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 bit of a unique look into the more sophisticated side of customer engagement. They 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 most respondents generally agree that genAI stands to have a significant impact on their team’s future, there was a curious difference between responses from customer success compared to customer marketing and B2B customer experience. Almost all (95%) of customer marketers expect short-term impact, followed closely by 85% of customer experience respondents. Customer success (CS) respondents, however, responded a bit less enthusiastically, with 77% agreeing that it will impact them significantly.

This trend continues 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 everyday. 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, a quick look at the data shows technologies commonly used by more than one function group near the top and those in a dedicated-use group closer to the bottom. Customer success platforms (dedicated), for example, 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. 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 insufficient to show a statistically valid correlation, juxtaposing the 27% of CS respondents who don’t think genAI will impact their function against the relatively low reported use percentages of 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 speed adoption — or it could be a case of the tech being available, but promoting its use to postsale business functions is not a high priority for the vendors just yet. Feel free to reach out if you see this as a missed opportunity (or not) to help enhance the postsale B2B customer experience with the efficiency gains and personalization that genAI promises the market.