Scale Customer Success
with Cast Automation

Introduction

Cast scales Customer Success and post sales with automation, driving the same value as human Customer Success Managers but focused on accounts without dedicated CSMs.

Cast offers end-to-end automation that drives expansion revenue for you and customer success and health, product adoption, retention, and impactful outcomes for your customer accounts.

Use cases for scaling customer success and account management functions range from simple Digital Business Reviews — the digital equivalent of QBRs — with personalized insights and personalized recommendations to a sophisticated end-to-end automation engine that is aware where a user is in her journey with your product.

Cast personalization is aware of user personas and uses data to personalize the content, i.e., insights and editorials, delivery, i.e., in-app for users and presentations over email, text, slack, for non-users or executives.

Scaling Moments of Truth

Moments Of Truth

Customers have several interactions with your business. Examples include interactions with a website, mobile app, chatbot, sales, customer success, support department, collections, account managers, and more.

Paraphrasing Wayne McCullogh (CCO, WalkMe), Moments of Truth are all customer interactions or touch-points a customer has with your business. All Moments of Truth should be positive.

Customer Success centric Moments of Truth

Customer Success has several customer interactions over their journey with your product. From pre-boarding to onboarding, activation, product adoption, retention, advising, recommending, helping renew and expand, to off-boarding.

1. Several customer interactions result from a playbook execution triggered by an identified risk, an identified opportunity, or an occurrence of an event.
2. Other customer interactions are periodic and scheduled, for instance, a quarterly business review or its digital equivalent, the Digital Business Review.
3. Customer Interactions can be ad-hoc and initiated on-demand by a customer. For example, a champion announces she is leaving the customer company.

Moments of Truth at Scale

Intimate customer relationships are relatively easy to maintain when your customers number in the hundreds and you have a named CSM on a small portfolio of customers.

However, replicating that white glove experience that adds the special, memorable moments to a customer's experience is much more difficult when customers number in the thousands or even millions, where a CSM may not be assigned. — Brian LaFaille, Google.

Scaling Moments of Truth with Cast Automation

Several simple interactions can be automated using email or push notifications, and several others require CSMs to connect with customers. However, not every interaction can be or should be automated.

Several complex interactions resulting from a playbook trigger or periodic and scheduled Digital Business Reviews are automatable with Cast.app, without requiring CSMs, helping scale Customer Success.

We will go over how that is possible.

Personalized Moments of Truth At Scale

Cast.app scales customer success by digitizing interactions between a company and its customers. For digital interactions to be effective, they have to be personal — personal to each user at a customer account. For example, the interactions can focus on strategy for the C-level executive, operations and efficiency for the Director/VP operator, and tactics for an individual contributor.

With Cast.app, you can generate interactive video presentations for each user at your account. The video presentations are data-driven and meticulously explained by a digital presenter who records all feedback and calls to action. Examples of calls to action include renewals, expansion, invitations to webinars, etc.

Simple to Sophisticated automation

You can start by automating the QBR or one playbook for a specific segment and then iteratively digitizing additional playbooks for additional segments.

You can end up with your very own sophisticated automation engine that works for your business and your users.

Personalized Moments of Action

Personalized Moments of Action

All data-driven and interactive Cast video presentations have one or more personalized "calls to actions" shown to the "right user" at the "right time" in their journey of using your product. We call them personalized moments of action.

Cast Digitized playbooks via Cast.app is personal to the user you are reaching, her role, the segment her account belongs to, and where the account is in their journey. All personalization happens based on the data provided for each user and account.

Data-driven Cast Video Presentations

In Cast, you provide user and account data, which is used to personalize Cast video presentations.

User Data is the data about each user, i.e., contact, at your customer accounts — E.g., first name, email, cell, role, renewal authority, is-a-champion, is-an-executive, interests, responds to surveys, etc.

Account Data is data about your accounts. E.g., SMB vs. Commercial segment, last renewal date, licenses, features or products purchased, account health, etc. Account Data also drives visualizations, editorials, fields, snippets, personalized recommendations, narrations, benchmarking and comparisons, and gamification and 'shamification.'

Personalized recommendations

In a Cast Project, you specify calls to action along with triggering conditions. Calls to action are shared with users as personalized recommendations and only when it makes sense for a specific user. Personalized recommendations avoid overwhelming users with insights by making the recommendations highly relevant to each user.

Personalized recommendations can be renewals, up-sells, add-ons, cross-sells, offers, invitations to webinars, suggestions to join a community or consultation with a specialist.

You typically set up calls to actions once in the project, and they are conditionally shared based on user and account data. So, for example, renewal recommendations and offers will appear close to the renewal date. You may choose to share a recommendation to save money by switching from a monthly to a yearly subscription right after the monthly renewal date.

Recommendations do not always have to be about revenue expansion. For example, recommending 3rd party products that you do not sell, increases stickiness, builds trust, and improves your relationship with customers.

In Miracle on 34th Street, Kris Kringle directs one shopper to another store because the desired item is not available at the store they were in. Initially confused but clearly impressed with the honest and useful information, she informs the store manager that she will become a loyal customer (for life). — Wayne McCulloch, WalkMe.

Cast Projects and Scenes

Scenes in Cast are a building block. A Cast Project is a collection of scenes. A scene has data-driven visualization or an editorial, narrations that may have data-driven fields (e.g., last-renewal-date) and snippets (e.g., account-adoption-benchmarking), and an appearance (background images, colors, etc.)

Creating Cast Project

1. Create a Cast Project by cloning a starting project template, a project created by your team member, or a project created by an expert and shared with the community.
2. Drag scenes of interest into the Cast Project Workflow.
3. Create a storyline without binding any data to get feedback from your stakeholders.
4. Edit the design (visualizations or editorials), narrations (subtitles and spoken content), and appearance of each scene. Narrations and visualizations make use of data-driven fields and snippets.

Connecting Data to a Cast project

As mentioned in the above sections, visualizations in scenes and fields in narrations are all data-driven.

You can bring data into a Cast project in several ways.

1. Upload a CSV file or paste data directly in a Cast data grid. You can export a report from your CRM, CSM, advocacy, support platform. This is the fasted way to get started.
2. Provide data in Google Sheets. You can export a report from any of your platforms.
3. Provide data from cloud databases and Data Warehoueses. Cast support 55 different data sources and Data Warehouses. You can use the Cast built-in reverse ETL engine to bring data from any Data Warehouse easily and quickly for creating Cast Video Presentations.
4. Provide data via an API for high-volume video generation. You will need your developer's assistance to use the API.

Data-driven Narrations

With fields and snippets, your narrations can become quite powerful and personalized.

Fields

When you build a Cast scene, you will create a list of narrations to make a compelling narrative. To personalize the narratives per user (contact), you use fields and snippets.

Fields are variables you can create using our field editor. An example of a field you can create is "$number_of_licenses_bought". Once you create a field, you can use it in narrations to generate sentences. E.g., "Thank you for purchasing $licences-purchased licenses."

Snippets

You can create complex and useful phrases or sentences using Snippets. For example, you can make the Snippet: "$recommend_licenses," which based on $number_of_licenses_bought and $number_of_licenses_used, can recommend an upsell by creating a snippet that says:

"We noticed that you used 4 out of the 5 licenses you bought, or 80%. We recommend speaking with your account manager to discuss additional licenses so you don't pay for overages."

Surfacing Insights and Personalized Recommendations

One of the great things you and your team can do when you have datasets and fields is to build upon them to surface relevant insights for your customers.

For instance, you can build powerful insights like comparisons and benchmarks with these building blocks.

Let's take the example of building a Benchmark. Let's say your product is a Business Intelligence tool, and you want to benchmark your users on queries performed versus other users on their team and users in similar teams.

• You can create three fields.

1. $user_queries, which will tell you how many queries a given user performs.
2. $median_user_queries_on_team and
3. $median_user_queries_on_similar_teams using the "median" calculation in fields.

• With these three fields, you can build a snippet to surface insights with the logic of your choice.
• For example, queries are within 20% of the $median_user_queries_on_team or $median_user_queries_on_similar_teams, you can say:

"Good Job, the number queries you performed are inline with the amount performed by your team."

• If they are below 20%, you can offer a prescriptive recommendation.

"We noticed that your query usage is significantly less than your team members."

"We'd love to help you be more successful. Click this link to schedule a meeting with a customer success engineer on our team so we can help you get the most out of this tool."

• And, of course, you can congratulate those whose query usage is 20% above their team's median.

In this way, with fields and snippets, you can surface relevant and helpful insights and recommendations that are hyper-personalized to each of your users.

Datasets

How to use and validate datasets? You can start with one of our template scenes and provide an updated dataset.

For example, you can start with a Monthly Usage scene, which has a corresponding line visualization, and supply it with line data for your accounts.

Cast Data Onboarding

Adding data to Cast is relatively easy, thanks to the powerful Cast Data Onboarding feature. During Data Onboarding, we ask that you provide data for a specific visualization type (i.e., line data, metrics data, contact data, etc.). We can then run validation to ensure that your Data does not have any errors and is in the correct format to be supplied to a Cast scene.

Digitizing Playbooks for Scaling Customer Success

To get the maximum mileage out of Cast,

1. Digitize playbooks that work effectively for high-touch CSM-lead accounts
2. Use standard triggers to activate a digital playbook, e.g., drop-in usage, identified opportunity, identified risk, change in champion, drop-in Customer Effort Score or NPS, etc.
3. Generate a personalized Cast video presentation created on the fly and delivered and presented to each affected user at each affected account.

Scenes — The building blocks

In a Cast project, a scene is a building block — similar to a static slide in a presentation — which along with the data you provide, helps create both personalized content and recommendations for your customers, or more precisely, the individual users or contacts at your customer accounts.

Scenes themselves and the content in scenes are conditional - they may or may not be shown to a user, depending on the user's profile and interest. For example, do not upsell feature A if the customer is already using feature A.

Prebuilt scenes

Cast provides several scene templates for you to use. You can swap out the data and narrations and use them immediately.

Like any presentation, a cast video presentation begins with an introduction scene. To create a 3-4 minute effective Cast presentation, add 6-10 scenes additional scenes.

We have several template scenes pre-configured in Cast. All you have to do is

• Drag and drop them into the workflow and
• Configure them with data

You can create video presentations in just minutes. We have categorized the scenes below by type.

Introduction and agenda

Just like any presentation, set the stage, welcome the user, share an agenda, or congratulate them on how long they have been a customer.

Usually, select one scene from this category.

Navigation Scenes

A Navigation Scene lets users choose their path while watching a Cast Video Presentation. A navigation scene always presents options that users can choose from to see different sequences of scenes.

For example, users can select between "SMB," "Commercial," "Enterprise," or "All" navigation options.

Strategic Scenes

Strategic content is shared best as a checklist or an editorial scene. Editorial scenes visualizations usually aren't data-driven, but their narrations may take full advantage of fields (e.g., $NPS-score), which are data-driven.

You may share the past quarter achievements, next-quarter goals, and action plan to achieve the goals.

Pre-boarding

You typically do not assign CSMs to free or trial accounts. You can, however, use Cast automated/virtual CSMs to convert customers if you support freemium and free-trial models.

During pre-boarding, share the value customers would get once they become paid customers. Share expectations on how long it will take to onboard and customer and vendor responsibilities for successful onboarding. Share white papers, testimonials, marketing, and sales collateral as appropriate recommendations for the users.

Onboarding

Remember, you are onboarding users and non-users — economic buyers, executives, and others — who may never login into your product. If the executives understand the value they get from your product, they will walk through walls to help you with product adoption, activation, and success.

Welcome users to your product. Share about departments customers will be working with (Customer Success, Implementation or services, Customer Support, and account management). Share expectations and how they can get the most out of the product, how long it will take to onboard, customer and vendor responsibilities for success, and how you will build a CS plan together. Share valuable resources relevant to each user by their role (support portals, community, documentation, workshops, webinar recordings) as recommendations.

Retention and Adoption

The customer is activated. Now the focus changes to continued adoption and retaining them. So, share product and feature usage, trends, and user activity. Offer re-onboarding to inactive users. Share about license deployment, and value received. Share relevant new products and features and their value as recommendations.

Support and Operations

Report on support usage and compare the support usage with other similar customers. Too little and too much support usage is indicative of a problem that can be an early indicator of churn. Support should go down for mature customers post-adoption. Share support experience and metrics and how they match SLAs. Share details of product quality and status of feature requests.

Relationship and Engagement Strength

We need to know the account relationship strength. You can use the Komiko Score and Trend to determine relationship strength, NPS, or Customer Engagement Score (CES) to figure out how engaged executive sponsors, champions, and users are.

Renewals and Expansion

Identify and mitigate renewal risk. Offer renewals update and discounts or incentives for early renewals. Offer discounts for annual conversion, multi-year contract conversion. Expansion upsell, add-on, cross-sell recommendations.

Managing Feedback and Advocacy

Capture feedback directly in cast video presentations and record them in your system of record. Reach out to people who gave an NPS score of 9 and 10 to be advocates and leave reviews on G2.

Benchmarking and Comparisons

Share Benchmarks for accounts across segments, cohorts, comparing user progress and usage. Compare user usage and correlate with success. Use selective Gamification and Shamification techniques to drive usage, adoption, retention.