You know what's harder than getting new customers? Retaining them. Which then brings another question. How much hand-holding should you do in order to keep your customers sticking around? 

Some users want a VIP concierge experience. Others just want to click "Skip tour" and figure things out themselves. That’s where the classic face-off of two different engagement approaches begins: high touch vs low touch customer success models.

So how do you decide which approach wins for your SaaS company? Should you assign a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to every user like Oprah handing out cars? Or do you lean into automation and let users self-serve their way to success?

In this guide, we’ll unpack both models, share practical tips, and help you choose the right approach—or mix—for your customer success strategy. 

What Is High-Touch Customer Success?

High-touch customer success is like white-glove service for your software, complete with guided onboarding, regular syncs, and deeply personalized support. It’s about meaningful human interaction that builds trust, loyalty, and long-term value. 

But of course, the high-touch approach is quite costly, since it has to involve your team members. That's why high-touch interactions have to be strategically deployed. Here's a general outline: 

When to be high-touch:

• Complex or customizable SaaS tools
  
  
• High ARR or Enterprise accounts
  
  
• High-value customers at risk of churn requiring human guidance
  
  

Examples:

• Notion assigns a dedicated customer success manager to enterprise clients for personalized onboarding and support
  
  
• Zoom offers strategic account support for large organizations with multiple user tiers and integrations
  
  

Key Tactics:

• Granular segmentation based on value and customer needs
  
  
• 1:1 sync calls to align on goals, timelines, and progress
  
  
• Tailored onboarding docs and personalized walkthroughs
  
  
• Executive business reviews and customer engagement tracking
  
  

Pros:

• Strengthens high-value customer relationships and increases retention
  
  
• Promotes deeper feature adoption across the customer journey
  
  
• Enables real-time course correction based on qualitative feedback
  
  

Cons:

• Resource-heavy and hard to scale without growing your success teams
  
  
• Scheduling across time zones adds friction to engagement
  
  

What Is Low-Touch Customer Success?

In contrast to the high-touch interactions, low-touch customer success is all about empowering users to achieve outcomes independently. Think of it as a sleek, scalable self-service experience driven by automation, in-app guidance, and smart content delivery.

Of course, it's not as personalized. But it's cost-effective, and if you leverage it correctly, it can lead to much better results than high-touch. 

When to be low-touch:

• Serving a broad customer base with varied needs
  
  
• Simpler SaaS products or plug-and-play tools
  
  
• Limited CS resources but high growth goals
  
  

Examples:

• Slack delivers a powerful knowledge base and proactive onboarding videos
  
  
• Many SaaS tools now offer tailored self-service onboarding flows by customer segment
  
  

Key Tactics:

• Contextual product tours and automation-driven interactions
  
  
• Behavioral email flows and tooltips tailored to customer needs
  
  
• AI-powered self-service via chatbot or knowledge base
  
  
• In-app feedback loops for customer satisfaction tracking
  
  

Pros:

• Easier to scale and automate across thousands of customers
  
  
• Faster onboarding and reduced dependency on human CSMs
  
  
• Cost-effective for engaging lower-revenue or freemium customers
  
  

Cons:

• Risk of churn if the self-service experience lacks clarity or guidance
  
  
• Harder to personalize the customer journey without human input
  
  
• Limited real-time understanding of deeper customer needs
  
  

How to Deploy Low-Touch Customer Engagement 

Before we go further, let's dive a little deeper into providing low-touch customer experience.

First of all, a low-touch approach doesn’t mean neglecting users. It means reducing manual interactions and engagement while still delivering a strong customer experience.

So, how do you do that? By leaning on automation and self service, you can scale highly personalized customer engagement, reduce churn, and support a growing user base without overextending your customer success team.

Here’s a step-by-step approach:

1. Build a strong self-service foundation

Start with a robust knowledge base that answers common questions and reduces support volume. Combine that with product onboarding tools like Userflow to create personalized, in-app experiences—checklists, tooltips, and product tours that guide users from signup to success without the need for high touch support.

2. Automate communication and feedback loops

Use behavioral email platforms like Customer.io or HubSpot to deliver timely, contextual messages based on user actions. Trigger satisfaction surveys or milestone check-ins to gauge engagement and flag churn risks—all without needing a customer success manager to intervene manually.

3. Add scalable support options

Deploy AI assistants or chatbots to handle repetitive queries and escalate only when human involvement is needed. This lets your manager or CSM step in with high touch support for complex issues or high-value accounts, while most users continue with a seamless self-service experience.

4. Segment users to match support levels

Not every customer needs the same level of attention. Use data to segment users by role, usage, or potential value. High-value accounts might still receive personalized onboarding and regular check-ins from a customer success manager, while others thrive with a low-touch model powered by automation.

By blending automation with targeted human interactions, you can create a flexible engagement strategy: one that improves retention, delivers value at scale, and lets your success team focus on where high touch truly matters. Which leads us to what we actually want to tell you: using both engagement approaches. 

Hybrid-Touch Engagement: Best of Both Worlds

Now that we've walked through the strengths and weaknesses of both high-touch and low-touch engagement models, you might be thinking, both of those customer experiences sound great. Well, there is an option to choose both.

Here's the thing. Customer needs don’t fit into neat little boxes, and neither should your customer success model. Some crave human interaction, while others would rather figure things out solo. Hybrid-touch engagement gives you the flexibility and scale. 

Think of high-touch to low-touch as a spectrum. A trial user might start with fully automated onboarding and get routed to a human CSM after passing a usage or value threshold. High-value customers may receive tailored support, while others navigate via tutorials and tooltips, with the option to escalate if needed.

So here's the general game plan that works well for SaaS Companies that covers all of your blind spots:

• Have personalized low-touch engagement deployed across your platform. 
• Have your CSMs selectively target users and interactions which actually require high-touch engagement. 

That way, your customer success team aren't tired out chasing every single help ticket under the sun, but you also have the benefit of being able to offer that human touch when it's needed. 

Our Final Take On High Touch vs Low Touch Customer Engagement

If there's one takeaway from this, it's that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the high touch vs low touch debate. It’s more about building the right approach to customer engagement that fits your customers, your product, and your team.

Whether you’re relying on your customer success managers to guide high-value users or deploying personalized onboarding at scale through automation for thousands of self-service customers, the goal is always to deliver the best customer experience possible that increases customer lifetime value and retention. 

So don’t just pick a model. It's not high-touch vs low touch. It's more about deciding where to leverage each one. 

Looking for a customer engagement tool to start deploying personalized low-touch interactions? Try Userflow for free, and give your CSMs to focus on high-touch clients (or take a break). 

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