Postsale teams responsible for customer retention, growth, and advocacy gain from adopting AI to automate tasks and support interactions. They should start preparing now for the inevitable changes AI represents for postsale engagement. Our recently published research outlines common starting points and more advanced ways to put AI to work. Here is some of what we found.
Common Starting Points Involve Conservatively Scoped Projects
Starting with smaller projects — focused on helping team members learn AI principles, the tech’s limitations, and how to adopt it safely — brings measurable benefits quickly. Our research found leading teams using AI to:
Prepare proactively for customer interactions. Customer success managers (CSMs), marketers, and service reps are using AI to pull together transcripts and notes from previous interactions, support-ticket text, product histories, and usage data to build account briefs and to generate health scores that help them prioritize which accounts to focus on and what to say in their next interaction.
Tap into customers’ experiences to source more authoritative content. The rapid rise of AI search requires B2B teams to create interconnected content clusters that search engines and AI platforms favor when synthesizing answers. Customer experiences, service cases, and advice from community members and internal experts represent some of the richest sources of material for this type of content.
Increase consistency and quality of customer-facing employee interactions. CSMs and service agents benefit from periodic coaching and interaction-quality reviews. AI helps scale this process when used to review call transcripts; help draft quarterly business reviews, emails, and other standard communications; and automatically benchmark performance against standardized best practices.
Use signals to mitigate churn or spot current-account growth opportunities. AI helps postsale teams achieve new levels of understanding and insight into customer relationships. These AI-driven signals and data help to inform, design, and manage customer dashboards, monitor health scores, understand sentiment, detect potential risks, and spot accounts ready to try out a new feature or upgrade to a new product.
Advanced Approaches Enhance Customer Experiences
While the use cases for internal productivity proliferate, most postsale engagement teams continue to dabble. AI-driven change is happening now, and customer-facing teams should take bolder action with even bigger steps that transform their customer experiences. Advanced adopters are using AI to:
Power chatbots that assist CSMs, service reps — and customers. Across postsale teams, customer service and customer success benefit greatly when using AI assistants or chatbots with conversational interfaces. These tools help service agents — and even customers — ask questions using natural language and receive more relevant and specific answers. When turned toward customers, AI helps make self-service use cases more attractive and effective.
Build account-specific microsites augmented by RAG-based interfaces. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps customers engage with AI using natural language to better find and use information. When applied to building customer portals or microsites, the AI can use customer context to answer questions within their specific domain, improving self-service and delivering more personalized experiences.
Create video-based avatars that use LLMs to engage conversationally. Using generative AI to convert text or audio into video offers a new ability to create avatars that can deliver a tutorial, answer questions, conduct a demo, or market a new product release to customers. Technology from providers such as HeyGen and Trupeer lets postsale teams record without a camera, perfect scripts automatically, and translate content to different languages on the fly — saving hours of time in video content production.
Elevate Your Use of AI To Create Postsale Impact Now
While these postsale engagement examples may sound basic or routine to some, getting them to work effectively is not easy. Read the research — or view our recorded webinar — to learn the challenges that postsale teams struggle to address and examples of upfront planning, cross-functional collaboration, and ongoing change management that help some teams succeed faster and better. Forrester clients can also request a call with me to discuss their current plans and how they might better use AI to elevate their customer experience.
