Digital journeys promise scale, personalization, and efficiency — but for most companies, they never make it off the whiteboard.

Despite the clear benefits, many CS teams stall before they start. The result? Wasted time, missed opportunities, and CSMs stuck in high-touch work that could be automated.

This article outlines a clear path forward. Based on insights from a session at Planhat Open with post-sales leaders from across industries and regions, it breaks down how to launch and scale one-to-many customer success — from targeting and messaging to metrics and iteration.

Phase 01: Identify your objective

Uncertainty is without a doubt the largest hurdle at the start of any greenfield project, and digital touch projects are no different. According to our attendees, knowing where to start posed such a significant challenge that it actually prevented most from getting started; leading to months, if not years, with nothing to show.

If you’re in this position, this section will provide you with four areas of focus for first steps. Each is fairly easy to set up, and allows you to see value quickly. Read all four and decide which would be the most impactful starting point for your org.

1. Boost adoption and advocacy

Being able to spot (and act on) customer behavior allows you to keep struggling customers on track, and turn thriving customers into advocates. To get started, set up automations based on the following common customer behaviors: 

• Low engagement: Set a threshold for engagement with your product, and if customers fall below this level, automate a notification for their CSM to reach out.  

• Detraction and promotion: Using NPS and CSAT scores, set up automations to prompt a desired outcome. For example, if someone is clearly enthusiastic about the product, trigger an automated message thanking them for their custom and asking them to leave a review on G2.  

• Power usage: Set up an automation so that customers with high usage levels get added to a ‘power user’ cohort. You can then invite them to events, include in beta testing, and request customer references. 

• Feature underutilization: If you know that a customer would get value from specific features, set up an automation where if their usage of those features is low they get sent content educating them on the utilization and benefits of those features.

  
  

2. Deliver personalization

Personalization begins with understanding. Thanks to customer platforms, extreme personalization is possible without requiring CSMs to remember vast amounts of information or manage unwieldy spreadsheets. Here are four ways to use company information to deliver more personalized service:

• Company milestones: Create templates for communication around milestone events like funding rounds or expansions to send thoughtful messages with less effort.

• Contract milestones: Set timed reminders so you can arrange check-ins at pivotal contract points like onboarding anniversaries and upcoming renewals.

• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Identify accounts that align closely to your ICP definition and have growth potential. Move them into the relevant customer cohort to nourish the relationship. 

• Co-marketing partner: Flag customers with a profile that would enhance marketing materials, then engage with them at scale to nurture those relationships.
  
  

3. Increase renewals and expansions

The decision to churn, renew, or expand is rarely made during the renewal window. Here are three ways you can use a customer platform to identify where customers may be with their decision, so timing and content of communication can be tailored to increase the likelihood of renewal or expansion: 

• Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs): Set up a trigger for when customers qualify as CSQLs, so you can act on expansion opportunities as they arise.

• NRR and renewal forecasting: Set up an automation that updates renewal likelihood based on health scores. This will help you with accurate renewal prediction and focus the effort of CSMs on customers with higher churn risk. 

• Renewal communications: If you use methods like Assumptive Renewal, set up triggers for low engagement or usage, outstanding invoices, or the submission of a formal cancellation. This will mean you can tailor your communications towards problem solving. 
  
  

4. Reduce time spent on customer comms

If your CSMs find themselves sending out hundreds of nearly identical emails to customers, that’s time they could be spending on more valuable work. Get that time back by automating the following types of correspondence: 

• Product launches and feature updates: Use templates to bulk send feature releases to the entirety of the relevant cohort at once. 

• Generalized training: Create automated campaigns to deliver product training tailored to common needs.

• New user onboarding: Create templatized workflows for onboardings including automations that send out welcome messages and resources to get them started. 

Now that you’ve decided on your desired outcome, let’s identify which section of your customer pool to start with. 

Phase 02: Segment your cohorts

The success of your digital touch initiative will depend as much on the customers you choose and how you manage the transition, as the quality of your automations. 

Here’s how to identify the right customers to include in your segmentation, and make sure they are on board with the transition:

Step 01: Define

Start by identifying which segment of your customer pool you want to put into a digital journey. As a general rule, keep your tech touch segment to around 30% of your customer base.

ARR is a common, and common-sense place to start but as you become more mature, CS teams will look at customer employee count or customer potential vs simply ARR.

Don’t feel bound to the rules you create. If smaller customers have high advocacy potential or contacts show promising career growth, include them.

Step 02: Refine

Once you have defined your cohort, divide your customer base further to provide custom treatment. There are many ways to divide customers but we recommend using criteria like:

• Engagement level

• Risk 

• Growth potential

This allows you to do things like identify your top 20 high-growth targets and top 10 high-risk customers. Then you can keep your CS team informed with dashboards and regular KPI reports.

Step 03: Manage

Once you’ve identified your target customers, reach out to them to guide them through the transition. Customers may not initially be thrilled to move from high touch to tech touch, even if the result is that they reach better outcomes, faster. So managing the transition is key.

Start with why the change is happening, not that the change is happening. 

If the story is one of improving response times and increasing the number of CSMs that can help them, they’ll realize they are gaining something, not losing something. It’s important to make it clear that this will lead to greater personalization and the benefits of scalability, while keeping the ability to escalate to senior leadership. 

Once they are on board, it’s time to go live. 

Phase 03: Measure success

Setting up a digital touch strategy clearly requires time and effort. That effort is more than worth the investment, but in order to justify it, you need to establish metrics that show the impact it’s having. 

The metrics you choose will relate to the objectives you decided upon in phase 01, so look through the following and choose one or two that will best indicate the success of your digital touch efforts::

• Click-through, conversion, and response rates: Measure engagement to gauge how well your messages resonate.

• Outcome labeling in sequences: Properly label the outcomes of your sequences to measure success, and build a dashboard to compare success of each template strategy. (Example: ‘Completed Responded’, ‘Completed No Engagement’, etc.)

• Dashboard event attendance and certification completion: Track specific outcomes within sequences, such as onboarding completion or training attendance.

• Product adoption: Check for increased feature usage upon completion of specific campaigns.

• Customer advocacy: Track increases in third-party reviews, references, and case studies.

• Retention and revenue rates: Monitor changes in renewal rates, NRR, and GRR as indicators of your program’s overall success.

Test, pivot, polish

Because customer platforms let you run different digital journeys at the same time, if you were reading this article and a few different things caught your eye as a way to solve the same challenge, you can run an A/B test. In fact, we’d recommend doing so. 

If something isn’t working, you can try something new and compare the outcomes; and if something is working, you can test minor tweaks to see if it can perform even better.

Ready to get started? Watch this video to discover how to practically apply the advice from this article in Planhat.