The Important Things Your Customer Success Manager Can Do That AI Can't: Part II

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In Part 1 of this two-part series, we established that AI is incredibly powerful, particularly in a customer success-driven environment. When time is of the essence and relationships are on the line, you need something that will essentially guarantee that you can reach out to the right person with the right information at the right time. The natural shortcomings that go along with being a human being don’t allow for that… this is a void that only AI can fill.

However, it’s important to understand that AI has a few shortcomings of its own.

For everything that AI can do that your Customer Success Manager can’t, there are just as many things that can be said about the opposite argument, too. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of both AI-driven solutions AND your dedicated Customer Success Manager puts you in the best possible position to leverage the benefits of both at the same time. 

Maintaining That Emotion

AI is terrific on paper… but unfortunately, we don’t always live in a world of paper. The insights generated and actions taken by AI resources will ultimately only be as good as the data they’re working with daily. What if you enter into a situation where Customer A is technically achieving his or her objectives with your solution, but they’ve got some type of problem or concern that the data just doesn’t reflect?

The answer is simple: your AI would be unaware of it and you would have missed an opportunity to fix a problem or preserve a relationship in a deep, meaningful way. This is where your Customer Success Manager comes in handy.

CSMs help organizations from developing too much of an over-reliance on AI. Remember that the goal of AI is to help everyone work “smarter, not harder.” It’s not designed to let your business essentially run on auto-pilot, yet this is a mistake that far too many people seem to make.

An over-reliance on AI means that you’ve fallen into reactionary mode – something that customer success, in general, is supposed to be the answer to. The moment that an AI solution begins to manage ALL communications and interactions with customers, you’re essentially just sitting around and waiting for a computer program to tell you what to do. Necessary actions take too long to execute. Clients start to feel neglected because they’re interacting with machines instead of humans. If there are blind spots in your data – and there will be – you’re taking too long to recognize them and are paying the price as a result.

Customer Success Managers are invaluable in terms of making sure that doesn’t happen, and they always will be.

Building a Better Future Through Customer Success

At the end of the day, the point of this two part series is to underline why both the right Customer Success Manager AND the right AI solutions are essential to your larger customer success efforts. AI is an incredible tool to use to proactively manage relationships… but it is a tool, the same as anything else.

Think of AI like a hammer. When the job in front of you calls for a hammer, you want the strongest, sturdiest hammer you can find. But you still need someone who knows what they’re doing to wield it properly. You still need a knowledgeable, passionate craftsman to drive those nails into that board and turn all that spare plywood into the house you were trying to build in the first place.

This, in essence, is the relationship between your Customer Success Manager and artificial intelligence. Taken alone, they’re both incredibly powerful resources that put your customers and your entire organization on the path to victory.

But when combined together, they become something much more powerful and meaningful than they could ever be on their own.

You can read this and other customer success, social collaboration and cloud productivity thoughts on my blog. If you'd like to chat more about these topics directly, feel free to shoot me an inbox!