A common adage in the business world is that adding tech into the mix dehumanizes everything. 

However, buyers don’t see it that way: a Harvard Business Review study found B2B customers want their needs filled in ways that make them feel autonomy, relatedness, and mastery. While this is often done through white-glove customer success, you’ll run into scale problems, particularly if you have a lower price point and a high volume of customers. 

That’s where tech touch customer success comes in. The principle here is not to replace humans, but to augment their efforts with the goal of giving customers the answer they need, when they need it, in the format that provides the most value.

What is tech touch customer success?

Tech-touch isn’t a high-touch model with one-on-one engagement (though your users will feel just as catered to). So what is it?

In short, it’s a combination of automation for CSMs and personalized, relevant experiences for the customer. The software manages check-ins and communication on the CSM’s behalf with minimal human interaction. CSM tasks are mechanized and scaled, but the customer will have no idea because they experience attentive service.

Done right, it leads to real business results: Teachers Pay Teachers, an online marketplace for educational resources, saw a 16% retention bump in their enterprise customers by leveraging tech touch CS.

But if you think that tech touch customer success completely replaces humans, think again. It’s really just about filling the gap between available human capacity versus demands on their time. Ella Dillon, the CCO at Conversica, conducted a study that found CSMs are asked to complete tasks that would take approximately 5,000 hours. However, the average person only has about 1,800 hours of working per year—around 25% of what’s demanded of them. 

‍

The 4 benefits of tech touch customer success

1. Personalized communication and education

A key element of tech touch CS is customers get the communication they need at a given moment. Whether that’s a prompt because of low usage, a reminder of renewal, or an in-app popup talking about the latest feature, it’s personalized from day one. 

2. Customer insights collection

Your customers engage and succeed with your products and services while technology collects data, segments customers, and personalizes communication. When your users need additional support for onboarding, implementing, or troubleshooting, tech touch is the proactive way to support them without eating away at your time.

What’s even better is this data will help build your customer health scores, which you can use to better understand customer needs and proactively reduce churn by alleviating immediate problems.

3. Saves time for CSMs

Tech touch CS means a human doesn’t need to handle every single communication. This is helpful when you have a dozen clients in your book of business, let alone hundreds or even thousands of low-revenue customers. 

4. Better leverage cross-channel communications

Broaden your communication tools to reach your customers. For instance, sending an in-app pop-up to your customer who isn’t using the application is ineffective. But you could send them an email. Or even retarget them with an ad. When you have a computer helping you figure out all the details, the effect is higher quality customer communication. 

‍

Where tech touch customer success delivers the most value

Tech touch CS is incredibly impactful, but only if you use it in the right scenarios. Here are a few examples: 

Onboarding administration: Data and segmentation allow you to tailor your communication to your customers' needs and goals. Devise checklists to steer them to activation points and welcome pages. Inspire actions and next steps or call attention to missed steps with practical guides customized to their needs.

Customer Success Qualified Lead (CSQL) prompts: When quantifying your expansion process, a key risk is missing the trigger point. What happens if you don’t happen to check usage analytics the day a customer spikes, for instance? A tech touch CS automation can help here–it can automatically look at usage statistics and send you a prompt to reach out if it looks like a customer might be ready for expansion. 

Re-engagement campaigns: You can re-energize your customer’s engagement when you notice they haven’t been using the tools you give them. Tech touch CS not only allows you to track their usage (and not just in-app meanderings), but it also allows you to send out email campaigns to stimulate their interest again.

Your email campaigns can include any one or a combination of the following:

• Checklists of missed setup steps.
• Links to educational/training materials.
• Requests for feedback.
• New, relevant features.
• Motivating content.
• Limited time offers.

Self-service and DIY help campaigns: Customers are likely to give up when looking for an easy solution but have to search through a sea of information to find it. With a robust help center, your customer has the tools at their fingertips, anytime and anywhere, to meet their own needs without waiting around for someone else to help them.

‍

When to NOT use tech touch customer success

There are a lot of great use cases for tech touch CS, but sometimes you need a human. Here are three times when perhaps leaving it to the robots is a bad idea. 

1. Renewal conversations for large contracts: You might automatically remind someone of a renewal anniversary coming up, but the actual conversation should include a human if you’re talking about a big number or complex contract. 

2. Significant escalations: If someone has gone through your DIY resources and is still facing a problem, get a human involved. This will be an opportunity to not only help that customer but possibly upgrade your DIY resources for the future. 

3. Building genuine relationships: Tech touch CS is a tool to aid your relationship building. However, relationships are a human game. There should always be points where humans can intervene, depending on the needs of your customer base and the capacity in your organization.

‍

The power of humans and automation

Tech touch CS allows you to automate many tasks while making your customers feel valued and seen. At the same time, you’re collecting valuable data to enhance their experience and boost your effectiveness. 

Done well, your processes scale up easily, enabling you to get more done with technological resources versus adding another employee to the team. Done really well, tech touch CS helps improve your bottom line to the point where you can hire additional humans to take on all the strategic work now being demanded of customer success.

Infographic

Many people worry about robots taking over their job and leaving them with nothing. But that is not always the case in the business world. Have you heard of tech touch? It shows how the power of automation fits in a business run by humans. As long as you know how to use it properly and when, technology can assist your business in the path of success. Learn more about it, here.