How AI Can Align Diverse Stakeholder Objectives in High-Touch Accounts

‍The High-Touch Paradox

High-touch interaction involves frequent, personalized engagement between a company and its customers. This typically includes dedicated account managers or customer success teams who provide tailored support and build close relationships with clients. In high-touch environments, it often feels like we know these accounts inside out. Companies invest heavily, assigning entire Customer Success teams to a single account worth millions. They create success plans, build playbooks, and hold detailed weekly reviews. They track everything from product adoption to recorded calls and support tickets. This approach gives retention leaders confidence that they have created an extensive account profile, but therein lies the paradox: the accounts we believe we understand the best can sometimes lead us to false assumptions and misconceptions.

The reason? The diversity of stakeholders and their differing business objectives. A high-touch account team may not fully meet or prioritize all these objectives, nor may they effectively segment stakeholders or user groups to map their varying needs.

The Gap Between Decision Makers and Actual Users

During the sales phase, the sales team typically engages with champions, decision-makers, and a few influencers. They’re well-versed in the business objectives discussed during these sales calls. However, after the rollout, it’s the users—many of whom were not involved in the sales process—who interact with the solution. These users often have a different set of expected values, which can be very different from those of the decision-makers. This gap between business objectives and user expectations can be significant.

This chasm can be even wider in the context of platforms. Take, for example, the management of CRM platform accounts. The initial champion—let’s say, someone from operations—made the decision to implement the CRM, expecting it to drive efficiency and improve forecasting. But then, other business stakeholders emerge with their own expectations: Sales wants to reduce admin time, Finance aims to ensure accurate reporting, Marketing focuses on lead generation, and Support seeks better customer insights. Another layer—IT—adds to this complexity. The CRM admins have their own expectations, such as ease of integration, system reliability, and tech features. And of course, the account manager doesn't necessarily communicate with all these stakeholders.

It doesn’t stop there. Business values are inherently dynamic, shifting over time. These values need to be reassessed continually to align with the evolving needs of the stakeholders. In SaaS, a lot can change over the course of a year-long contract. Champions change, market focus shifts, budgets are adjusted, and new competition emerges. In 2022, many organizations adopted SaaS tools to meet specific business goals. However, the economic downturn a year later shifted their focus towards efficiency and productivity. SaaS vendors that failed to adapt to these changing needs lost clients as a result. There is no way around it: The customer journey must be dynamic and personalized.

The Consequences

This misalignment between business objectives and user expectations – and the inability to map the business needs to all stakeholders – can have serious repercussions. Blind spots can lead to the painful loss of an account with a Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) in the millions. When we overlook critical stakeholder needs, we risk losing even our most valuable clients.

Sometimes we’re aware that we failed to expand a contract or upsell due to a shortfall between the expected and delivered values of specific stakeholders. But perhaps the most concerning are the scenarios we’re completely unaware of—the missed opportunities for growth that go unnoticed. In these cases, we don’t even realize the potential that wasn’t pursued, leading to unrealized growth and missed revenue.

How AI Enhances High-Touch Account Management

This is where AI comes into play. With recent advancements, account managers, Customer Success, and revenue leaders can finally crack the code of their high-touch accounts. AI clarifies each stakeholder group’s expected business value and assesses how well the SaaS product is meeting those expectations. 

Here is how: Through advancements in large language models (LLMs), AI can analyze vast amounts of unstructured data to identify business objectives and stakeholder preferences, allowing for more focused and relevant interactions. Additionally, AI-powered user segmentation offers a detailed understanding of user behaviors by clustering them into distinct groups, allowing for tailored engagement strategies. Finally, predictive analytics allows for forecasting stakeholder needs, even with limited direct communication, by drawing on patterns and data from similar accounts. 

AI for Personalized Customer Retention

As a CTO, I’ve seen firsthand how advances in generative AI now enable customer retention teams to create dynamic, personalized journeys for their high-touch accounts. AI can analyze different user types within these accounts, pinpointing their current business objectives and correlating them with product usage. This will allow retention teams to tailor their recommendations, similar to the personalized experiences offered by Spotify, Amazon, and Netflix. With AI, we can better anticipate our clients' evolving needs, allowing us to strengthen these relationships and, ultimately, boost customer retention.