Let's rewind a bit: When you subscribe to the new software tool, you don't just receive an email from a dedicated account manager. You schedule a kickoff call, who takes you through every single thing like a tech concierge.
That's high touch customer engagement.
Then you sign up, receive an automated welcome email, browse the help center on your own, interact with a chatbot, etc.
That's low touch customer engagement.
Both work!
But if Netflix were to make you hop on a Zoom call just to set up your account, or if enterprise software left you to figure out complex workflows without any support, you'd be very frustrated.
It's all about balance. If we go too high touch when not needed, we burn resources. If we go too low touch when guidance is actually expected, we risk churn. The key is understanding the correct approach.
And that's what we're covering in this article on how to make the most out of low touch customer success and a high touch engagement model.
Let's start by clarifying what falls under each.
High touch engagement is like having a personal trainer for your software who's always there to make sure you succeed. It's a customer engagement model that combines personalized human interactions all together.
Instead of allowing users to figure things out all by themselves, businesses using high touch customer success provide dedicated support to help them every step of the way. So you can expect to have dedicated customer success managers, providing a hands-on onboarding process and organizing frequent check-ins.
You'll see the high touch engagement model commonly used in enterprise SaaS that requires deep integration and training, luxury services, or simply B2B software with a complex onboarding process.
Among the top advantages of a high touch strategy in this customer journey are:
High touch engagement can have its drawbacks though. Here are some common ones and how to prevent them:
Now let's look at how you can cater to different customer segments with low touch engagement models.
Low touch engagement is similar to how self-checkouts work. They're fast and generally efficient as they only require human interaction if absolutely necessary. It's also a way of prioritizing self-service for customer service employing automation and AI to keep things rolling.
In fact, instead of having one single dedicated account manager, with low touch models customers can expect instant access to help centers, chatbots, and in-app prompts directing them instead toward finding answers independently.
You should consider low touch customer service with freemium SaaS models, eCommerce stores, as well as any kind of subscription-based model where scaling is essential.
A subset of low touch is tech touch, the use of technology like in-app messaging, guides, tutorials, and workflows to provide a personalized experience without the need for much human involvement. Tech touch helps your company scale engagement and support efforts with minimal costs while equipping you with the tools you need to add a personal touch to communications.
Low touch strategies also have their own fair share of benefits:
But no touch model is going to work if you don't prevent some core challenges:
Here's a quick breakdown of the key differences for each customer success model:
Time to get to work and decide where each customer success model falls within your business:
A good rule of thumb goes like this: The more features and complexity, the more support users will require.
High touch is best for products requiring customization, training, and ongoing support. These products often have a steep learning curve or are deeply integrated into a customer's operations.
Low touch remains ideal for intuitive, easy-to-use products that don’t need heavy guidance. For instance, simple apps like productivity tools or subscription-based services like streaming platforms or freemium SaaS products fit this model.
Enterprise clients generally have much higher expectations of their services, including dedicated customer success managers to take them through custom account setups and tailored training.
These clients also want a white-glove experience that includes frequent check-ins, proactive problem-solving, and communication with someone familiar with them and the uniqueness of their business needs.
But on the other hand, SMBs and individual users actually want self-service and automation to speed up things. They expect intuitive products that won't require too much involvement from them.
Their priorities are speed and simplicity, and they may find it a frustrating experience if every question they have feels like it needs to be answered by a human, especially when they're quite basic problems.
High touch engagement gives customer satisfaction a boost through... you guessed it, plain old personalization. But this comes with high operating costs for SaaS tools that need to provide personalized training and support for each customer.
By contrast, low touch engagement cuts costs. A freemium tool giving users access to in-app tutorials and AI chatbots will likely be cheaper to manage. But an additional touch or follow-up such as email campaigns or community forums is essential for retention and satisfaction.
The best approach?
To balance them all.
The most successful businesses blend high touch and low touch engagement.
But what's a good approach to do so? Here are some examples of how you might want to implement a hybrid model:
Let's now see these examples in action.
A dedicated customer success manager will be assigned to enterprise customers initially just for onboarding purposes. The customer then gets personalized training sessions, strategy calls, and milestone check-ins. This helps the company create a stronger bond with the client and ensure they're fully using the product.
The customer success manager has an important role here as they're responsible for removing any user concerns, educating the user, and even upselling new features (if applicable).
What to expect? Higher adoption rates and long-term customer satisfaction are a given with customized, hands-on support.
Notion uses a combination of low-touch and high-touch tactics in customer success and retention. For larger organizations and enterprise customers, Notion provides dedicated customer success managers who assist with personalized onboarding, optimizing workflows, and continuous engagement to ensure the organization is maximizing value from Notion.
A SaaS tool offers automated onboarding with tooltips, video tutorials, and in-app guidance. They can then send AI-driven emails to nudge users toward activation milestones, depending on how users have engaged with the platform.
As the product's features expand, they'll add extra elements to self-service models with knowledge bases and community forums where customers can make even answers to most of their questions by themselves.
The result? Growth becomes a bit easier as the company doesn't yet have to set up a dedicated customer success team. The business will also be able to serve its entire user base as queries come in, even leaving some extra time to consider a hybrid approach.
Accelo’s customer success and support operation has grown significantly (scale) over time, thanks to the low touch approach with Appcues. Rather than changing their entire support system, Accelo improved their help center with Appcues and added in-the-moment, in-app assistance. They adopted an incremental approach, with onboarding enhancements as the first step, including a welcome modal, video tutorials, and interactive walkthroughs.
Bynder also became more efficient at sales with a self-service demo they set up via Appcues. By replacing lengthy, sales-led demos with an interactive, guided experience, Bynder increased the speed of its sales cycle by 9%, reducing the time taken to move MQL to SQL. Moreover, the self-serve demo became such a strong source of leads, that 20% of the SQLs now come through this channel.
Appcues supports businesses with in-app onboarding for low touch engagement efforts such as in-app tooltips and walkthroughs. This approach helps users get up to speed quickly with minimal friction, empowering them to navigate the product on their own.
With the platform's native multi-channel messaging for high touch moments, you can send personalized emails, push notifications, and in-app messages whenever you want to mark clear milestones. You can customize these to each customer’s journey, making sure they get the right message and feature recommendations at the right time.
Data-driven personalization via Appcues is also handy as it pulls insights from customer behavior so you can create personalized in-app experiences. For example, you could send an important message when a user completes an action or remind users they haven't tried out certain key features.
The best part is you won't need support from your development team. Appcues lets your product team design and launch engaging customer experiences with no-code workflows.
Feefo used Appcues' no-code tools to launch a new UI redesign with custom modals for teaser announcements. This approach gave them valuable insights into how customers used the app and provided a smooth user experience without extensive technical resources.
The key differences between high touch and low touch engagement are mostly related to the degree of personalization and support you'll offer.
High touch engagement means people will get personal help from experienced support agents, along with added resources like customer success managers, making it right for complex products and enterprise customers.
Low touch is all about automation and self-service options. This model is better suited for targeting a huge customer base with simple products.
Still, the best approach depends on business goals, product complexity, and customer needs. And a hybrid model will be best during transition periods or when you need to scale quickly.
With Appcues, any model, including the hybrid one is extra easy to implement. Get a free demo to explore its no-code workflows, personalized in-app messages, automated onboarding, and so much more!
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