The Upcoming Customer Success Revolution: Generative AI Image

The Upcoming Customer Success Revolution: Generative AI

By Nick Mehta, CEO, Gainsight

What does ANYONE want to talk about in business right now besides generative AI? Maybe the Met Gala outfits? It’s the number-one unprompted topic in every single conversation I have with a Customer Success (CS) leader or CEO.

As we’ve reflected at Gainsight, the opportunities abound for a revolution in Customer Success using generative AI. The first version, of course, is people hacking around with ChatGPT—e.g. to write emails, etc. That’s cool, but I think it’s just scratching the surface.

From my conversations, there are three categories of the impact that could be step function changes for all of us: efficiency, effectiveness, and experience. This post will be about efficiency.

Efficiency: Many CS leaders I know are studying where their teams spend their time today and what low-value activities can be removed or accelerated via generative AI. For example:

Reduce Meeting Prep Time

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Salespeople spend time preparing needy Executives like me with notes on upcoming client meetings. This can easily be replaced by AI. Quality will be better and very few people enjoy writing prep notes!

Reduce Support Time

As much as we say “Customer Success does not equal Support,” inevitably CSMs spend a fraction of their time on technical questions. What can we do to use generative AI to scan the corpus of knowledge in documentation, support cases, and the like to allow them to answer questions on the fly from clients, without having to go back and forth internally?

Simplify Knowledge Transfer

When an account is transitioned (due to turnover, leave, or promotion), the incoming CSM spends inordinate amounts of time learning the history of the customer. And inevitably, the client often feels like it wasn’t enough.

Enable Pooled CSM

This use case is continuous in Pooled CSM, where the CSM on an account may change from situation to situation.

Learn More at Pulse 2023

P.S. Come to Pulse 2023 (5/17–5/18 in San Francisco) to see us unveil a whole bunch of this stuff!