Last week, we published two data snapshot reports from Forrester’s State Of Customer Engagement Survey, 2024. Focused on US-based respondents at B2B firms that primarily sell software, these short reports give a unique peek into the more sophisticated side of customer engagement. The snapshots highlight some generative AI (genAI) findings, technology usage, and a (possible?) connection between the two that I’d like to begin exploring in this post.

Customer Success Respondents Appear A Bit Less Bullish About GenAI

While the vast majority of respondents agree that genAI will significantly impact their team, we spotted a curious difference between responses from customer success compared to customer marketing and B2B customer experience practitioners. Almost all (95%) of customer marketers said they expect to see short-term impact from genAI, followed closely by 85% of customer experience respondents. However, customer success (CS) respondents responded a bit less enthusiastically, with 77% agreeing that it will impact them significantly.

When we asked whether these postsale pros use genAI today in their daily work: An almost identical percentage of customer experience (92%) and customer marketing (91%) say they use genAI every day. CS respondents, while showing a high overall degree of daily use at 85%, are not quite in the same place as their customer engagement counterparts.

Does Technology Use Indicate A Lack Of CS Familiarity With AI/GenAI Solutions?

While CS respondents use a blend of general-purpose and CS-specific technologies, looking at the data shows technologies commonly used by more than one function group near the top and those used by CS specifically group closer to the bottom. For example, customer success platforms used by CSMs primarily rank only third on the list. More interestingly, standalone generative AI and sales/conversational intelligence rank in the bottom five, each earning only single-digit percentages in responses. This is surprising, since Forrester expects genAI-dominant technologies to play more prominent roles in customer-facing strategy and use.

Is It Time For CS To Step Up Its GenAI Game?

While the sample size is to small to show a statistically valid correlation, comparing the 23% of CS respondents who don’t yet think genAI will impact their function against the relatively low reported-usage percentages for conversational intelligence, standalone genAI, and other AI-heavy technologies such as journey mapping and journey orchestration leads me to wonder: Are CS teams less excited about genAI because they have yet to adopt it in ways that could show them its full potential?

In the coming months, I plan to investigate both popular and leading-edge uses of genAI in customer success and other postsale engagement activities to learn whether more CS-specific tech would help to solve key postsale concerns today, such as scaling engagement and personalizing experiences.  Or is it that the vendors focus less today on postsale teams as they aim for market adoption by presale marketers, sellers, or service teams first?  Feel free to reach out if you see targeting postsale teams as a missed opportunity (or not) to help enhance the B2B customer experience with the efficiency gains and personalization that genAI promises the market.