How AI Can Close The Post-Sale Gap And Turn CX Into A Revenue Driver

Christopher Miller is the VP of Product for AI and Growth at HubSpot.

Today, most businesses deliver great experiences for their prospects. They spend time wooing them, understanding them and connecting and engaging with them in order to encourage them to convert. But for too many, this experience ends once a prospect becomes a customer. In fact, most customers don’t hear from a business again until there’s an issue that needs to be resolved. We call this the post-sale gap, and it’s leaving a huge hole in customer experience (CX) that businesses need to close.

To make matters worse, when customers do hear from a business, 98% find customer service interactions frustrating, according to our research. The customer journey doesn’t end once a prospect converts. In many ways, that’s where it begins. It’s clear we need to not just close the post-sale gap; we need to make CX better, more proactive and more customer-centric.

Traditionally, the answer to solving CX challenges has been to add more support personnel to meet growing demand. But as we’ve seen in recent years, depending on headcount to drive growth in an economy where budgets are shrinking isn’t the answer. I believe that closing the gap isn’t about doing more. It’s actually about doing less but doing it well. This is possible by focusing on two key areas.

• Connecting customer-facing teams.

• Using AI to power customer experience.

Connecting Customer-Facing Teams

One of the key challenges to closing the post-sale gap is that too many businesses operate their go-to-market teams in siloes. Marketing interactions aren’t connected to sales, and when the prospect converts, service teams are still starting from zero despite having a marketing and sales history. As the customer journey shifts, this issue only becomes larger as lines blur between teams.

Many companies have tried to solve this challenge by implementing connector apps and integrations to make their systems work together. But it’s no longer enough. For sustained growth, businesses need a platform that unifies all customer-facing teams and enables the flow of critical data and insights between them.

Using AI To Power Customer Experience

If unifying customer-facing teams is step one, supercharging CX teams with AI is the critical next step in closing the post-sale gap to increase retention and drive growth.

Customer success is an inherently personal craft. It requires CX teams to not just deeply understand their customer, but also be available to offer personalized guidance, making it one of the most difficult teams to effectively scale. And without an effective growth plan, bringing success together with the rest of the customer-facing teams will be a short-term win at best. This is where AI can help.

With AI, businesses can scale their support and success functions in multiple ways, including:

• Offering self-service experiences for customers like chatbots that can provide support anytime, anywhere. Advancements in generative AI mean the chatbots of today can communicate like humans, powered by natural language AI models. The most important factor to remember when building a service chatbot is ensuring that your customer data and training materials are accurate. Choose solutions that can train your bot on your existing support and knowledge base articles.

• Using AI as a sidekick for moments that require a human touch. For example, reps and customer success managers (CSMs) could use AI to pull insights to deeply understand customer problems and draft thoughtful responses. If customers need a deeper level of support than a chatbot can provide, AI is still extremely effective in helping support teams triage and resolve issues faster. Quickly helping customers is critical to improving CSAT and, ultimately, revenue retention.

• Connecting the dots between customer-facing teams to route issues more effectively and efficiently. As mentioned above, one of the biggest challenges in closing the post-sale gap is ensuring internal team alignment—whether that be status updates, quarterly business reviews or even flagging that a customer might be ready to churn. Using AI, companies can manage these internal interactions faster and at scale by surfacing the next best actions for customer success teams or themes that your customers share over the course of your conversations.

By using AI to power CX, teams can scale personalization while maintaining the level of customer service they need to reduce churn and support customer retention.

Turning CX Into A Revenue Driver

The implications of closing this post-sale gap by unifying go-to-market teams and powering CX with AI are significant. It’s no longer the case that to effectively grow your business—and your CX teams—you need to add headcount. Once businesses get comfortable with this strategy, we’ll see customer service go from a business cost center to a true revenue driver.

It’s time to prioritize support and success as areas that can play a critical role in a business’s bottom line and give CX the innovation it deserves.

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