers whether those emails are generated by an automated CS workflow or by a human being who typed the information out, as long as the information is useful to them.         

On the other hand, consider a conversation about future KPIs and goal planning. A CSM will want to ask complex questions to gather a comprehensive understanding of their product’s performance against the customer’s business outcomes, their upcoming challenges, and any changes in their requirements for your product. 

A task as nuanced as that would be incredibly challenging for even the best automation platform to do well. For that conversation, you’ll want to lean on a qualified, empathetic CSM who knows the right questions to ask. It’ll take a human who can be flexible about the responses they provide and who’ll be able to “hear” the customer’s unspoken concerns and requirements. 

2. Is a combined approach going to be more effective? 🤝

Automation doesn’t need to be an either/or situation. For instance, let’s say you have an automated message that you send out to your executive sponsors every month, articulating the value that your solution has delivered in the previous four weeks. 

That would be tricky to handle at scale, so it’s a great use case for automation. However, that’s not to say that you should stop there. In fact, that automated email seems like a great opportunity to loop in the CSM, as it gives them an excellent vehicle for a follow-up conversation with the executive buyer. 

For instance, you could create a workflow that goes: 

1. Automated value email sent to the executive sponsor 
2. Automated reminder prompts CSM to reach out to executive sponsor for follow-up
3. CSM has a conversation with the executive sponsor, to ask if they have any questions about the email, if they need any additional resources from your team, and if the value you’re giving them will have any impact on their planning for the next month 

Automation is there to empower your CS team to offer more personalization, more human interactions, not less. It gives them the time and resources to make every customer interaction as valuable as possible. 

3. What level of personalization are we able to handle at scale? 🔮

To be effective, automated CS outreach must be personalized and relevant to your customer. So it’s a mistake to attempt to automate CS plays if you don’t have the data you need to make sure that every communication is specific, valuable, and directly relevant to the person you’re sending it to. 

If you don’t have enough data to be able to segment your accounts by persona and create customized content for each persona group, for instance, then you’re not ready to send out most of your engagement content automatically. You’ll simply be spamming your customers—never a good look. You’re better off continuing to handle customer engagement in person until that data is in place. 

Wondering how other CS leaders identify which touchpoints to automate and scale? Watch this expert panel discussion for a behind-the-scenes look: How To Pick Which Customer Success Tasks To Automate (And Which To Leave For Humans)

The foundations of automated CS 

Before you dive into automating your CS playbooks, start with a solid foundation and put the right data and technology in place. Here’s what you’ll need to have before you start automating: 

1. Accurate, integrated customer data

To send genuinely useful content to customers, be sure to organize your data so you have: 

• Up-to-date contact information
• Account mapping (to segment your accounts by buyer persona) 
• Commercial information (renewal dates, data from their contract about licensing or users, and so on) 
• Product usage data 
• Communication data (last outbound contact, last inbound contact, etc.) 

More than that, you’ll need to be able to bring all this information together into one platform that can turn it into relevant content and timely communications. 

We should probably mention here that Catalyst does all of this. Our data integrations let even the least technical user bring critical customer data from Salesforce into Catalyst, along with support tickets (Zendesk, Service Cloud), email and calendar data (Google or Outlook), issue tracking (Jira), and adoption data (Snowflake, Redshift, Segment, Mixpanel). 

2. A deep understanding of your ideal customer journey 

To create effective automated plays, you need to start with a solid understanding of how customers should be using your solution. You’ll need a customer onboarding journey that steers customers toward moments of impact as quickly and effectively as possible. 

(Here’s a guide that explains how to build a customer journey map if you’re not confident about your current process.)

Once you’ve defined your customer journey, work backward to create logical workflows. Think about the ideal communication sequences that your team should follow. 

For instance, take expansion signals. What would be the best possible series of actions that your CSMs should take if they spotted that a customer was approaching 90% usage? In cases like these, too many CS teams are bogged down with manually checking data or, perhaps worse, frantically reacting when a customer’s account is auto-shut-off for hitting a usage cap; neither is good for growth.

But before you can effectively automate your CS playbooks, you need to know what those ideal playbooks look like and how they each drive value. 

3. An aligned customer communication strategy

Of course, you won’t be the only SaaS vendor messaging your customers. In most companies, Sales, Marketing, and maybe even Product will also email your customers. So it’s very easy, when you start automating your communications, to find that you’re accidentally bombarding your customers with too many messages—or, worse, sending conflicting messages.

So before you automate anything, make sure you get on the same page with the rest of the GTM team. You’ll need to communicate (and own): 

• What your collective organization is sending
• When it’s going out
• Who it’s for
• How you’ll measure results 

How to get started with automation

Two words: Start slow. We’d recommend starting with the low-hanging fruit first—easy automation that will drive efficiency, like automating your welcome sequence or renewal reminders. 

Then, start to look into ways you can automate your growth and expansion playbooks. Once you’ve got that down, get into the more complex automation scenarios, like automated content distribution that’s segmented by buyer persona at the individual level. 

Here’s how to crawl, walk, and run with CS automation: 

The crawl phase: Efficiency   

The basic purpose of automation is to increase your CS team’s efficiency, so that’s where you should focus first. 

Create simple automated playbooks triggered by major commercial events (like free trial downloads, initial purchases, or upcoming renewal dates). Catalyst’s email tools make it easy to create and use email templates that automatically fill in personal details, and send them out at the best possible time. 

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Some simple playbooks you might want to consider automating include: 

• A welcome email sequence: A general welcome, a hand-off and introduction to their CSM, and an onboarding email with specific instructions for the next steps
• A check-in email: A friendly note to ask how things are going 
• A conversion sequence: A short cadence designed to convert free trial customers into paying users by explaining useful features, providing resources, and reminding them about the end of the trial period
• A renewal sequence: A reminder about their upcoming renewal, complete with instructions for renewing and a meeting scheduler in case they want to talk first  
• Invitations to webinars, discussions, or Q&A sessions

The key is to think first about value. Every automated message should deliver a tangible benefit to your customers, whether that’s helping them get more out of your software, saving them time by showing them relevant information, or making sure they renew in time to save any downtime or hassle. 

The walk phase: Growth 

Once you’ve got a few automated sequences running successfully, your team should already notice some significant time savings. Now it’s time to think about how you can automate your customer growth. 

In this phase, revisit your customer journey and identify user behaviors that could act as triggers for specific commercial messages. (One trigger, for example, could be when a user is using 90% of their available licenses). 

Monitoring this information across an entire book of business is pretty easy with Catalyst’s Journey Builder. You can use it to: 

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• Define your ideal customer journey per segment
• Set up target outcomes for each stage of the customer journey
• Track the customer’s progression toward those outcomes
• Create automated email sequences and notifications for your CSMs 

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You can also set up Signals to make sure your team never misses an expansion opportunity. Signals come through when an account is ready to expand based on customer behavior. You can automatically notify your team about the potential expansion, or even send automated emails to the customer to start the expansion conversation. 

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The run phase: Optimization 

Once you’re really up and running with automation, analyze how effective each playbook is. 

If you’re not using Catalyst, you may need to ask a data analyst to pull a report and see which of your automated sequences are generating the best results. 

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If you are using Catalyst though, you can use Playbooks to understand what's working and what's not across your workflows, so that you can repeat winning processes and remove low-performing ones.

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You can also start to build more sophisticated segmentation into your workflows. For example, segmenting your accounts at the persona level means that you can send specific content to the executive buyer, the technical owner, the admin, and the end user, for example. That way, you not only send more personalized and relevant content to your customers, but you also know which content is performing and where it’s not resonating. 

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For more ideas on how to use automation to level up your CS program, check out these 3 Easy Ways to Delight Customers at Scale. 

How to get your CS team to use automated workflows 

Of course, your automation program is only going to work if your CSMs actually use it, and that can be a struggle. Some CS professionals feel anxious that robots are coming for their jobs at worst, or making their customer interactions impersonal at best. Some are simply too swamped with firefighting to try something new. And some are just a bit change-resistant and business as usual with no automation feels easier. 

To encourage your CS team to start embracing automation, we’d recommend you: 

Require CSM approval on all messaging 

If you simply start firing off messages to a CSM’s book of business, you can more or less guarantee you’ll stress them out. Instead, add in an additional stage—the automated email can tee up ready to go, but it requires final approval from the relevant CSM before it ships. That way, they know what’s going on, and they can also make relevant changes before the message goes to the customer. 

Provide clear documentation 

People use tools they understand. To encourage your CSMs to use automated workflows, make sure you have clear communication around: 

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• What messages you’re sending automatically
• The inputs you’ll use
• The timing of when you’ll send messages
• The value for the recipient 
• The benefit for the CS team 

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Documentation is infinitely easier with a tool like Catalyst. When our customer Braze switched from their existing customer success platform to Catalyst and everyone had the visibility they needed, their team’s adoption of the tool increased by 222%. 

Catalyst empowers CS teams to “human” at scale 

If you’ve felt overwhelmed by all of the AI buzz, we hope this article has helped put your fears to bed. Automated workflows aren’t there to replace CS teams—in fact, they should provide a solution that lets your teams have more human interaction with your customers, not less. 

Start with some simple email sequences and see how that goes. Once those are working well, you can begin to add triggers to signal expansion opportunities and create segmented email sequences with customized content for each buyer persona. 

If you’re ready to dive into CS automation, we’ve got your back. Catalyst makes automation easy, with: 

• Playbooks that automate alerts, assign tasks, and deliver personalized communication to every customer segment at just the right time

• Trackable customer journeys that monitor customer journey progression based on clear outcomes and let you use personalized workflows to build efficiency and repeatability into your processes 

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• Customizable email sequences that help your team increase productivity and deliver delightful, personalized customer experiences at scale.

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• Easy-to-use reporting features so you can watch the performance of your automated flows and optimize them over time 

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