customer success

From strategic advisor to renewal champion, from ad hoc support provider to educator, and empathetic ear, as a Customer Success Manager (CSM) you often wear many hats. In a role where responsiveness and proactive engagement are crucial, time is your most precious asset. That’s why ChatGPT and other AI tools can be transformative in increasing productivity and impact, as they can free up a significant amount of time, so that the CMSs can focus on providing maximum value to their clients.

Here are some ways in which CSMs can use AI, particularly ChatGPT (along with a few shoutouts to other tools) to stay ahead and organized and provide personal service and attention without losing their minds.

Prepare for customer calls

Every CSM worth their salt spends a good amount of time reviewing a customer’s account prior to a meeting with them. This includes renewal dates and amounts, usage data, and, most importantly, reviewing the activity history and summaries from past meetings. ChatGPT can come in handy when it comes to synthesizing the information and creating an agenda prior to reaching out to set a customer call. A sample prompt: “Based on the summaries of the last four meetings with this client, create a three-point agenda focused on new users, feature adoption, and potential Services project.”

In addition, you can use ChatGPT to gather pertinent information about the customer that may not be directly related to your product or services. For example, you could ask it to identify a couple of newsworthy items, detect policies, industry changes or events that could affect the customer, or get a summary of the customer’s high level strategies.

A couple of ideas for prompts:

“Summarize the top 3 news stories from the past 6 months about [Customer Name] and highlight anything relevant to digital transformation or leadership changes.”

“Here’s [Customer Name]’s 2025 strategic plan. Extract the top 5 goals and suggest how our platform could align with each?”

A quick word of caution: watch for potential pitfalls like hallucinations or misinterpretation, particularly when summarizing nuanced meeting content.

Turn meeting notes into follow-ups

If you don’t already have an AI tool to automatically join your calls and provide notes afterwards (we do, but I still prefer to take notes manually with my Remarkable and then convert them to text), ChatGPT is great at rewriting notes and organizing them into action items. It also makes it a breeze to send follow-up emails. Simply ask: “Turn these meeting notes into a summary email for the client, with clear action items and deadlines.” Use the time you save to handle the action items and tasks assigned to you. If your meeting was extensive and included a number of different stakeholders, you can even ask the tool to write separate, personalized emails based on each person’s or group’s priorities, challenges, questions, and interests.

Create customer-facing resources

You probably have a plethora of resources available that you can share with customers, whether that’s white papers, your knowledge base site, product documentation, pricing sheets, or marketing one-pagers. But sometimes, your customer needs something more custom, which is where ChatGPT (and other tools, such as Google’s NotebookLM) can come to the rescue. A simple example: You have a customer who has been remiss in updating their software, so now they are a few versions behind. They ask you to give them a summary of the most important features and security enhancements that have been implemented since the last time they upgraded. Instead of combing through pages of release notes, you can simply copy the URLs of the notes and ask ChatGPT: “Summarize the key features of these releases, specifically as they pertain to security and usability. Put them in chronological order and add the benefits of each new feature.” Or you can ask the tool to eliminate jargon and simplify an array of rather technical articles into a summary for non-technical users.

Make tailored communication scalable

In order for you to serve all of your customers in a highly personalized way, it’s important that you have time to do so, and that, as counterintuitive as it may sound, involves making communication more scalable. For example, you may start an outreach campaign for selected customers in order to tell them about a set of features that they don’t seem to be using. You can have ChatGPT craft a few different versions of our email depending on their profile (number of users, SaaS versus on-prem customers, or industries. Similarly, you can use ChatGPT to plan quarterly business reviews for customers that are similar to each other based on the aforementioned criteria. This approach will make it easier for you to detect patterns, too. Here is an example prompt: “Write an email to our customers in finance to offer a QBR in which we discuss how [our product] has helped them with [initiative/goal] and discuss if and how [change in the industry] will affect them. Make the tone professional but friendly.”

Highlight proactive insights

ChatGPT can even process usage metrics and support ticket data. Simply upload your data from Mixpanel, Hotjar, Amplitude or whichever tool you have in place and ask it to provide insights for you to use in your next meeting with the customer. Those could be red flags (for instance if the customer is not using a large percentage of features, or you see declining logins) or potentially areas for expansion. A sample prompt: “Analyze this summary of [Customer Name]’s usage and tell me about trends I should ask about in my next meeting with them”. If you have a fantastic support team (like we do at Hannon Hill), you can also upload support tickets and summaries over a certain time frame and show your customers how (and how quickly) you’ve helped them or helped their end users.

Facilitate internal collaboration

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, there’s no such thing as over-communicating when it comes to your customers. I am a firm believer in keeping team members from every team in the loop. But not everybody has time to read multiple paragraphs of meeting recaps or long threads of emails. Use ChatGPT to create the right types of information for the right audience in the right channels.

A few examples:

“Summarize the transcript of this meeting into a Slack message for the product team that breaks the customer’s feedback down into: wishlist, complaints, and praise.”

“Draft a CSM onboarding brief for a new team member taking over the [Customer Name] account. Include company overview, implementation status, desired outcomes, success metrics, key stakeholders, risk factors, and next steps.”

“Summarize the latest renewal conversation with [Customer Name] for internal tracking. Include renewal likelihood, objections or blockers, contract value, timing, decision-maker insights, and follow-up actions.”

Using ChatGPT or other AI tools is not a replacement for highly personalized, high value interactions with your customers. It should free you up to do more of what matters because AI can be your bionic arm to help you be more efficient, reduce the busy work, and do things that AI is just better at than humans are, which is processing large amounts of data. The goal is for you as the CSM to drive value, build loyalty, and be a highly valuable partner.

What about you? What are your tips for CSMs when it comes to using ChatGPT?

If there’s one thing I’ve been saying at nauseam in internal conversations: There’s no such thing as over- communicating when it comes to your customers.

We’ve all experienced first hand how some organizations treat customer communication like a one-lane road, owned and operated solely by the customer success or support team. But the truth is, our customers don’t experience our companies in silos at all, so why shouldn’t operate that way? When you open up communication across teams and create visibility into what customers are experiencing and sharing, you can build a culture that’s not just customer-friendly, but customer-obsessed, which is a much better place to be in.

Here’s why I think it matters, and how you can start fostering a that culture.

Create a dedicated Slack channel

Nobody wants more meetings, so you can start with a cross-functional Slack channel for customer insights. This can be your internal hub for things like:

Good news: big wins, unsolicited praise, successful launches
Red flags: early signs of dissatisfaction, usage drops, missed expectations
Complaints: even if they’re tough to hear. You need to share what’s really going on without sugarcoating.
Challenges and blockers: recurring issues, misalignments, confusing parts of your product
Aha moments: when a customer uses your product in a brilliant, creative, or unexpected way

Don’t restrict access to the channel. Invite Sales, Product, Services, Marketing, and Leadership, and really anyone who touches or impacts the customer experience. You might be surprised by the insights that come from someone who isn’t a Customer Success Manager. A marketer may have seen a trend. A developer might immediately understand the root cause of an issue that the customer is reporting. An account executive might chime in with helpful background from the buying journey. If you’re worried about overloading your team with messages, just make it clear that not everything requires an acknowledgement, let alone a response.

Make customers a part of the weekly conversation

Sharing updates in Slack is a good start, but not everyone looks at those updates all the time, and you don’t want to miss the opportunity to drive change. Make some space in your weekly company updates or all-hands meetings for a quick customer snapshot. It doesn’t need to be a full write-up or polished presentation, just a few minutes to surface recurring themes, such as

Are multiple customers asking for the same functionality?
Did a recent update excite users or confuse them?
Are there usage patterns indicating onboarding gaps?
Were customers not aware of a newly implemented feature or a service that you offer?

These patterns should inform roadmap conversations, onboarding optimization, and sometimes even hiring.

In addition, encourage your team to stay informed and curious about what’s going on in your customers’ world that may not have anything to do with your product or service. We share at least three articles about our customers every week in our weekly updates, because it makes us appreciate everything that our customers do and how they make the world a better place.

Break down the walls between roles

One of the most impactful things you can do is give everyone the opportunity to interact with customers, especially when they can add unique value. For example, let your engineers sit in on customer success calls. Encourage your marketers to attend quarterly business reviews. Invite your product leaders to join customer onboarding calls. Empower your sales reps to loop in implementation developers earlier in the sales process (if they have the bandwidth, of course).

The point is not to flood your customers with too many touchpoints, but to bring more clarity, more empathy, and more value to every interaction. When customer knowledge lives in silos, things tend to fall through the cracks, issues get repeated, feedback loops can break down, and your teams make assumptions based on partial or outdated information.

But when customer communication is shared, celebrated, and acted on:

Product decisions feel less speculative
Marketing becomes more relevant
Support becomes more proactive
The team starts speaking the customer’s language
Empathy grows

You can create alignment not just on what you’re building, but who you’re building it for. Make everyone listen to your customers. Because when your whole company becomes part of the customer conversation, you build stronger relationships, better products, and a clearer sense of purpose.

What about you? How much communication about your customers is too much?

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