Deploying AI Agents in Customer Success
AI Agents in Customer Success
Boost Retention and Prevent Churn with ServiceNow’s New AI Agents for Customer Success
In today’s competitive business landscape, retaining customers and preventing churn is more critical than ever. But with so many customers to manage and vast amounts of data to analyze, it can be challenging to stay on top of customer health and identify potential risks before they become problems. That’s where ServiceNow’s new Customer Success AI agents come in. Designed to continuously monitor customer health, flag early risk signals, and trigger success plays, these agents empower customer success teams to stay proactive and ensure customers stay on track to achieve their goals.
Why AI Agents?
1. Proactive Customer Engagement and Risk Mitigation
Customer Success AI Agents continuously track customer health by analyzing usage patterns, support tickets, and other metrics. They identify early warning signs of potential issues—like declining engagement or dissatisfaction—before they lead to customer churn. Additionally, the Success Risk Solution AI Agent suggests tailored “success plays” (actionable strategies) to address these risks, enabling customer success teams to act quickly and effectively.
2. Data-Driven Insights and Predictions
By leveraging vast amounts of data within the ServiceNow platform, AI Agents provide predictive analytics and actionable insights. The Success Trend AI Agent, for instance, uses historical and real-time data to forecast customer behavior and highlight potential risks. This empowers companies to make informed decisions and tailor their strategies to meet customer needs proactively.
3. Scalability and 24/7 Availability
AI Agents operate around the clock, monitoring customer health and supporting global customer bases across time zones. They can also manage a high volume of interactions simultaneously, enabling companies to scale their customer success efforts without significantly increasing staff. This scalability ensures consistent service quality as businesses grow.
4. Enhanced Personalization
These AI Agents can analyze individual customer data to deliver personalized experiences. By understanding unique usage patterns and challenges, they can recommend specific actions or solutions tailored to each customer. This personalization boosts satisfaction and strengthens customer relationships, making clients feel valued and understood.
5. Seamless Integration with Workflows
Built into the ServiceNow AI Platform, AI Agents integrate effortlessly with existing systems and processes. This eliminates the complexity of managing separate tools or siloed solutions. The AI Agent Orchestrator further enhances this by coordinating multiple agents to tackle complex tasks collaboratively, ensuring a cohesive approach to customer success.
6. Cost Efficiency and Revenue Retention
By automating tasks and optimizing team efficiency, AI Agents reduce operational costs while maintaining high service standards. More importantly, their ability to predict and prevent churn helps retain revenue, making them a cost-effective investment for long-term growth.
7. Addressing Potential Concerns
While adopting AI Agents offers clear advantages, companies might worry about data privacy, prediction accuracy, or the need for human oversight. ServiceNow mitigates these concerns by:
- Enforcing strict governance with built-in analytics and controls for transparency.
- Offering tools like the AI Agent Studio, and AI Control Tower which allows customization, guardrails, and visibility to align AI actions with company policies and ethical standards.
Conclusion
ServiceNow’s AI Agents for Customer Success combine proactive risk management, automation, predictive insights, and seamless integration to deliver exceptional value. They enable companies to enhance customer satisfaction, optimize resources, and maintain a competitive edge—all while ensuring control over AI-driven processes. For businesses aiming to prioritize customer-centricity and growth, these AI Agents are a strategic and impactful choice.
The Benefits: Proactive Customer Success Powered by AI
With Customer Success AI agents, customer success teams can continuously monitor customer health, flag early risk signals, and trigger success plays, empowering your team to:
- Address issues proactively before they escalate.
- Boost retention by ensuring customers achieve their goals.
- Drive loyalty through personalized interventions.
- Streamline operations with seamless integration.
- Enhance risk mitigation with targeted solutions.
- Improve efficiency with actionable insights.
AI agents not only help retain customers but also create a foundation for sustained success, turning satisfied customers into loyal advocates.
ServiceNow and AI: Paving the Way to Customer Success
With the power of AI and ServiceNow’s industry-leading, AI Platform, businesses can unlock new levels of customer success and drive long-term growth. Our agents are designed to integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows, enhancing your team’s ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale. As AI continues to evolve, ServiceNow remains at the forefront, helping businesses like yours stay ahead of the curve and turn customer success into a competitive advantage.
Meet the AI Agents Transforming Customer Success
ServiceNow is proud to introduce three powerful AI agents as part of Customer Success, found within our Technology Provider Service Management and Telecom Service Management products: the Success Health Monitor AI Agent, the Success Trend AI Agent, and the Success Risk Solution AI Agent. Each agent is built to address specific challenges in customer retention and success, leveraging the power of AI to deliver real-time insights and automated actions. Let’s explore how each one works and the unique value it brings.
Success Health Monitor AI Agent: Your Customer’s Personal Health Tracker
The Success Health Monitor AI Agent continuously tracks key indicators of customer health, such as product usage, support ticket volume, and customer feedback. By analyzing these metrics, it provides a health score for each customer, giving your team an at-a-glance view of who may be at risk. This allows customer success teams to quickly identify and prioritize customers who need attention, ensuring no one slips through the cracks.
Success Trend AI Agent: Predict and Prevent Future Risks
The Success Trend AI Agent takes monitoring to the next level by analyzing historical and real-time health data to identify trends and predict future customer behavior. By spotting patterns and anomalies, this agent can identify potential issues by, proactively, creating risks. Armed with these insights, your team can take proactive measures to re-engage customers and prevent churn.
Success Risk Solution AI Agent: Automate Proactive Interventions
The Success Risk Solution AI Agent is designed to turn insights into action. By identifying specific risk factors, this agent can automatically trigger Success Plays —predefined workflows or actions tailored to address each customer’s unique needs. Whether it’s a personalized onboarding session, a targeted check-in, or a back-to-green motion, these automated interventions ensure your team can respond quickly and effectively to keep customers on track.
Real-World Impact: How our AI Agents Work Together to Drive Success
Let’s consider a real-world example to illustrate the power of these AI agents. Imagine a scenario where a customer’s product usage suddenly drops.
- The Success Health Monitor AI Agent detects this change and passes the batton to the Success Trend AI Agent.
- The Success Trend AI Agent, can then perform an analysis to understand the issue. Assesses the health of an engagement over time and determines if there is a potential issue.
- If an issue is identified, a risk is created. If a matching risk already exists a risk occurance is created instead.
- The Success Risk AI Agent can analyze the risk, suggest or trigger a success play to resolve the risk.
The seamless integration of monitoring, prediction, and action keeps your team proactive, addressing issues early and building lasting customer loyalty.
Fast-Track Solutions with AI-Powered Precision
Customer success agents juggle countless tasks to keep their customers happy and engaged. The Success Risk Solution AI Agent is here to lighten the load by helping agents address risks and signal issues proactively—all from the convenience of the Now Assist panel.
How It Works
Available directly within the Now Assist panel, this AI-powered tool fits seamlessly into your existing workflow. Here’s what it does:
- Analyze Unaddressed Risks: Customer success agents can request the agent to analyze any unaddressed risks and signal issues assigned to them. The agent reviews these items one by one, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
- Suggest Success Plays: For each identified risk or issue, the agent suggests and appropriate success playWhether it’s a customer at risk of churn or a signal indicating low engagement, the agent offers clear, practical steps to address it.
A Step-by-Step Approach
Imagine an agent noticing a customer with declining usage. They open the Now Assist panel and request an analysis. The Success Risk Solution AI Agent evaluates the situation, identifies the unaddressed risk, and suggests a success play—perhaps a personalized outreach email or a training session to boost adoption. The agent tackles each issue systematically, one at a time, with the AI’s guidance.
Deploying
Things to consider
- Risk Identification: Categorize risks such as declining product usage, support ticket escalations, or customer dissatisfaction, as highlighted by the Success Health Monitor and Success Trend AI Agents.
- Solution Mapping: Link each risk type to a specific success play. For example:
- Low engagement might trigger a personalized outreach email.
- High support ticket volume could initiate a back-to-green motion.
- Customer-Specific Factors: Account for variables like industry, company size, or lifecycle stage. A usage drop for a new customer might need onboarding support, while a long-term client might require a strategic review.
- Severity Levels: Differentiate between critical risks (e.g., imminent churn) and minor ones (e.g., slight engagement dips). Critical risks could trigger urgent actions like manager escalations.
- Continuous Optimization: Monitor outcomes (e.g., churn prevention rates) and refine mappings based on performance.
Installing the agents
Install or upgrade to the following versions:
- Instance version Yokohama Patch 3 or newer
- Account Lifecycle Events (sn_acct_lc) 4.1.6 or newer
- Now Assist for Telecommunications, Media and Technology (TMT) (sn_tmt_gen_ai) 4.0.3 or newer
Monitor engagement health
Components installed
- Flows
- Monitor engagement health
- The flow is set as inactive by default and will need to be activated to run.
- The flow is scheduled to run weekly on Monday at 07:00 AM.
- Monitor engagement health
- Properties
- sn_cust_succ_ai_ag.enable_health_monitor_metrics (T/F)
- The default setting of this property is TRUE.
- Setting the value to TRUE considers the over all engagement health score for a given engagement when analysis is carried out. If the health score is detected to be declining, a risk signal is created.
- Setting the value to FALSE considers each health metric used to derive an over all health score. If any individual metric is noticed to be declining a risk will be created for the specific metric.
- sn_cust_succ_ai_ag.enable_health_monitor_metrics (T/F)
- Limitations
- Currently there is a limit of 10 (ten) engagements per Customer Success Manager that can be tracked at a given time. These engagement are identified by checking the field AI Health Monitor (ai_health_monitor), to TRUE
Configuration
- Navigate to Flow Designer.
- Open the flow – Monitor engagement health.
- Click Activate.
- Note – This flow is set to run at the same time as the Analyze risks and recommend solution flow. Move the Monitor engagement health flow to a few hours before the Analyze risks and recommend solution flow to ensure any risks created today will be assessed by the risk flow.
- Determine which setting should be configured for the system property. If FALSE is desired – consider each metric independently – navigate to the property and update the value.
- Navigate to a list of engagements and check the AI Monitor Health check box for up to 10 engagments per Customer Success Manager.
Testing and Verification
- Ensure the color bands have been configured for each health definition. See Color bands in Customer Success in Appendix A.
- Ensure up to 10 engagements have been identified for analysis.
- Ensure engagements have scores in the ALE.Active Engagements Health Score indicator for the last 12 weeks. You will need to synthesize a sudden decline or trending decline in the scores in to simulate a negative health trend. (pa_indicators_f72af041431412105029d1529ab8f2a2)
- As an admin, set yourself as the customer success manager for one or more engagements to be tested.
- At this point you can navigate to the Now Assist panel and see the process us underway.
- Note there is demo data in place for the Risk Solution AI agent to enable the creation of Risks or Risk occurrences. Make sure the agent and the flow are enabled before executing the test of the engagement health agent.
- Navigate to Flow Designer, open the flow Monitor engagement health and execute it.
Analyze risks and recommend solution
Components installed
- Flows
- Analyze risks and recommend solution
- The flow is set as inactive by default and will need to be activated to run.
- Decision table
- Engagement Risk Solutions
- Analyze risks and recommend solution
Configuration
- Ensure the Now Assist panel is activated - Now Assist panel on ServiceNow Docs
- Navigate to the AI Agent Studio to enable the functionality in the Now Assist panel.
- All > AI Agent Studio
- Select Create and Manage
- Find Analyze risk and recommend solution and open it.
- Click Continue in the bottom right until you reach the Select display section.
- Toggle the option on the Now Assist panel
- Click Save and test
- Decision Table
- Open the Engagement Risk Solutions Decision table and populate the rows as necessary using elements from the Risk to direct to the appropriate flow.
- Ensure the expected users have the Customer Success Agent (sn_acct_lc.ale_success_agent) role.
- Ensure the color bands associated with Metric Instance Configurations are set appropriately. For more information see: Color Bands in Appendix A below.
Testing and Verification
- The logged in user must have Risk records assigned to them that are unaddressed.
- Unaddressed risks are:
- State | changed to | Closed OR Cancelled
- State |changed from |Closed OR Cancelled AND has an associated Risk Solution
- Unaddressed risks are:
- Open the Now Assist panel and enter a prompt such as:
- Help me with my risks
- Analyze all critical priority risks
- Assess all risks for Boxeo
- When iterating trough the returned risks:
- All potential solutions will be returned and the user will be prompted to select one.
- The agent will be asked to provide values for the inputs associated with the flow which will be executed from the solution.
- Validate the success plays were created as expected.
Take the Next Step Toward Proactive Customer Success
ServiceNow’s new AI agents are a game-changer for customer success teams. By providing real-time insights, predicting future behavior, and automating proactive interventions, these agents help businesses boost retention and prevent churn. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your customer success strategy— learn more about ServiceNow's AI agents today.
Appendix A
Color bands in Customer Success
Deploying Contextual Color Bands on the Technology Community
Setup the color banding table on ServiceNow Docs
