Alberto Rodrigues is the EVP of Customer Success for Oligo, and a member of Vitally's Success Network. ‍

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Automating Customer Success tasks using common tools in your software stack is easier than you might think. 

Here’s how I leveraged Slack and Zapier and more to free up time for me and the rest of our CS team. 

‍The Problem

As CS professionals, you do your work, which is to handle the customer, get things done, and make things happen. And then you need to redo your work — enter the data about what you have just done into a system of record. And that, I'm going to say, is a pain in the lower back.

So that was my motivation in looking for ways to automate repetitive CS work: How can I do my work one time, and from there be done with it?

‍The Solutions: Three Automated Slack Scenarios

1. Automated Summary and Action Items: After every customer call, my team used to summarize the call and the action items, and post all of that into our customer Slack channel.
   
   Now, we get the transcript from Gong, and I pass that transcript on to the bot we trained with OpenAI. That gives us a call summary in the format that we like, with the action items listed at the bottom.

We also created a Zap where I add an emoji — in our case, we use our company sticker — which acts as the trigger that parses the next steps. And then it creates a task automatically in Vitally and anywhere else I want it to. That saves at least 15 minutes for each call.

‍Related: Sara Bonnano’s Blueprint for Creating AI-Generated Call Summaries for CSMs at Zapier

2. Automated Emails: Most of our customers have a Slack shared channel with us, but some organizations don't use or allow Slack. Or sometimes a third party is on our call, but not part of that Slack channel. In those cases, we need to not only post the call summary and action items into our Slack channel, but also send an email to a team or to an individual.
   
   I used to copy the summary of the call in Slack and paste it into emails to send to any number of people. Now, if I add a “send email” (envelope) emoji into Slack, Zapier is going to read that message, see everyone that I tagged, find their emails, and automatically send an email to those people with the summary as well as a link to the Slack message.

3. Automated Data Tracking: We have tons of great data, but we were never able to organize it or disseminate it effectively among teams. Now, whenever there is a piece of data that should be shared internally, our team members know to tag it on Slack with a KB (knowledge base) emoji, as seen in the screenshot below. And then the AI takes the entire Slack thread and sends it to an OpenAI assistant via Zapier that basically looks and reads it, and generates a KB article.
   
   That article is then posted in two places. One is a shared Slack channel specifically for this purpose, so that channel becomes a catch-all where we can search for data. It’s also sent to Zendesk, which creates a draft of an article. And then about once a week, someone in Product goes and reviews and edits the articles and publishes them into our knowledge base. Essentially, we are building a searchable database for the data we all need to be referring to, across teams. 
   
   Pro Tip: Make sure that the OpenAI assistant is trained to get the input in any language and always to return the suggested article in English, so independently of where your Dev teams are located and their preferred language you can still easily capture and share knowledge:

‍Utilizing the Entire Software Stack

So let’s say you and I were on a call right now, with me explaining the ways I’ve automated things. A couple years back, this call would have been more stressful on my end, because I would simultaneously be taking notes, and I might have forgotten some key points.

Now, at the end of our call, I would get an almost ready-to-send-to-you summary that includes our action items, and those items would already be created in Vitally as tasks to the CSM. All I would need to do is review, make a few changes, and throw it into our shared Slack channel. I would add an emoji if I wanted that summary sent to you via email, and I would mark it with a KB emoji if there was data that I’d want summarized for the team. So life is easier right now. 

It feels like we, as a team, have been using our software stack to their full advantage — not only Vitally, which has been great, but also Zendesk and OpenAI and Zapier, to name a few. And I have to say, it’s been so helpful having Slack as the primary channel to communicate with customers. The customer can go there and ask anything and get their answer quickly and efficiently. It’s had a huge impact. It almost feels like for customers without Slack, you're back in the '80s.

Related: Improve Visibility on Customer Interactions by Connecting Thena to Vitally

The Benefits to the Team 

These three automations have been time-saving, of course. They are also good for the morale of the team. Usually you leave all the stuff you don't want to do for the end of the day. And then either you don't do it well, or you finish your day with the worst task, so you’re not really happy. Now my team can focus on doing their job, not the administrative work — or they have less of that, anyway.

These automations have also helped other colleagues — the sales team and the founders, to name a few. Instead of taking time to watch the recorded calls, they just take a look at those good summaries and easily see the data points. So that’s saving them time, and enabling them to make new connections. It gives the sales team visibility into what our team is working on, and it’s helping to bring those worlds together. 

What’s Next?

I'm trying to build a new bot that takes all the call summaries for the month and tries to find common themes: what customers are actually using, what customers are asking as feature requests, where we are aligned or not aligned. This would enable us to get some insight, strategy-wise, from all the customer calls. That’s next on my agenda.