For all the benefits technology has brought, there’s one thing that it may never be able to replace: the human touch.
In a physical sense, the need for the human touch is inherently biological — we need it in order to thrive in a world that can, at times, feel isolated. In a 2018 article for The Guardian, writer Cindy Lamothe explained the benefits of the act, especially in a world where much of our social communication is done online.
“It turns out that these moments of connection, while fleeting, have a lasting impact on our well-being,” Lamothe wrote. “This ability to synchronize with others is crucial for social development — a fact that has garnered the attention of psychologists and scientists in recent years.”
Further, if there is one thing the past year has taught us, it’s that human connection and communication shouldn’t be taken for granted.
So what can businesses seek to take away from these findings? For one, the human touch can’t be artificially imitated, and though technology can supplement its effectiveness, it can’t take replace it entirely. For instance, at Rokt, an e-commerce company, Deputy Chief Commercial Officer Holly Aresty says that the human touch is always favored over automation.
“While our platform is very robust and sophisticated, an individual CSM manages every single customer account, campaign and implementation to ensure it’s achieving the desired results for our customers,” she told Built In NYC.
Aresty and Rokt aren’t alone in their strategy. Below, she and three other customer success leaders share how they keep the human touch at the center of all of their customer interactions, especially as they scale their operations.
What they do: Rightway provides care navigation and pharmacy benefits management solutions through a consumer-centric app that pairs every member with a live, clinician-led care team.
What are the most important considerations when scaling a customer success team, and why?
Effectively scaling customer success efforts (especially during periods of rapid growth), requires strong internal customer operations, focused on delivering an exceptional client experience, to keep the “human” relationship thriving. As companies grow, their customer success teams must identify ways to automate and streamline operations to increase efficiency.
Increased efficiency frees up time toward prioritizing white-glove service.”
What tools or technologies do you use to make customer success more scalable?
At Rightway, we’re constantly making sure we have a balance of configurability and customization in place to create “guardrails” that allow our customer success managers to think creatively. Increased efficiency frees up time toward prioritizing white-glove service and allows the team to deliver world-class support to customers, at scale.
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
At Rightway, we’ve learned that a personalized human touch component, in addition to technology, provides CSMs the chance to build meaningful relationships to understand what’s really important to the customer and offers a chance for us to pivot or implement change based on their feedback, helping to ensure happy customers across the board. Through continual process improvements, we’ve been able to find efficiencies, tools and systems that are easy for our team to leverage, allowing CSMs to provide a personal and proactive experience for each client.
What they do: MarketMatch, DeepIntent’s healthcare platform, helps healthcare brands and publishers deliver relevant, privacy-compliant digital ads to patients and professionals.
What are the most important considerations when scaling a customer success team, and why?
I am a firm believer that one critical area of focus for scaling successfully is culture. Maintaining the culture that fostered your growth as a small business is critical to the health of your company as it evolves. A mantra that I rely upon heavily to guide my decisions about the growth of the team is, “Culture is the foundation of success.”
There are a few core attributes that I drive in our teams’ cultures, like being nimble, being hyper-collaborative, ensuring you are an advocate for each other’s success and, simply, having fun.
This is a large part of what I have focused on in my first few months at DeepIntent — working cross-functionally to gather feedback from all levels, implementing efficient processes, and openly discussing the type of culture which has helped make DeepIntent so successful to date.
You want to be sure that the client sees your CS team as a critical, irreplaceable extension of their own business.”
What tools or technologies do you use to make customer success more scalable?
Throughout my career, I have found three tools essential to successfully scaling customer success:
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A CRM system for actively guiding the customer along each step of their journey with our company
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Reporting dashboards to ensure the customer success team has direct access to the data they need, such as client KPIs and even customer success performance metrics to track their own growth
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A unified billing system between your customer success and finance teams for a consistent billing experience, month-to-month
If you are relying on shared spreadsheets in the place of any of these functions today, you have to ask yourself how long you can maintain a growing business without the proper tools.
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
I ask myself and the team, “What are we spending time on that doesn’t matter to the client?” Addressing that, automation is great for problems that don’t require advanced analysis or complex decision-making. If something can’t be effectively automated, I’ll investigate whether a more cost-effective resource or solution is available.
Ultimately, you want to be sure that everything your team is working on is valued by the client and they see your CS team as a critical, irreplaceable extension of their own business.
What they do: Rokt helps e-commerce companies reach their customers with personalized marketing.
What are the most important considerations when scaling a customer success team, and why?
Rokt is a high-growth unicorn company gearing up for IPO. We’ve hired over 100 Rokt’stars across the globe in the last two years, and are rapidly expanding into new verticals and geographies while launching new products. Scaling a customer success team in this fast-paced environment requires a long-term strategy that prioritizes the needs of our customers.
Based on our growth, the strategy that has proven most effective for us is to segment our teams by industries or verticals. This enables each team member to deep dive into industry trends, challenges and opportunities to become industry experts, allowing them to provide best-in-class service and solutions to all our clients. We view our team as an extension of our client’s team, so it’s crucial that they understand their business intimately. This vertical-led focus has also made it easier to onboard, train and grow our teams at a rapid rate to keep up with our expanding customer base.
Additionally, our hiring strategy and process are key when it comes to scaling all teams at Rokt. While hiring we look for candidates with a strong IQ, AQ and EQ ensuring all new team members are curious, customer-obsessed, smart and humble.
What tools or technologies do you use to make customer success more scalable?
Smart tech is what drives Rokt and allows us to help our customers achieve their growth goals. While Rokt’s core solutions are backed by our proprietary AI technology, when it comes to efficiently scaling our teams we rely on multiple tech platforms for data reporting, project management, collaboration and communication across departments. Within the customer success team, we heavily rely on Google Suite, Tableau, Asana and Atlassian to help our teams be more effective and efficient.
We believe when it comes to customer success, technology is only part of the solution.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
While Rokt’s powerful and robust AI and automation tools work hard for our clients to optimize their transactions, we believe when it comes to customer success, technology is only part of the solution. Rokt’s CSM team is unique in that we are fully white glove for all of our clients, which means we lean heavily on human touch over automation. While our platform is very robust and sophisticated, an individual CSM manages every single customer account, campaign and implementation to ensure it’s achieving the desired results for our customers.
What they do: Shapeways is a technology platform that provides businesses with advanced additive manufacturing solutions for every step of the process, from design to production to fulfillment.
What are the most important considerations when scaling a customer success team, and why?
The process of building and scaling a customer success team is centered around one inherent base: the customer experience. This means understanding the complete customer journey, gaining the necessary insight to build a strategy for meeting their needs, and focusing on accounts that will yield true partnerships rather than just a reactive vendor relationship.
Customer retention should also be considered during every single interaction — not just on the tail end of the buying cycle. This consideration starts by working with the customer from the inception of their idea in the design phase and then helping them to create the exact benefits they want their customer to receive through the multiple iterations of the design process. Once the idea is ready for production, you then can ensure you deliver the catered product to the customer, without any worry of the vendor feeling that the benefits to the customer might have been overlooked.
The key is to make all relevant information easy to understand and access.”
What tools or technologies do you use to make customer success more scalable?
A good tech stack for a customer service team begins with a strong customer relationship management (CRM) system, offering an intuitive ticketing system that provides easy access for everyone. And although today many customers may prefer to interact through an online chat tool rather than any other form of communication, they should have the option of speaking directly to the team members who can help them.
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
Much of this is decided by how the tech stack is built and what level of service the customer actually needs. For example, choosing materials for additive manufacturing, many Shapeways customers are able to find the desired material capabilities in the FAQ section — without additional help from the commercial team. For other issues, like printability, the user application team is directly involved in making sure customers will achieve the optimal level of quality in 3D printing and post-processing.
The key is to make all relevant information easy to understand and access, and to use automated software effectively, prompting customers to seek additional assistance as needed.
