Digital Customer Success: Accelerating Satisfaction
Digital Customer Success is the exciting superhighway that companies plug into when their current Customer Success teams need to grow beyond the 1:1 human-touch model.
Digital CS adds AI, automation, and a myriad of digital tools that significantly grow a Customer Success team's abilities. It also bridges many gaps between Customer Success (CS), Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX), Community, and Support. It actually lifts all boats, making those areas work more in sync with each other.
The positive impressions customers come away with are perhaps the most important result of a well-constructed Digital Customer Success strategy.
- Customers and users feel more empowered to handle their own needs
- There is less reliance on 1:1 meetings with CSMs to get anything done
Digital CS is usually employed:
- In tech-touch or low-touch customer segments
- When the customer base grows too large for 1:1 support
- In company restructuring when addressing the appropriate number of CSMs and DCSMs needed to support the products and their customers
- In product-led growth (PLG) companies where customer interaction happens mostly within the product
Vocabulary
Digital CS: The use of technology, automation, and data to scale and personalize the customer experience—especially for large volumes of customers—without relying solely on one-to-one human interaction.
Agentic AI: goal-oriented, autonomous, multi-step planning and execution to complete tasks with minimal human input.
Digital CSMs (or DCSMs): Humans using digital technology to engage customers with medium-touch or high-touch motions, and/or running workflows based on the results of Agentic AI or digital-first automations. It's very important to understand that Digital CSMs are not lower-level assistants to "regular CSMs", but rather trained in workflows that grow the overall effectiveness of Customer Success at a company.
LAER is a profit lever with Digital Customer Success
LAER is the infinity loop to success, maintaining strong relationships and loyalty.
LAER and Digital CS work extremely well together because they both focus on optimizing the customer lifecycle from different angles.
Digital CS and LAER, working in unison
"L" = Land
DCSMs and CSMs work together to ensure that every new customer lands well, no matter the size or scope of the contract. This is especially true if the Customer Success team reports to the sales org rather than within a customer team.
"A" = Adopt
Adoption is where Digital CS really shines. Here, DCSMs are companions to AI and automation, ensuring product adoption happens at scale, fast, and with minimal friction.
"E" = Expand
DCSMs make expansion a proactive action. Working in a way that's very similar to a channel enablement team, DCSMs take the burden of connecting all the expansion dots off of marketing and product teams. They educate customers to make the most purposeful decisions possible.
"R" = Retain (or Renew)
Digital CS teams monitor licensing, renewal dates, and overall risk indicators, making engagements happen long before expiration is set to happen. This maintains CSAT because customers feel like they are taken care of.
How Digital CS helps existing teams
Digital CS + Community
Digital CS + Enterprise CSMs
Digital CS + Enterprise CSMs
Are forums still a thing? Absolutely. The best way to engage (and track) customer engagements and satisfaction is through a well-structured online community. If a company is performance-driven, then a huge amount of the tracking of KPIs or OKRs is done by connecting triggers from their online community (and its users) directly to modules in their CRM.
Digital CS + Enterprise CSMs
Digital CS + Enterprise CSMs
Digital CS + Enterprise CSMs
Our team of experienced customs brokers has a deep understanding of the customs clearance process, including tariff classification, valuation, and documentation requirements. We work closely with our clients to develop custom solutions that meet their unique needs and ensure a seamless import or export experience.
Digital CS + Product
Digital CS + Enterprise CSMs
Digital CS + Product
Digital CS teams play a powerful, often underutilized role in helping Product teams build better products, faster. DCSMs are on the front lines, working in scaled customer engagement, gathering early signals on issues, behavior insights, and working feedback loops. Through Digital CS, product teams can better capture data like Diffusion of Innovations, which measures product and version adoption.
Digital CS + Support
Digital CS + Enterprise CSMs
Digital CS + Product
Most customers are self reliant. The old rule of thumb was 80/20, where 80% of customers preferred to handle things themselves but 20% needed help from Support. Today that's more like 90/10, and thanks to deflection tactics offered by Digital CS, many customers within that 10% are able to "feel supported" without ever needing to speak with a human on a Support Team.
Chris Bové - Head of Customer Success
Having spent the last several years as a results-driven head of Customer Success teams, I've led high-performance strategy and execution in SaaS, Subscription, D2C and B2B environments.
These digital and human-first CS teams have a proven track record in LAER strategy. We have driving net-new customer adoption & onboarding, expansion, and complex retention workflows through scalable success programs that highlight customer advocacy, proving that Digital CS is a profit lever, even for companies who track financials using for EBITDA.
Customer-Centric Culture
Being passionate about fueling long-term growth and loyalty only goes so far. It's not until the culture in a company changes will CS truly shine. The first step in this direction is to get skilled in syncing customer needs with business goals. This mitigates churn, boosts NRR, and enhances CLV.
- Construct the best possible ecosystem for this to thrive
- Create cross-functional agendas with teams in Product, Customer, and Marketing to deliver best-in-class customer/user experiences.
- From scratch, build, train, and direct teams to create and maintain revenue retention, even in industries and cohorts experiencing downturn.
- Drive empathy-first performance models to help those teams throttle success through touch points driven by the customer’s actions.
Accomplishments
- Highest NPS-scoring manager in the customer division.
- Created Digital CS workflows rescuing $1.2m from impending churn.
- Strategy change in retention campaigns increased reply-rates from 2% to 18%.
- Training of Digital CS team in new de-risk strategies increased rescue rates in 2023 from 48%-75%, and in 2024 from 75%-90%.
- Recognized by two CEOs for invaluable contributions to products and their onboarding.
Driving outcomes in Digital Customer Success Management
Chris Bové strategized and led a new Digital CS Team with great success, and all during a transition from public to private ownership (private equity). Scroll below for the details.