700 Participants from 41 Countries told us what they think about the state of customer success, the role of intelligence & automation in their day-to-day, and what they envision for the future of customer success.
How Customer Success Tools are helping CS Teams and what's missing.
How Intelligence impacts the entire customer journey
How automation is being utilized to improve the day-to-day of CS Teams
The future of CS and the trends we can expect
Introduction
We believe in harnessing that power and providing CS Teams with the tools they need to create better outcomes for their customers and companies. Customer Success teams around the world are utilizing technology, specifically intelligence and automation, to improve consistency in their processes, monitor their customer’s experience, and scale their operations quickly. How do we know this? They told us!
Check out a summary of the results from our annual survey below.
Founder & CEO, SmartKarrot
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Background
Intelligence and automation are becoming more prevalent across the industry in 2022, regardless of the size or location of the CS Team. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, practitioners and executives are starting to shift their focus to sustainable growth. CS Teams seem optimistic about the future of Customer Success, and we don’t blame them!
Technology changes fast and so do the needs of a customer. Using your feedback, we're building smarter tools that help you (and your customers) succeed.
Participant Demographics
6% of respondents preferred not to disclose their revenue.
6% of respondents preferred not to disclose their revenue.
Our Key Findings
Customer Success Teams tend to be interested in expanding or improving their toolkit with new technology and features. However, they are facing some challenges with the implementation.
Without customer data, there would be no customer success. Raw data, however, is of little value to CS Teams. Globally, CS Teams of all sizes need and want intelligent data and insights.
Worldwide, CS Teams have seen the value in Automation but are struggling to utilize it at scale. Many businesses are interested in introducing automation to specific CS processes.
Across industries, not only SaaS, but Customer Success is also rapidly advancing in the direction of improved technology (intelligence and automation).
Operations & Technology
We know CS Teams are using technology to improve their day-to-day life. Customer-centric organizations know that improving operations can result in happier teams and customers.
In this section, see which solutions the industry is prioritizing and get insights into common challenges faced by CS Teams.
Garnering executive support and cross-department collaboration are bigger challenges in 2022 compared to 2021.
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Dive deep into how these results compare to 2021.
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Compared to 2021, there is a significant increase in companies currently implementing CS platforms (17% vs. 38%) and a substantial drop in companies with no plans of using one (31% vs. 7%) — both pointing in the direction of rapidly growing adoption of dedicated technology in Customer Success.
Compared to 2021, surveys and campaigns, workflow
automation, and customer portals have seen the largest increase in popularity.
A Customer 360° view is consistently considered to be very important.
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The road to customer success starts with an accurate and actionable understanding of customers.
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Intelligence
There is no doubt that intelligent insights improve the lives of CS Teams. We’ve found a large majority of participants believe in its power, but many are unsure about how to implement intelligent processes.
In this section, see how CS Teams are currently using intelligence and where they hope to integrate it in the future.
Teams are struggling with making sense of data (30%), manual analysis (28%), and capturing data (12%).
See how the results differ across different types of organizations.
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The data reflects the growing confidence in the power of AI and CS at the highest levels, particularly for augmenting business effectiveness and efficiency.
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See the bigger picture.
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There is a high amount of interest in using an AI Customer Success Assistant across all roles, but the interest is slightly higher in the US compared to other regions.
See how CS Teams would use call intelligence.
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Due to the difference in demands between their roles, while Customer Success Managers value real-time call assistance the most (55%), for Customer Success Leaders it's the ability to mine customer sentiment at scale (67%).
Real-time call assist and next-best-action guidance
Automatic recording, transcription, and call summaries
Highlight calls of interest
Mine conversation cues, sentiment, and overall intent
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Compared to 2021, an AI-powered personal assistant and end-to-end augmented intelligence have seen the largest increase in popularity. The market demand for these features leads us to believe in the power of AI / Augmented Intelligence to make Customer Success simpler, more powerful and intuitive.
Accurately predicting future events (risks, opportunities, etc.)
Accurate picture of customer's needs, issues, sentiment.
Recommending best action based on various scenarios
Auto-learning to improve future outcomes
The data reflects the growing confidence in the power of AI and CS at the highest levels, particularly for augmenting CS effectiveness and efficiency.
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Automation
Automation can be a scary word. For some, it means their role is being replaced by a robot. For others, it means a helping hand to get the job done faster and with more consistency. We believe in the latter and see automation as a way to help CS Teams, not replace them.
In this section, see how the industry views automation, where it is currently benefiting them, and how they plan to introduce automation into their current workflows.
Compare this year’s results to 2021.
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There are varying levels of agreement across roles and regions with stronger agreement across higher roles as well as in the US and APAC.
Although 86% of CS professionals believe automation is important, only 28% of companies report high levels of automation adoption. This signals a significant gap in the ability to actively automate CS operations across the industry.
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Small
Medium
Large
Compare results based on company size.
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The increase in automation adoption can be attributed to the influx of fast-scaling companies, CS process maturity, the need for operational efficiency, availability of intelligent and personalized automation, innovation in AI, and more.
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Risk and Opportunity alerts are the most-preferred areas for automation across all roles, team sizes, company sizes, and regions.
Risk and Opportunity Alerts
Campaigns and Surveys
Health and Usage Monitoring
Tasks and Playbooks
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Half of the respondents say their CS workflows, analytics, and automation are extremely siloed (17%), not integrated (26%), or they are not aware of any integration (7%) — representing a significant desire for comprehensive integration.
The Future of CS
As Customer Success becomes more mainstream, we expect to see a lot of innovators in the space pushing the boundaries and providing new ways of improving the customer journey.
In this section, see predictions from practitioners, stakeholders, and CEOs. Do you agree with them? Let us know on LinkedIn!
There will be significant changes to our customer success tech stack (innovation, specialization, and consolidation) over the next two years.
We think consolidation of the CS tech stack is increasing in popularity, enabling customer-centric businesses to gain unified, strategic, and actionable visibility into their customers at an organizational level.
We think consolidation of the CS tech stack is increasing in popularity, enabling customer-centric businesses to gain unified, strategic, and actionable visibility into their customers at an organizational level.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in customer success will become mainstream in the next two years.
We see a lot of demand for the CS capabilities that AI unlocks and believe that sooner or later, AI will become integral to a CSM’s daily life.
We see a lot of demand for the CS capabilities that AI unlocks and believe that sooner or later, AI will become integral to a CSM’s daily life.
Smart intelligence and automation will play a significant role in scaling customer success over the next two years.
Our view is that smart intelligence and automation can help CS Teams scale results (not just grow) without an additional strain on resources.
Our view is that smart intelligence and automation can help CS Teams scale results (not just grow) without an additional strain on resources.
Customer Success will evolve from a defensive, "churn buster" role to an offensive, "earn booster" function over the next two years.
Although CS has its roots in churn prevention (defense), customer-centric companies have been evolving it into a growth driver (offense).
Although CS has its roots in churn prevention (defense), customer-centric companies have been evolving it into a growth driver (offense)
Customer Success adoption in non-SaaS industries will accelerate rapidly over the next two years.
CS originated in the SaaS industry, but it solves a universal, industry-agnostic problem. It’s only a matter of time until non-SaaS industries adopt CS practices.
CS originated in the SaaS industry, but it solves a universal, industry-agnostic problem. It’s only a matter of time until non-SaaS industries adopt CS practices.
Final Thoughts
When we look toward the future of CS, we need to consider the foundation that has been built in the industry. Automation and intelligence should function as an additional tool in the CS Team’s toolbelt and assist them in their effort to enhance the overall customer journey. Without some level of automation and intelligence, CS Teams will miss out on opportunities to improve customer outcomes at scale.
We are in the new frontier. Timely intelligence and thoughtful automation provide a major opportunity for customer-centric organizations to understand and help make their existing customers successful on an ongoing basis. We can’t wait to be a part of your growth and look forward to another year of intelligent automation at scale!
Founder & CEO, SmartKarrot
SmartKarrot is an intelligent customer success platform that drives predictable and repeatable success. From onboarding to advocacy, SmartKarrot helps enterprises and SMBs implement and scale Customer Success.
In Episode 26, our CEO chats with Irit Eizips about the evolution of AI-Powered Customer Success.
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Current insights, resources, inspiration, and ideas that will help take your Customer Success team to the next level.
We survey CS Teams from all over the world to get their feedback on current industry trends and what they see for the future of CS.
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