You can deliver more value in one targeted message than you can in an entire afternoon of aimless conversation. That is the idea behind tech-touch customer success solutions: thoughtful, relevant, value-driven communication delivered only when it has a positive impact on the customer.
When your enterprise starts to fulfill its growth potential, it becomes impossible to greet every customer with one-on-one attention. Crowding your customer engagements with unnecessary noise becomes a potential waste of time for both your customer success (CS) team and for your customer. Instead, you must cherish every available interaction and maximize its impact. With the right digital strategy in place, you can give every account in an ever-growing customer base everything they need to succeed, without confusing them with unnecessary noise.
What Is the Tech-Touch Advantage?
The key ingredient in tech-touch customer success is purpose. About every piece of communication, your enterprise should ask: what is the point of this engagement and what are each of us gaining from it?
With this streamlined approach, tech-touch maximizes your customer success resources by harnessing your customer knowledge and using it to deliver proactive value that drives growth. Digital communications also offer the advantage of branding and message consistency, no matter which customer is being contacted and which CS team member usually handles their account. The result is a win-win for your CS team and your customers. Tech-touch customer success solutions:
- Make Better Use of Customer and CSM Time
- Enable Your Enterprise to Scale
- Deliver More Relevant Communication
- Provide Customers with Self-Sufficient Solutions
- Improve the Enterprise/Customer Relationship
Tech-touch customer success focuses your relationship on the elements crucial to providing value to your customers. It is a way of maintaining purpose in every customer engagement.
How Tech-Touch Customer Success Works
Tech-touch customer success is data-driven and goal-oriented. It relies on accurate customer information being collected, analyzed, and shared across your enterprise and used to push customers to achieve specific goals that lead them to real-world business success. It is the process of turning reliable customer data into meaningful customer interactions that produce value.
When your enterprise adopts a tech-touch digital strategy, it begins to evolve a scalable, measurable approach to customer success that increases customer retention. You should reach a point where every customer touch has an impact and is an extension of your brand identity.
Embracing a digital solution does not happen overnight. You have to evolve toward a more customer-centric model across several key aspects of your customer success efforts:
Customer success skills: Team members learn to effectively monitor, interpret, and act on customer data and automated red flag warnings.
Customer success processes: Campaigns and strategies become standardized to allow for rapid and effective engagement.
Customer success technology: Customer success metrics, usage data, and customer experience measurements are automated.
Customer success roles: Team members have clear responsibilities across their customer portfolio and are empowered to act.
Adopting these principles allows your enterprise to enjoy the win-win benefits of precision customer success engagements.
5 Win-Win Tech-Touch Advantages
As with all customer success efforts, tech-touch initiatives aim to deliver value that drives growth on both sides of your customer partnership. Tech-touch solutions offer the following benefits.
1. Make Better Use of Customer and CSM Time
Tech-touch customer success solutions encourage your team to stage timely, relevant engagements by having them base their actions on where the customer is in their customer journey and how their progress matches up with specific goals and milestones. Every engagement should be geared toward helping the customer achieve immediate milestones so that they can get maximum value and ROI from your product. Automating communications and basing them on specific triggers also frees your CSMs to spend more time on high-impact projects and the face-to-face communication needed for high-touch and complex accounts.
2. Enable Your Enterprise to Scale
As mentioned above, leveraging customer data means CSMs can effectively deliver impact to a range of customers without compromising proactive, personalized value. Segmenting customers according to shared attributes such as industry, contract value, stage in the customer journey, license utilization, health score, and more allows CSMs to be more responsive, while linking messages to clear customer goals makes them impactful at scale. These techniques allow your CS team to pivot quickly when needed and do more with fewer people.
3. Deliver More Relevant Communication
A digital solution that draws on customer data and segmentation promotes engagements that lead directly to improved value. Customer segmentation allows your team to group customers according to shared characteristics and commonalities. As a result, customers trust that there is thought and purpose behind your enterprise’s communications, and subsequent campaigns to encourage product use or drive customer expansion become more effective. If every interaction brings them value, customers are more likely to be willing to listen when you reach out.
4. Provide Customers with Self-Sufficient Solutions
The tech-touch approach prioritizes customer education and empowers the customer to independently derive value from your product, leaving them free to grow without the need for constant assistance. By offering high-value solutions that are relevant to the customer’s current immediate needs such as training webinars, in-depth product materials, and even peer-to-peer networks, a digital strategy favors time-saving, customizable self-help solutions that teach customers to use your product as part of their workflow. This includes the establishment of clear support channels so that customers are empowered to reach out, instead of becoming bogged down when problems arise.
5. Improve the Enterprise/Customer Relationship
Tech-touch customer success solutions improve your customer relationship by prioritizing customer need over unnecessary, spammy communications. Their goal, which is now your goal, is to reach practical milestones that ultimately grow their business. Why send mass communications that will be useful to only a fraction of the recipients?
The advantages of this value-based customer relationship can most clearly be seen with the tech-touch success of video-calling startup Zoom.
Zoom: A Tech-Touch Success Story
In little more than a decade, Zoom has become the name perhaps most synonymous with video calling. The rise in remote learning and work arrangements in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic recently drove a rapid increase in customer opportunities for Zoom. Their rapid growth created a perfect opportunity to use feedback and data gathered from their customer success platform to update tech-touch processes and communications.
Customer Success Operations Manager Marco Innocenti outlines how Zoom used tech-touch principles to help new customers through the crucial onboarding phase of adopting Zoom technology. The Zoom experience is a timely example of how the right customer success software embraces customer success best practices and makes it easy for teams to keep up with an ever-evolving tech-touch strategy.
The Right Technology for Tech-Touch Customer Success
A comprehensive customer success platform is able to bring together data from a range of sources and make it easy to visualize, while prompting CS team members to implement practical next steps based on that data. With the right CS solution, CSMs have access to an easy-to-read display of the health of every customer, so they can act fast to capitalize on opportunity and ward off churn.
The journey to implementing efficient tech-touch customer success solutions within your own enterprise begins with the right data and a commitment to customer communication that focuses on timeliness and value.
In these challenging times, you can’t afford to buy before you try. Get started for free today. Totango’s customer success platform gives you a comprehensive understanding of your customer that lets you deliver tech-touch engagements with impact.
