AI for customer success: Benefits + use cases

For the Avengers, there’s Tony Stark: An enigmatic billionaire with cutting-edge technology up his sleeve. With the arc reactor powering his Iron Man suit, he saved the world from Thanos’ reign of destruction.

In much the same way, there’s AI for customer success (CS): Cutting-edge technology using deep learning and machine learning to revolutionize how businesses support their customers and become the fuel for their super suit. With artificial intelligence, businesses can analyze vast amounts of data, predict needs, and deliver personalized solutions faster than you can say, “Avengers Assemble!”

Discover the state of AI for customer success, its benefits, use cases, and best practices by diving deep into CS AI with our guide.

More in this guide:

• What is the state of AI for customer success?
• What are the benefits of using AI for customer success?
• 13 ways to use AI for customer success
• Using customer success AI: 6 best practices
• Frequently asked questions
• Revolutionize CS with an AI-powered support solution

What is the state of AI for customer success?

Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving, transforming customer success and customer experience. In CS, AI-powered tools are crucial for enhancing experiences and driving positive business outcomes, leading 56 percent of CX leaders to explore new generative AI vendors, according to our Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024.

By leveraging AI in the workplace, companies gain deeper insights into consumer behavior, improve support task automation, and deliver personalized service at scale. Plus, AI-powered predictive analytics that identify churn risks and autonomous, intelligent digital agents that provide instant solutions allow customer success teams to be more proactive, productive, and efficient.

Many organizations are beginning to use AI-powered tools to create customer success plans as AI for customer success continues to evolve. With the technology’s growing maturity, more sophisticated and practical use cases are expected to emerge, although customer success AI is already making waves in the customer service industry.

What are the benefits of using AI for customer success?

According to the Zendesk AI-powered CX Report, 78 percent of CX leaders believe AI will make or break businesses. Even if you have a powerful customer success team, partnering with AI allows you to experience invaluable CS benefits that lead to growth.

Strengthened customer experiences

Customer success AI can drastically enhance customer experience (CX). There are various ways that AI improves CX, including helping teams:

• Uncover hidden patterns or insights by analyzing customer data.

• Understand needs, expectations, and preferences.

• Tailor product and service recommendations.

• Prioritize proactive service solutions and issue resolutions.

• Resolve queries from start to finish by connecting to backend systems.

This type of AI also empowers companies to deliver highly personalized interactions. More than two-thirds of companies believe generative AI can produce warm, familiar, and friendly customer experiences. According to our CX Trends Report, CS AI enables human-like interactions to happen consistently, fostering trust and enhanced relationships.

Plus, AI-powered digital agents can provide near-instant customer support, reducing wait times and improving customer satisfaction. By anticipating needs and proactively responding to customer requests, AI for customer success can strengthen every facet of CX.

Refined data analysis

Whether you’re collecting customer feedback or organizing identifying information, your data analysis process matters. By investing in AI and data analysis, companies can leave the challenges of traditional analysis behind, including scope limitations and prolonged timelines.

By using customer success AI to quickly analyze customer and company data, businesses know exactly what to automate with intent suggestions based on actionable insights derived from past conversation data. This allows teams to quickly adapt to changing environments, customer needs, and expectations, improving CX while anticipating future challenges.

Improved agent productivity and efficiency

AI for customer success allows agents to focus on what truly matters: building customer relationships. By automating tasks like data entry, intelligent routing, and ticket triage, AI allows human agents to handle complex inquiries that require customer empathy, in-depth problem-solving, and emotional intelligence.

Additionally, AI-driven insights into behavior and preferences equip agents with the knowledge that removes guesswork, allowing them to deliver personalized solutions and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Streamlined workflows with centralized customer profiles and single-view workspaces for customer interactions across channels also help CS AI improve agent productivity and efficiency.

Increased loyalty and retention

By using customer success AI to consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences, teams can build strong, long-term customer relationships, improving customer retention. AI tools equipped with predictive analytics can identify users at risk of churning, allowing businesses to intervene proactively with personalized customer retention strategies.

Additionally, AI-driven personalization creates a sense of connection and value, making customers feel understood and appreciated. This deep understanding helps teams consistently exceed expectations and meet customer needs, increasing satisfaction, reducing customer churn rate, and driving repeat business due to customer loyalty.

Enhanced scalability

AI is the key to scaling customer success operations without compromising quality. As companies grow and their customer base increases, it’s more difficult for businesses to maintain the same level of personalization without AI. Plus, it becomes essential for businesses to scale multilingual support to help customers feel supported in the language of their choice without needing translation tools.

AI-powered automation allows customer support teams to scale while providing personal, unique recommendations to all users, even during seasonal or growth-specific surges. Customer success AI also allows teams to automate repetitive tasks, enabling them to focus on high-value activities like strategic account management and onboarding.

Plus, AI-powered data analysis helps teams identify areas where businesses can optimize support processes and effectively allocate resources to support scaling teams.

13 ways to use AI for customer success

Consider using AI for customer success in these ways to create a powerful customer success playbook designed to help teams align with customer goals, drive better results, and increase retention.

1. Refine customer onboarding for lasting relationships

AI for CS helps refine customer onboarding by helping teams create personalized and optimized journeys. By analyzing data and behavior, AI-powered solutions can identify optimal onboarding paths for individuals, enabling teams to tailor approaches, improve tool adoption, and reduce time to value.

Autonomous bots and digital assistants also provide customers with instant support, answering FAQs and guiding new customers through their unique onboarding experiences. Additionally, AI can track onboarding progress and identify potential roadblocks, allowing customer success teams to proactively intervene and build strong foundations for lasting customer relations.

2. Deliver personalized, proactive service

According to our 2024 CX Trends Report, 51 percent of customers prefer interacting with bots when they want immediate service—but not because they prefer AI to human interaction. Instead, they know they’ll likely receive near-instantaneous, personalized customer service based on their historical data, including their needs and expectations.

AI for customer success also enables customer segmentation, allowing teams to test strategies or provide relevant interactions to specific groups without overwhelming communication channels. By understanding individual behaviors, preferences, and purchase history, AI can predict needs, offer proactive recommendations, and provide personalized service. Plus, conversational AI can do this without sounding like a cold, lifeless robot.

For example, customer success AI can identify customers who are likely to churn and trigger targeted retention campaigns to drive deeper product adoption by suggesting products or services that better align with a customer’s specific interests. Ultimately, AI-driven personalization creates a more engaging and valuable customer experience that connects to a customer’s specific interests.

3. Automate customer support

According to our 2024 Zendesk AI-powered CX Report, 83 percent of CX leaders believe the volume of customer service interactions will increase by five times in three years. By using AI to implement automated customer service practices and tools, businesses can meet this growing demand by immediately resolving issues to support long-term customer success.

Intelligent digital agents and virtual assistants can address common inquiries, troubleshoot basic problems, and provide self-service options, reducing customer wait times and improving overall customer satisfaction. Plus, AI agents can resolve inquiries of all complexity and provide conversational, 24/7 support, helping customers achieve their goals more efficiently. However, these chatbot benefits are not the only advantages of AI—AI-powered automation also streamlines routine tasks like ticket routing, data entry, and status updates.

4. Assist agent-led service interactions

By assisting agents, customer success AI helps businesses deliver human customer service that is more accurate and efficient. CS AI surfaces relevant information for agents—like product details, account history, and previous interactions—to empower them to quickly identify needs, resolve issues, offer tailored solutions, and suggest the next best actions. These AI-assisted exchanges help human agents guide customers toward desired outcomes while deepening customer relations.

AI in customer service tools like agent copilot also use real-time insights and customer data to analyze situations, intent, and sentiment, then provide personalized resolutions for agents to recommend. Plus, our 2024 AI-powered CX Report anticipates we’re moving toward a world where 100 percent of customer service interactions will involve AI—even those that need human agents.

5. Analyze customer intent and sentiment

AI can accurately determine the underlying meaning behind customer queries, requests, or complaints by analyzing customer interactions across various channels. This insight into customer intent and customer sentiment enables businesses to respond effectively, addressing customer concerns while providing relevant solutions.

AI’s ability to understand nuances in client tone, needs, and expectations also provides invaluable insights for agents dealing with angry customers, which can help combat customer frustration from the get-go. Additionally, AI can detect changes in customer sentiment over time, allowing companies to quickly identify potential issues and proactively prevent churn.

6. Intelligently route tickets and calls

Customer success AI can revolutionize ticket and intelligent call routing, ensuring issues are resolved efficiently and effectively. By analyzing the content of incoming support tickets and calls, AI can accurately categorize and prioritize them based on agent skill, capacity, status, and conversation priority.

This intelligent automation can also consider urgency and complexity, directing inquiries to specific account management teams or qualified agents who know your industry to reduce resolution times and improve customer satisfaction. Plus, CS AI can identify ticket and call data patterns, enabling businesses to optimize workforce scheduling and allocate resources accordingly to increase operational efficiency.

7. Map customer journeys thoroughly

With AI for customer success, businesses have the unparalleled ability to precisely map customer journeys. By analyzing vast amounts of data from various sources, AI can comprehensively understand how customers interact with a brand, enabling teams to produce visual, in-depth customer journey maps.

With CS AI, businesses can also identify customer pain points, understand needs, and uncover opportunities for growth. Plus, AI-powered journey mapping—including customer experience mapping—goes beyond traditional methods by offering real-time insights and predictive analytics to help teams anticipate customer behavior and tailor experiences accordingly.

8. Provide consistent experiences across touchpoints

With customer success AI, businesses can ensure consistent customer experiences across all customer touchpoints. Artificial intelligence can create a unified view of the customer journey by centralizing data collected from interactions on communication channels, social media, websites, email, and more. This enables human agents access to AI insights that directly impact tone and service.

AI can also recommend consistent messaging to human agents during interactions and produce accurate or similar responses for AI-powered chatbots. CS AI also enables businesses to provide consistent and on-brand responses regardless of what agent is replying to them or what channel they’re using.

Plus, businesses can use advanced analytics to identify inconsistencies in customer experiences, make similar resolution recommendations based on past experiences or interactions, and recommend improvements to build customer trust and loyalty.

9. Build trust in data security and privacy

As AI and personalization take on a greater role, our CX Trends Report has found that data protection and cybersecurity are top priorities for 83 percent of CX leaders—and AI plays a crucial role in building trust in data security and privacy. In its simplest terms, robust data encryption, access controls, and regular security audits supported by AI tools help protect sensitive customer information from unauthorized access.

AI can also detect and prevent potential security threats, such as fraudulent activities or data breaches, helping businesses prioritize customer data privacy at all levels. For Zendesk, our Advanced Customer Data and Privacy Protection enables businesses to provide trusted and secure CX with exceptional privacy and security controls. Plus, Zendesk only stores customer data, which is crucial to providing top-tier service, reducing the potential for dangerous security breaches while supporting safer data handling.

10. Offer omnichannel experiences

To deliver exceptional experiences to all customers, it’s essential to meet them where they are—no matter their preferences. Customers interact with businesses across voice and digital channels and customer success AI helps businesses deliver seamless omnichannel experiences throughout their journey.

Centralized customer data and AI-powered insights allow businesses to analyze customer preferences and understand behaviors across different touchpoints, setting the foundation for omnichannel customer service. Plus, these tailored analytics can identify opportunities for cross-channel engagement and optimization, helping businesses narrow down their most important communication channels.

AI can also enable and automate omnichannel routing, which directs requests across multiple support channels based on agent status, capacity, skill set, and ticket priority. This type of omnichannel support increases service efficiency, customer satisfaction, and consistency.

11. Produce self-service opportunities

According to our CX Trends Report, 15 percent of customers prefer using self-service channels to resolve general issues. To respect these preferences, businesses can use AI for customer success to help customers become more self-sufficient.

With AI, businesses can offer customer self-service options like:

• Digital assistants to answer FAQs, troubleshoot common issues, and guide customers through various processes
• Dynamic AI knowledge bases with updated articles, relevant information, and the latest resources
• Help centers with AI-powered automations to guide users to recommendations and solutions

By offering efficient self-service support solutions, businesses can reduce support ticket volume, improve customer satisfaction, and enable account managers to focus on nuanced inquiries.

12. Scale data analysis and predictions

Customer success AI helps businesses collect vast amounts of raw data and transform it into actionable insights. By replacing traditional collection methods and storage processes, businesses using AI for customer success can store raw data longer and more securely. Plus, AI accelerates analysis, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions based on real-time AI analytics.

CS artificial intelligence also helps teams identify complex patterns and trends that would be difficult for humans to uncover, including potential churn risks. Additionally, AI automates data cleaning, preparation, and analysis, allowing customer success managers (CSM) to focus on strategic initiatives while AI forecasts behavior. Its predictive analytics capabilities can also forecast customer behavior, allowing organizations to anticipate needs, proactively address potential bottlenecks, and optimize resource allocation.

13. Assign customer health scores

AI can assess customer health and generate comprehensive customer health scores by analyzing many data points, including product usage, support interactions, and customer sentiment. These scores provide invaluable insights into customer satisfaction, risk of churn, and potential upsell opportunities.

By identifying customer trends like churn risk and sentiment, businesses can prioritize efforts effectively and adjust customer success software to better support individuals. By using AI to assign these health scores, businesses can also use AI to intervene proactively, implement targeted retention strategies, allocate resources effectively, and support struggling accounts to maximize customer value.

Using customer success AI: 6 best practices

Customer success AI is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s a powerful, revolutionary tool for the present day. Maximizing its potential and harnessing its power requires teams to prioritize customer transparency and follow these best practices.

1. Understand your business goals

Before investing in AI solutions, know your business goals. Your customer success AI should have features—like customer health scores, predictive analytics, and collaborative workspaces—that enable teams to reach organizational goals.

According to Harry Wray, director of CX at Zendesk, business development goals should fall into specific categories: “Generally speaking, companies should establish goals aligned to variations of three or four broader objectives. These are: Improve revenue; reduce costs; improve customer experience; [and] improve employee experience.”

Consider what CX metrics, business objectives, and customer service KPIs to prioritize, then choose a customer success AI solution designed to support the completion and success of these goals.

2. Be transparent about your AI use

According to our CX Trends Report, 75 percent of organizations believe a lack of AI transparency could increase churn rate. Instead of hiding when and where you use artificial intelligence, prioritize AI transparency to highlight its ethical, legal, and societal impacts. By addressing all levels of AI transparency, businesses can build customer trust and promote accountability between customers and companies.

3. Maintain a human touch

Our 2024 AI-powered CX Report found that maintaining the human touch while implementing AI is a top concern for 81 percent of CX organizations. Instead of automating at all costs and abandoning customer empathy, keeping a human touch on all AI-powered solutions is crucial.

To help AI boost agent intelligence without sacrificing human conversations, teams need to:

• Use AI to augment human capabilities, not replace them.

• Ensure AI can provide personalized support that is equally as helpful as human support.

• Support human oversight of automated conversations to guarantee AI provides the right responses.

• Encourage direct agent contact when needed.

While human creativity becomes stronger and more nuanced with the introduction of each new technology, understanding the nature of generative AI can allow your team to control and optimize interactions—without sacrificing a human touch.

4. Use secure solutions

Your customer data is only as secure as the solutions you invest in, and 80 percent of CX organizations who responded to our AI-powered CX Report say ensuring the security and privacy of customer data in AI is their top obstacle to innovation.

To prioritize customer data protection, choose a solution that keeps security top of mind. Research your customer success software options and make sure they incorporate security throughout the customer journey. Look for features like:

• Data encryption

• Compliance with industry standards

• Access controls

• Regular audits and vulnerability assessments

• User authentication

If the AI-powered customer success solution you choose has security features designed to protect customers, it’s easier to prioritize the safety of their data.

5. Consider how AI is trained

To prioritize diversity, you should train your customer success AI to prioritize diversity, leave behind bias, and understand the customer journey. At Zendesk, our AI solution is pre-trained on billions of real customer experience interactions. This sets Zendesk AI apart from other solutions by making it purpose-built for CX and customer success, using true-to-life interactions to inform its generative responses.

“Not all AI is created equal. Realizing this vision requires AI that actually understands your customers because it was built to do so,” says Tom Eggemeier, chief executive officer at Zendesk. “Only AI trained on billions of customer interactions knows in an instant how best to serve them. And only AI that reasons and orchestrates across your systems can bring your entire operation together, front to back, in an end-to-end, secure solution.”

6. Expand the use of autonomous bots

According to our AI-powered CX Report, 86 percent of CX leaders believe AI agents will be equipped to handle questions of any complexity within three years. And as the volume of customer interactions continues to surge, expanding the use of autonomous bots across customer solutions is more important now than ever.

Zendesk AI Agents are the next generation of AI-powered bots equipped to resolve complex customer interactions on their own. When autonomous bots promptly resolve technical issues and FAQs, CSMs can focus on more nuanced tasks, like driving deeper product adoption and engaging customers, thus improving retention and meeting customer expectations.

Frequently asked questions

Revolutionize CS with an AI-powered support solution

By leveraging AI for customer success, you can create an efficient, accurate, and highly personalized service solution. From task automation and complex resolutions to behavior prediction and in-depth analytics, customer success AI empowers teams to build stronger customer relationships and deliver exceptional experiences—just like J.A.R.V.I.S., Stark’s AI companion.

Embrace the future of customer success and intelligent experiences with Zendesk AI. Our solution helps teams maximize operational efficiency, deliver omnichannel support, and increase loyalty while moving into a new, AI-powered age focused on intelligence, automation, and customer centricity.

Stay ahead of the curve and revolutionize your customer success strategy by investing in Zendesk AI today.