What are the key points of tech-touch, low-touch, and high-touch essential to customer success, and what is the concept of "digital high-touch"?

Lately, many people have probably started hearing the term "customer success" when making proposals for marketing or service design.Customer success is a concept that emerged with the proliferation of subscription services. It involves proactively engaging with customers to guide them toward success and encourage continued service usage. In customer success, it's crucial to divide customer touchpoints into three stages—high-touch, low-touch, and tech-touch—and utilize resources efficiently and effectively. We'll explain the key points for each touchpoint and also introduce the recent trend of "digital high-touch."

Customer Success: Critical for Subscription Businesses

Customer Success literally translates to "customer's success." It refers to the medium- to long-term support efforts aimed not just at getting customers to purchase or subscribe to products or services, but at guiding them toward success and growth through the use of those products or services. The goal is to increase customer satisfaction, encourage continued use or additional purchases, and thereby maximize the company's profits.

Customer success is considered a particularly important perspective in the subscription business, which has been expanding in recent years. In a subscription model, the company earns profits by charging a fixed fee based on the usage period, not just from a one-time purchase. Therefore, it is necessary to actively engage with customers who have already subscribed to encourage them to continue using the service.

For example, major e-commerce platforms have systems that send alert emails to customers who simultaneously purchase honey and infant products, warning that "Honey poses a risk of botulism when given to infants." This prevents undesirable outcomes for customers after purchase, ultimately leading to higher customer ratings.

Evaluating the optimal approach across three tiers: high-touch, low-touch, and tech-touch

One crucial metric in customer success is LTV (Life Time Value). LTV calculates the total value a customer brings to a company over their lifetime through purchases of its products and services. It is generally calculated using factors like "average customer value × profit margin × purchase frequency × retention period."

In customer success, it's said to be crucial to categorize customers into three tiers—High Touch, Low Touch, and Tech Touch—based on this LTV and customer touchpoints, and to implement the optimal approach for each.

"High-touch" involves providing individually optimized, intensive support to a small number of customers, such as major accounts, where LTV is expected to be high. "Low-touch" provides careful support, requiring a certain level of personnel and effort, to customers who may not be major accounts but still impact revenue. "Tech-touch" targets the large volume segment that constitutes the long-tail market, where LTV is lower, using digital technology for collective engagement.

Approach Methods and Success Factors for High-Touch, Low-Touch, and Tech-Touch

Now, let's examine the specific approaches for high-touch, low-touch, and tech-touch, along with the key points for success.

High Touch

High-touch, also called "human touch," targets the segment with the highest expected LTV. It focuses on large corporations and major clients, assigning dedicated account managers for meticulous follow-up via phone or in-person meetings. Beyond its high cost-effectiveness, the smaller customer base compared to low-touch or tech-touch allows for more intensive support.

It also allows for flexible, individualized responses, such as customizing contract plans. Investing a certain level of cost to enhance customer satisfaction helps prevent churn and build stronger relationships, ultimately maximizing LTV. The key to success is emphasizing elements of "emotional impact and trust" to maintain a positive relationship with these loyal customers.

This high-touch approach isn't limited to existing large customers; it's sometimes applied to new customers as well. Achieving customer success early in the service relationship makes it easier to retain them long-term and maintain a high LTV.

Low-touch

The mid-tier low-touch segment targets customers who generate higher revenue than tech-touch but less than high-touch. Support approaches fall between high-touch and tech-touch. Primarily, this involves less individualized support, leaning toward more generalized assistance or group-oriented approaches like workshops, seminars, and events. Since multiple customers interact at these venues, success hinges on creating an atmosphere of "comfort, enjoyment, and delight" felt on-site.

Furthermore, since the Low-Touch segment holds potential to grow into the High-Touch segment, individualized support is sometimes provided to foster better customer success.

Tech Touch

Tech Touch targets the largest segment—users of low-priced services or small-scale clients—whose LTV is expected to be low. Also called "digital touchpoints," it employs chatbots, automated email delivery, and FAQs to resolve queries. Due to the nature of the long-tail market, this segment includes users with diverse needs. However, leveraging digital tools enables consistent service delivery to the many customers classified here.

Providing high-touch equivalent support to an unspecified large number of people would exceed a company's capacity limits, ultimately leading to decreased customer satisfaction. To solve this problem, the approach of leveraging technology to achieve efficiency and uniform responses is the very essence of tech-touch.

To optimize the customer experience at each tier and drive customer success, a key perspective is how to implement tech-touch strategies that balance efficiency and effectiveness.

While high-touch, low-touch, and tech-touch are fundamentally considered based on LTV, the specific boundaries defining high-touch versus tech-touch vary depending on each company's marketing strategy, meaning the approaches mentioned above are not the only possibilities. Furthermore, classification methods using other criteria besides LTV exist, such as loyalty (affection and trust toward the company or brand) and IT literacy.

High-touch leveraging digital. What is the new customer success born from the pandemic?

In high-touch, low-touch, and tech-touch approaches, the allocation of human resources is a key point.While direct customer contact is crucial for high-touch and low-touch approaches, the pandemic has made face-to-face communication difficult, making it challenging to improve customer success using traditional methods. To maintain thorough follow-up even in this environment, the concept of "digital high-touch" emerged. This leverages digital technology to deliver the same level of emotional connection, trust, and enjoyment as in-person interactions.

Representative examples include online business meetings, live commerce, and events held in virtual spaces. These are widely adopted not only for infection prevention but also for their convenience in connecting with customers anytime, anywhere. With the proliferation of systems like web conferencing and video streaming, such approaches will likely increase and become commonplace.

Furthermore, going forward, digital technology may not only replace face-to-face communication but also enable higher-quality communication precisely because it is digital. For instance, in the entertainment sector, a new live format has emerged: creating stages that fuse artists' performances with technologies like CG, then simultaneously streaming them worldwide. This delivers the thrill of a live show to hundreds of millions of viewers without requiring an audience.Using synchronized digital light sticks and live chat, audiences and artists can interact, creating a more unified stage experience. This isn't merely a "substitute for live shows with audiences"; it offers a fresh, stimulating experience only possible through digital means. Applying these techniques to marketing could help compensate for the loss of "emotion and trust" – the core elements of high-touch communication – even as face-to-face interactions decrease, potentially enhancing effectiveness.

Indeed, recent live commerce initiatives increasingly emphasize interactivity. By leveraging chat and polls, they not only replicate the conversations and experiences once shared in-store but also achieve "one-to-many" customer engagement—something difficult face-to-face. While traditional high-touch strategies primarily focused on face-to-face communication with a limited audience to boost LTV, digital tools now enable simultaneous engagement with many while providing personalized, attentive follow-up.This represents one of the prime examples of digital high-touch.

Even after the pandemic subsides, as DX advances across society, the trend of integrating or mutually complementing real and digital elements in various scenarios will persist. High-touch initiatives, traditionally rooted in face-to-face interactions, have the potential to evolve into more efficient and effective approaches for gaining "emotional impact and trust" by leveraging rapidly advancing new digital technologies.

Tech-touch, low-touch, and high-touch represent a philosophy aimed at achieving customer success by efficiently utilizing human resources and providing follow-up tailored to LTV.In the new normal era following the pandemic, while physical touchpoints have decreased, the era of "Digital High-Touch" has begun. This leverages diverse digital technologies to deliver richer customer success. To achieve high satisfaction while interacting with many customers simultaneously without neglecting personalized attention, it is crucial to consider how to effectively utilize digital at each touchpoint and find the right match between initiatives and technology.