It’s no secret that Customer Success teams today are more strapped for time, with higher customer expectations to fulfill, than ever before. As your business grows and your team takes on more responsibility, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue the manual day-to-day operations that bog your team down and take up their valuable time.

This is where automation comes in to save the day. By identifying repetitive tasks in your Customer Success process that can be automated, you’ll streamline your workflows and free up time to focus on what success teams do best: delivering exceptional customer experiences.

To get you started, here are four key places you can automate your CS process today using Vitally’s powerful plug-and-play automation tools.

Related: We Asked CSMs: Which Parts of the Job Would You Automate If You Could? 

1. CSM Assignment

One quick win to automate your Customer Success is to set up a workflow to assign Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to new accounts. Each time a new client signs on and is entered into your system, an automation will trigger to assign that client a CSM. And because Vitally easily connects to CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, you can assign new accounts in real-time.

In Vitally, you can set up a Playbook to do just that. Start by choosing a trigger that will kick off the automation — for example, if an account is created less than 1 day ago, or their first date with revenue was less than 1 day ago. 

Then, add the action Assign key role and choose CSM. You then have a few options for how to assign CSMs based on how your CS structure works: you can assign based on the number of managed accounts, amount of managed revenue, or round robin. 

If you’d like to jump to the next step after assignment you can also add another action, such as: 

• Send an email to introduce yourself to the customer
• Create a Project for the CSM to ensure their new customer is properly set up in Vitally 
• Create your first Doc to collaborate on

2. Account Segmentation

Another quick win to save time and automate your Customer Success process is through account segmentation. Instead of manually going into your system and selecting which segment each account belongs to, you can set up a Playbook to do it auto-magically. 

Creating an automation to assign account segmentation can also be a powerful tool to trigger various other actions across Vitally. For example, you may use a specific segment as an automation trigger to generate Projects, assign roles, or update traits.

To get started, create a new Playbook and set the trigger to match whichever traits determine your segments. In Vitally, users can easily define their own custom segments, making it easy to manage these different parts of your business at scale. You can also have various types of segments, including product plans, customer tiers, or customer lifecycle stages.

Next, add as many branches as you have segments and choose the defining trait for each group. Then, add the action Add to segment and choose the segment you want each branch to be assigned to. 

If you’d also like to assign a Key Role, such as someone from Customer Operations, Implementation, or any other role in your organization, you can add that as an additional step to include the right people when assigning and/or changing segments.

3. Monitor Churn Risk

Keeping tabs on your customers to make sure they’re finding success is one of the core responsibilities of a Customer Success team. But with a growing book of business, it can become difficult to keep track of every customer and, inevitably, someone will slip through the cracks. Even moreso, with more leading indicators coming from places outside of just customer interactions, it can be nearly impossible to detect signs of churn before it’s too late.

To avoid this pitfall and always stay on top of customer health, you can create an automation that alerts you when a customer is at risk and assigns a member of your team to follow up. 

In Vitally, create a Playbook and set the trigger to whatever your team considers a risk indicator — for example, if a customer hasn’t logged into their account in 30 days, if they submitted a low NPS score, or if their Vitally Health Score drops into an unhealthy range. You can also set risk indicators for product events, custom Success Metrics, or anything else you and your team determine to be a leading contributor to customers churning.

Next, add an action to Create an Account Indicator - choose the Risk category, and assign a teammate who will be responsible for following up with the customer. 

Your indicators will appear next to the account name wherever it lives in Vitally, so keeping tabs on your customers’ health is always top of mind.

And just like Risks (the red dots in the example above), you can also create indicators for Opportunities (green dots) to track when a customer is ready for expansion.

Pro Tip: Set up follow-up actions, like creating a task for the CSM to send an email to the client, to further automate this process.

4. Onboarding Workflow

Onboarding is one of the most critical stages in the customer lifecycle. If a customer doesn’t have a seamless onboarding experience, they are less likely to be successful and retain in the future. But managing the end-to-end customer onboarding process can be a challenge for Customer Success teams with stretched resources and busy schedules. 

Well-placed automation can help you save time and create consistent onboarding experiences — in Vitally, use a combination of Doc Templates, Project Templates, and Playbooks to make this possible. 

Start by creating an Onboarding Project Template filled with the tasks your customers and your team need to complete during the onboarding process. 

Then, create an Onboarding Doc Template with that project embedded so that your success team can work through onboarding collaboratively with each customer. The Doc Template can also include any other relevant information for onboarding, like links to help documentation, educational videos, and more. 

Now that you’ve set up standardized onboarding templates, it’s time to automate! 

Create a Playbook that fires when a new customer signs on and is assigned a CSM or Onboarding Specialist. From there, all you’ll really need to do is add an action to Create a Doc. Since the Doc includes the Project template, it will also automatically create that Project for the account or organization.

Pro Tip: Add an action to Create an Account Task assigned to the CSM or Onboarding Specialist reminding them to schedule their first onboarding call. 

Now, your success team has everything in place to kick off onboarding your new customer, with no manual work whatsoever! 

By leveraging automation in a few key areas of your Customer Success operations, you can save hours of time previously spent on manual work, and focus instead on providing top-tier customer service. These are just a few of the countless ways you can use the power of automation to your advantage — the only limit is your imagination.  

To learn about more ways your success team can use Vitally to improve productivity today, visit our Blueprints Library, or request a demo.