Together Conversica and Gainsight Can Turn Customer Success Teams Into Retention Heroes

Customer Success teams work to build deep and lasting relationships with their customers. They learn their customer’s business and become trusted advisors to help customers get the most value out of their investment. In this prescriptive leadership advisory role, they also find new opportunities to expand the account that drives a higher lifetime value. While customer-to-CSM ratios vary by ARR and account size within industries, nearly every CS team is resource-constrained and struggles with a lack of capacity and time to more proactively assist their customers. They either don’t have the capacity to personally engage or they are under severe time constraints like the one imposed by COVID-19 to act quickly.

Present circumstances only exacerbate the challenges of capacity and time, and over the course of the next 12 to 24 months we are likely to see additional swings in market volatility. CSM teams have to make every effort to retain customer’s business and to gauge the health of their accounts. That requires a full 360-degree view of a customer’s experience.

According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) even increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent increases profits by 25 percent to 95 percent. Shoring up dollars spent on initial investments while new customer acquisition slows down is critical.

The right combination of technological solutions overcome both capacity constraints and time constraints. Any company that is undergoing a digital transformation would do well to consider augmenting their workforce with an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA).

Which Solutions Rise to the Surface?

Conversica and Gainsight together help to advance digital interactions with customers at scale which is exactly what the ‘new normal’ for doing business now requires. Rather than mass email campaigns, Customer Success teams need to adopt a solution that delivers personalized outreach at scale.

Conversica Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) are the next generation of intelligent automation helping organizations scale human-like interactions that attract, acquire, and grow customers. IVAs can augment highly-leveraged Customer Success teams looking to retain customers by automating many of the redundant, albeit important, tasks from driving customer health to nudging a client to conduct a business review, to gauging interest to buy additional products or services.

IVAs can send a variety of pre-built but customizable, proven messages for a wide variety of industry use cases and adjust with an empathetic or informational tone to convey what a company is doing to address fluctuations in a market or to quickly pivot to business revival and growth. Messages can be easily updated or changed to match the fluidness of market movements.

Teams must understand a customer’s pain points, challenges and struggles in order to serve them effectively. This is where Gainsight shines. Its customer-centric solution is purpose built to aggregate all customer data to have a 360-degree view and to fully understand what might be an appropriate next best action to suggest.

“Gainsight is our go-to tool to track our customer’s health and make sure we’re delivering outcomes throughout the customer journey,” said Katherine Glover, Senior Manager, Customer Success Operations for Conversica. “We’ve taken our processes to the next level by leveraging the data and insights captured from Gainsight and using it to engage customers in conversations with our Customer Success AI Assistants.”

“When Gainsight tells us that a customer is due for an upcoming quarterly review, our Customer Success AI Assistants will reach out to the customer to see if they’d be interested in scheduling a performance review. This process saves our Customer Outcomes Managers valuable time and energy on a task that would otherwise be completely manual,” said Glover.

The Gainsight Cloud Platform captures every interaction, providing relevant context and shared learnings for teams inside of an organization including for Sales and Marketing to deliver business outcomes for customers based on data-driven insights.

Conversica used in conjunction with Gainsight is a prime example of how intelligent automation can augment an entire workflow, saving time and overcoming capacity challenges so that when an action is recommended an autonomous action can be taken immediately without the need for human intervention.

Today, 40 percent of organizations that use Conversica Sales AI Assistants also use our Customer Success AI Assistants to holistically connect the customer journey, from new customer acquisition to customer retention and growth to accelerate revenue. Many of those customers integrate into Gainsight via their CRM, such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.

Delivering value to customers is more important than ever. Today, the risk of customer churn is heightened, and organizations are forced to deliver results with fewer resources. With an Augmented Workforce, companies can scale and recover from the current global situation at a faster pace than current Sales, Marketing and Customer Success teams have the capacity and capability to do. There will be a pressing need to employ Intelligent Virtual Assistants in order to rebuild and re-engage with prospects and clients.