As the technology sector transitions from hyper-growth to durable growth, SaaS companies are shifting their focus to safeguarding Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and ensuring customer outcomes. That’s why leading Customer Success (CS) teams are discovering ways to deliver amazing digital experiences to customers efficiently and at scale.
It’s clear that Digital CS is the path forward for SaaS. But it can be hard to get started with any new strategy. So we’ve rounded up three Digital CS challenges you’re likely to face while maturing your program, along with solutions to overcome them.
Challenge #1: Imperfect Customer Data
As a CS professional, customer data can feel like your best friend or your worst enemy. But the myth that you must have perfect data to get started with Digital CS is exactly that—a myth.
The Solution: Improve Your Data With Digital CS
The truth is no one has perfect customer data. The important thing is to get started with what you do have. Then, Digital CS tactics can actually help you improve your customer data as you go.
For instance, you can leverage in-app engagements to ask users a question upon logging into your platform to gradually fill in missing information about them.
Challenge #2: Finding Your Channels
Orchestrating an end-to-end customer journey across multiple channels doesn’t have to be difficult. But it does require an understanding of where your customers live every day: in the product, on email, in your Community, or elsewhere.
Pinpointing the right digital channels can be tricky. To complicate the matter, bouncing between multiple systems is the norm for most CS professionals and their customers. According to Rocketlane, 60% of companies use 4–6 tools for customer onboarding alone!
With multiple disconnected tools, it’s difficult to deliver a seamless, omnichannel customer experience—and it’s easy to remain stuck in a reactive stance, responding to customer requests ad hoc.
The Solution: Digital Hub
Right now, you likely have a different system for Service tickets, self-service resources, and your user Community. What if you could combine all of that functionality with your one-to-many engagements, knowledge base, and more in one central hub? What if you could pull resources from that hub straight into the product experience?
That’s exactly what we’ve introduced with Gainsight Digital Hub: a single destination for your customers to connect, share best practices, provide feedback, and build a stronger relationship with your product.
By training your users that Digital Hub is the one-stop shop to answer all of their needs, you create a strategy that allows you to optimize one primary channel, which feeds into all of the other channels in your content ecosystem.
Challenge #3: Losing the Human Element
While the goal of Digital CS is to empower human beings, it can still be difficult to craft digital touchpoints that feel like personalized messages. You don’t want to spam users with too many engagements, and you don’t want those messages to sound like they came from a robot.
The Solution: Human-First Digital CS
While data-driven automation, self-serve resources, and peer-to-peer engagement are all incredible ways to improve the customer experience, it’s important to remember that technology is only ever meant to amplify human connection. In other words, in a truly powerful Digital CS strategy, the human always comes first.
One way to ensure digital engagements feel personal is to include a real teammate’s name as the sender. That way, when the customer receives the message, they know their CSM is in the loop, ready to personally respond if needed.
Learn More
Check out how our Digital CS experts overcome common data challenges in Start Small and Scale Fast With Digital CS.
