Combine signals and go for it
If constraints force creativity, it’s time to let your imagination run wild. Because there isn’t enough creativity in customer success.
“Nothing is original,” says author Austin Kleon in his must-read Steal Like an Artist. It’s important for Success teams to remember this.
All other GTM teams steal constantly, as well they should. Sales tactics make their way through company after company. Marketing watches the competition and campaigns can look oddly familiar.
There are Success teams doing fun stuff. But so many of the conversations I have with CS teams are about the stock standard stuff:
Run a QBR
Respond to tickets
Have a pre-renewal playbook XX days before renewal
Or for companies without dedicated CS teams, it can be more about simply trying to be there when customers need you most.
There is so much useable data
Working with customers, you have first-party data with clear links to people and their companies. Pre-sales teams dream of attribution like this:
Chat
Email
Surveys
Community
Call recordings
Support tickets
Product usage (at account- and user-level)
When it’s a registered customer, most of these touchpoints are directly attributable to a user and an account. You can use these to trigger workflows.
Combine the signals
Just like pre-sales teams pull together combinations of prospect activity to create more effective campaigns, CS can do the same.
But customer data is directly traceable to users and accounts, so it’s really good stuff to work with.
Some combos to look for:
Email / Support / Call data + product usage — flag positive or negative sentiment and compare it with account- and user-level product usage
Product usage + in-app upgrade interest — high usage combined with power users checking out the upgrade path
Support ticket volume + consumption % — increasing support volume about new use cases combined with high % of consumption (tokens, credits, etc.)
What signals do you have that you can combine to make some meaningful workflows? This is when you start to run, compared to the somewhat simple workflows from yesterday.
This is where you can get creative.
AI and whatnot
If reading the list of signals feels overwhelming, maybe it’s time to hire some new teammates. Agents. Skills. CoWork.
Agentic workflows unlock capacity whether you build them in-house or hire them from a company like Attention.com. Once you point agents at the data, you can start to scale beyond your current headcount.
How to do that is beyond this note. You’re probably experimenting with AI a lot, so consider adding some customer-focused workflows to your next build.
AI runs on data and you have heaps of high-quality, first-party data to get creative with in service of increasing customer LTV, dropping dreaded churn, and growing your company’s revenue foundation.
Start.
If you’re doing the stock standard customer success work or haven’t started yet, just do it. Pick one customer segment, one signal, and do something creative to keep them happy.
Off you go,
Peter