#12 | 2024 Customer Success Predictions

My one word is “scale”.

It’s time once again for my 2024 Customer Success Predictions. My one word for 2024 is “scale”. Customer Success Leaders will leverage technology, including AI and automation, as well as the channel to achieve greater economies of scale.

1.    Customer Success will adopt generative AI to improve productivity and efficiency.

Generative AI’s benefits are touted in productivity and efficiency gains. Studies show that highly skilled workers using Generative AI can improve their performance by up to 40% compared to those that don’t use it. We’ve seen benefits for HR professionals, developers, and sellers. These same gains are applicable to CSMs.

CS Leaders will start implementing generative AI for low-risk use cases including:

• Summarization: meeting summarization, timeline summarizations

• Classification: Risk segmentation (churn), classify clients based on sentiment

• Content generation: growth plans, emails, EBR decks

• Entity extraction: extracting insights from growth plans

• Q&A: Product specific Q&A resources for CSMs or clients

Enterprises are still wrestling with trusting AI. Companies that bet on the tech providers with responsible, trusted, and explainable AI will see the biggest benefits in productivity gains. Why? Because they will use generative AI that they trust (curated data, smaller / domain specific data sets, filtered from bias, hate, profanity, transparent).

More on this topic here.

2.    Digital Customer Success as an initiative

As enterprises continue looking for ways to do more with less and reach more clients, Digital Customer Success will be pervasive through all client segments. Digital Customer Success becomes “an initiative”, not just a role. I believe too many people assume Digital Customer Success = Digital CSM. While that’s part of it, it’s bigger. Companies will embrace more AI, automation, content hubs, communities, and virtual education in large and small ARR clients.

More on this topic here.

3.    Customer Success will see more monetization (and differentiating from Services will be harder)

I’ve written in the past that CS should not be monetized (leave that to Services), but I can’t deny the data.  A TSIA survey show that 45% of companies monetize Customer Success offerings. These offerings are focused on proactive adoption and business outcomes. Some of the reasons for this is for CS to pay for itself, grow revenue, and optimize margins. I believe this will be tricky. CS and Services could start competing against each other if not clearly distinctive in the definition of who does what activity. More to come from me on this in 2024.

P.S. I’ve found TSIA research to be super helpful in decision making. The link above maybe behind a paywall.

4.    Consolidation of post-sales views of the client

Post-sales functions include Customer Success, Delivery, Support, and Education at a minimum. While different functions operate in different platforms, the CS platform vendor that can integrate data into a 360-degree post-sales view of the client will leapfrog. I don’t want to be misinterpreted that all capabilities come into ONE tool. I’m talking about API integrations so that everyone supporting the client post-sale can see a consistent view of client health.

Key use cases focus on one view of the client:

• One client health score that factors in feature adoption, project health, support, services, tech health, relationships, sentiment, and outcomes.

• One view of project health and progress.

• One view of support tickets, resolution, and SLA achievements.

• One view of Education taken (with association to support tickets).

Providing this integrated view, empowers the team to deliver an awesome experience and a consistent set of actions to ensure clients adopt your technology, love your technology, and love your team.

5.    Activating the Business Partner Channel

I called this out in 2023, as well. The data shows this is still a vastly untapped channel to scale and it shouldn’t be. If business partners are part of your GTM in selling, they should be part of your delivery. You can achieve higher CSM:Client Ratios by activating a culture of consumption and establishing a CS Partner Practice. Provide training on what it means to be a CSM. Your business partners probably don’t know what CSMs do and may even think that your CSMs are competing with them. Help them be successful as they help their clients adopt.

I’d love to hear your 2024 CS Predictions. Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and active new year!

Continued Success,

Janine