If your business cannot keep up with the attention customers seek, then it's possible that they will leave you.
Personalized conversations, regular follow-ups, and quick turnaround seem like nice solutions. But when the volume of customers creeps up, it's impossible to implement a one-to-one conversation with your agents for every little thing.
Thus, it's important that businesses learn to provide relevant, value-driven communication through technology and use customer support teams to fill in only when needed.
The idea behind "Tech touch customer success" is to let your business scale by harnessing customer knowledge and delivering personalized solutions that are extremely valuable. This way, you can deliver the same engagement and support to all your customers.
Many SaaS businesses have adopted a tech-touch model for their SaaS business. And if you are planning to do the same, this blog will be your ultimate guide.
Let's get started.
What is "Tech touch customer success"?
Tech touch customer success uses technology to collect customer information and then analyze it to personalize their product experience across their journey. It is more than low-touch onboarding, where the onboarding is done through software, and less than high-touch onboarding, where the support team handholds customers how to use the platform.
Tech touch onboarding is an excellent option for both SaaS businesses and enterprises. When your business is scaling, it's harder for the customer success team to build an engaging relationship with each of them. Instead of hiring a support member for each customer, you can use the tech touch model to deliver human-like engagement.
You can think of all the tasks your customer success manager does, yet some of them don't provide any value. These dull, repetitive tasks can be automated through technology. Tech Touch customer success fills every stage beyond onboarding and provides initial responses via in-app messaging, chats, emails, etc., to offer personalized support and advice.
Even with a customer support manager, the goal of Tech Touch customer success is to give customers the highest level of engagement and help them reach their goals. In case of extra support, the support team can always reach the customer for a one-to-one conversation in case of extra support.
Tech touch customer success vs. low touch vs. high touch
Most often, businesses confuse the tech touch model with low and high touch due to their similarities, but there are significant differences between them. Let's clarify what each of these models means.
High touch models
Most of the time, high-touch models are used for complex products that need extra help from a customer success manager to be successful. For the manager, this is their only (or one of a few) account to assist. High-touch models work best for high-value customers that demand extra attention.
Guided by the support team, the customer will be asked how to use the product to achieve their goals. The high-touch model is less dependent on digital engagement with the company; most conversations often happen with the account manager. This model requires a lot of resources, which isn't ideal for most SaaS products.
Low-touch models
Low-touch models would work best if your SaaS product is simple with no complex features that require hand-holding. But that doesn't mean the customers are abandoned or not paid attention to.
Low-touch onboarding relies on tech to solve problems. Instead of dedicated customer success managers, low-touch customers are given digital resources like video tutorials, FAQs, and knowledge centers to help them find answers to their questions.
The low-touch model is scalable but not often personalized. It follows a one-size-fits-all solution that can only cover the basic concepts or features of the product but does not uniquely answer customers' questions.
Tech-touch models
The Tech Touch model strikes a balance between low and high touch. It relies on tech similar to low-touch but uses customer data to personalize the user's experience. The Tech Touch model engages the customer across the entire user journey, from onboarding, activation, and plan expansion.
It saves both your customer success managers and your customers time on pointless and repetitive conversations. Instead, harness customer knowledge to provide unique experiences to each customer. Tech touch is both scalable and personalized and helps customers reach their "aha moment" faster.
Benefits of Tech-touch customer success
Tech-touch customer success aims to deliver value and help customers reach their goals. It works best for SaaS products that require minimal hand-holding and where support team tasks can be automated.
Still not convinced? Let's hear some of its advantages-
1. Automation is crucial for scaling
Automated self-help and tech-touch are effective strategies to scale your SaaS business. It helps improve customer experience through value-driven communication that is personalized to fit customers' needs.
Tech Touch Customer Success removes dull, repetitive tasks from your customer success managers and gives them ample time to have strategic conversations with customers that drive customer loyalty and expansion. This model lets you scale customer service without hiring more customer support members to deal with new accounts.
2. Tech touch model increases customer satisfaction
The tech touch model is customer-centric, meaning it listens to your customers, understands their goals, and uses insights to improve their experience on the platform. These are the features of customer-led growth, where the company's main motive is to deliver a quality experience and make customers their brand advocates.
Since the communication is targeted and automated, the chances of it being spam are less. Instead of having an aimless conversation, you talk direct and that leaves a positive impact on your customers.
3. Provide customers with a self-sufficient solution
The tech-touch models aim to educate customers so that they can solve their own problems and get value without needing help. It uses digital resources like webinars, videos, help centers, and in-depth product tours to help customers understand how to use the product to their advantage.
Many SaaS brands today have adopted interactive onboarding flows that ask customers what they do and why they are using the product. These platforms then analyze the data to provide customers with personalized onboarding that focuses on helping them reach their goals.
Ways to do Tech touch customer success
Here is how you can adopt tech touch customer support for your SaaS business-
1. Find triggers that can be automated
When using your SaaS solution, many customers will follow the same path. While they might not use the same features or have similar goals, they will surely have some common ground. During this journey, customers might face similar issues or have a hard time figuring out how to use a feature.
And these are tasks that need automation. Your mission is to conduct proper customer segmentation based on their end goals. For example, if your SaaS product helps people manage their resources, it will have different types of customers, such as SMBs and freelancers. Each customer group will have a goal they want to achieve through your product.
Now, you can create digital resources like onboarding playbooks, videos, and product tours to help them understand features that will contribute to customer success. You will be amazed to see how well your customers respond to these self-help resources and how they encourage customer loyalty.
2. Automate data collection through feedback surveys
As soon as a customer signs up for your SaaS product, you can give them a personalized experience by giving them an interactive onboarding flow. The onboarding phase is also a time when you have a high risk of losing your customer, especially when they don't realize value from you quickly.
The interactive flow will help you understand which customer segment this user falls into, so you can run a personalized onboarding campaign. You can ask them about their job profile, the purpose of using your product, and the results they expect. Lastly, talk about the features they will be most interested in and help them realize the value of your product.
Check out Canva's onboarding flow; it starts with understanding your role in using the tool. It then lists the features of using Canva for the role, followed by what the user might want to design. This information helps Canva recommend templates that best suit customers' needs and help them reach their Aha moments faster.
If you want to implement a similar onboarding flow, then MarbleFlows can help you. We have different interactive onboarding flows that you can use to customize your customers' paths and convert them twice as fast.
3. Offer customer self-service support
To make customers self-reliant, you can add in-app help centers that give them access to the knowledge base, tutorials, support tickets, videos, and other resources to help them quickly solve their issues.
This doesn't mean that every customer is offered the same information. The tech-touch model triggers personalized resources based on customer segments and their actions on the platform.
For instance, check out Salesforce, a popular CRM platform with dedicated product videos to solve customer problems. You will also find a list of resources and a contact page to chat with their agents.
4. Keep customers in a loop to reduce churn
Tech touch" doesn't mean that you don't engage with your customers. Constant communication is the key to keeping customers in the loop and not letting them slip away.
But you don't want to annoy your customers, so instead of sending them big release notes for major feature announcements, tell them how it will improve their work and contribute to achieving their end goals.
See this Slack tooltip on its latest feature, where users can schedule messages to be sent at a certain time. This is minimalist and to the point.
You can send re-engagement email campaigns to inactive users to remind them of the onboarding steps they missed, create a sense of urgency with time-sensitive offers, ask for feedback, or share new information that will help the customer succeed.
Wrapping up
Tech touch model is the best way you can scale your SaaS business.
When launching your tech-touch model, keep your customers in mind. They don't have the patience for elaborate customer onboarding. The reality is that they only care about how fast they can realize value from your product. The answer to your customers' problems is helping them reach their ultimate goals.
One way you can do this is through personalized interactive flows. Try MarbleFlows' interactive flows for free and see your user retention rate increase.
Written by Rashi Jaitly.
