AI-powered CS: The Ultimate Guide for CS Leaders (AI + Customer Success Summit Session)

AI-powered CS: The Ultimate Guide for CS Leaders

AI is still an emerging priority for Customer Success Leaders pushing the customer-led growth function toward a digital future. Of those using AI, 75% report they started in just the past two years. Learn with Emilia D'Anzica on how to leverage AI quickly to scale your organization.

Speaker

Emilia D'Anzica - Managing Partner & Founder at Growth Molecules

Emilia D’Anzica, MBA, PMP, is the founder and managing director of Growth Molecules™, a management consulting firm focused on protecting and growing revenue. The company aims to help organizations increase profit while maximizing customer value. Emilia is also on several advisory boards globally and an active contributor to the Forbes Council. She is a part-time Adjunct MBA Marketing Metrics Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also the Author of numerous articles, book, Pressing on as a Tech Mom, and an MBA Case Study focused on Customer Success Marketing Metrics: Enabling Clients to Realize Their Customer Success.

Watch AI-powered CS: The Ultimate Guide for CS Leaders

Additional Q&A

how are you seeing CS teams assess ROI / cost benefit analysis with AI initiatives they are pursuing?

Customer Success teams can assess the ROI and cost-benefit of AI initiatives by following these five steps:

Define the goals of the AI initiative. What do you hope to achieve with AI? Are you looking to improve customer retention, increase upsells, or reduce churn?
Identify the key metrics to measure success. Include metrics such as customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value, or number of closed deals.
Estimate the costs of the AI initiative. Include the cost of the software, the cost of data, and the cost of implementation and training.
Estimate the benefits of the AI initiative. Include an increase in revenue, a decrease in costs, or an improvement in customer satisfaction.
Perform a cost-benefit analysis. Compare the estimated costs of the AI initiative to the estimated benefits. The AI initiative will likely be a good investment if the benefits outweigh the costs.

Additional assessment tips to consider:

Use a variety of inputs to measure success - one isn't enough. This will give you a more complete picture of the impact of the AI initiative.
Consider the long-term benefits of the AI initiative. Can it positively impact customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value?
Factor in the intangible benefits of AI. AI can also improve efficiency, productivity, and decision-making.
Get buy-in from stakeholders. It is essential to get buy-in from stakeholders before implementing an AI initiative. This will help to ensure that the initiative is successful.

By following these steps, Customer Success teams can assess the ROI and cost-benefit of AI initiatives and make informed decisions about whether or not to invest in them.

To reiterate what I discussed in my presentation, AI can be used to improve Customer Success by offering:

Predictive analytics: AI can help predict which customers are at churn risk. Leverage the information to intervene early and prevent churn.
Automated customer support: AI can automate tasks like answering FAQs and resolving simple issues. Automation can free up Customer Success manager time to focus on more complex tasks.
Personalized recommendations: AI can automate customized recommendations to customers. This can help customers to get the most out of the product or service in real-time.
Upselling and cross-selling: AI can identify opportunities to upsell and cross-sell to customers, increasing CLTV and revenue.

As AI develops, more innovative ways to improve customer relationships arise.

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‍Transcript

This transcript was created by AI. If you see any mistakes, please let us know at marketing@matik.io.

Matik MC: Great. Hello, everyone. And welcome to Matik, AI and customer success summit. You are currently watching AI powered CS, the ultimate guide for CS leaders. I'm very excited to introduce our speaker today. And as I introduce her, I'm gonna have our answer or ice breaker question. What would you use AI to automate in your life outside of work? So today, we're lucky to have Emilia D'Anzica managing partner and founder at growth molecules.

Emilia D’Anzica: Hi Bex. Thanks so much for that question. I've been listening in on all the other sessions and wanted to pick something different. So I Live in Sonoma county, California. We have lots of fertile land to plant and grow crops. So I would use AI to tell me exactly when to plant my seeds and in what type of soil because I lose countless hours nerding out on figuring out what seed I should plant, when, and where it's very disappointing when nothing grows. So, I think that would be super cool and save me tons of time.

Matik MC: I love that response. It makes everyone have a green thumb, which is always good. Just a reminder to our audience. If you have any questions for Amelia throughout the session, go ahead and go to the Zoom control bar and click Q and a and drop your question there. And she will answer it at the end of the session. So I'll hand it over to you Amelia.

Emilia D’Anzica: All right. Thanks so much back. And thanks to everyone who's joined us today, we're going to spend the next 2025 minutes together and really learn about AI and how you can use it as a leader. But since I can't see any of you, I thought it would be fun to start with all of you. Pascal is going to put up a poll and I'd love to learn a little bit more about how your company is using AI. So curious for the people who are on the call today, how confident you feel leveraging artificial intelligence as a leader or whatever your role is and customer success. So give it a moment and let's see who we have on the call today.

Emilia D’Anzica: And you can be honest and say you're you know, you're exploring this and still trying to figure it out. I can't tell who's answering what? All right. We'll give it one more second and let's close the poll and let's see what people are answering. All right. So it looks like sort of is the main answer here. And I think that's a lot, that is a lot of what I've been hearing around in CS. And the reason I selected two years is that in a recent study that came out, it showed that the majority of people that are using AI have been using it predominantly in the last two years in their role. So today, our goal really is to talk about how can we improve the customer experience? And of course, customer access, operational inefficiency, and ultimately, what every board member cares about, who we report to besides our customers, right? Is increasing revenue. And there's an opportunity with AI and that's why we're all here today. So give you a quick blurb about me and then just talk about the rise of AI and CS. There are a lot of unknowns, but there are a lot of things we do know and the main reason why people are trying to figure out why to use it and that's productivity and then just the value in it pitfalls and what you can do about it going into the future. All right. Just a little bit about me. I'm the founder of growth molecules. We're a customer success advisory firm. We have a lot of companies right now coming to us as we're going through assessments or helping them build playbooks. How can we apply AI? And there's so much of it help us figure out where do we apply it? And when, so, I've included some examples of some platforms that we've evaluated and we're helping clients evaluate and implement. And if you wanna connect with me on LinkedIn, we always love learning about new people. So please do. All right. So the rise of AI for CS a year ago, very few people were talking about it, right? If you go to Twitter or your LinkedIn feed, I would say probably around last fall, it really became jargon. And now you hear about it all the time. You also hear that AI is going to replace customer success managers. And we know that's not true, but what it will replace what will be replaced our customer success professionals that are not embracing it. So I didn't include the stat in here because I couldn't I read the article, but I didn't have time to include all the sources or go to Netflix and actually find the job descriptions. But one article claim, that there are jobs out there that are paying seven to 900,000 dollars a year for people who can really understand and apply that type of knowledge across departments and organizations. So these jobs are not going away. Just like when I went to college at ubc, customer success, professional as a profession didn't exist. So these new jobs are coming up. Yes, they may replace some of the roles you see in customer success. But the role building relationships is not going away. It's going to be amped and boosted by AI. And that is really exciting. So the opportunities across the customer journey is where we typically start talking about it. I always ask prospects that we're working with when we're evaluating how can we help you, is well, what's your customer journey? What are you currently doing to help clients? And I was at WalkMe for three plus years is their VP of customer engagement and they were one of the early companies who were really looking at artificial intelligence or understanding where is the customer failing with your product? And how can something like a walkthrough help you? So looking at behind the scenes and then applying that just in time intelligence was incredibly helpful across the customer journey. So as a leader, if you're thinking about how can I help my customers with all of these platforms that are popping up start by building a customer journey. Obviously, the client that we work with here has been blurred out, but you can see here it can be an intense exercise. You wanna bring in all the different organizations like product marketing, sales leaders into a room, white boarding or using sticky notes or a jam board, whatever it is you use and really understanding what is the customer journey? What can we automate and across when segments? And it's not ever going to be just a pure tech touch. And even at the highest level your white glove customers, they want tech touch AI as well because if you think of someone like a cmo, if they're your champion, imagine how many products they're investing in. If you're asking them for an executive business review every quarter, the chances of them showing up every quarter are very small because they have so many other artificial intelligence platforms or whatever they're using that they're also leveraging and they're just simply not going to. So if you can give them the data they need on a regular cadence to get ROI, this customer journey mapping exercise will really help you start understanding what can we apply and when to help the customer continuously get ROI from our product. So I not only externally but also internally help productivity. And I wanted to another pull here. I know, we asked about yourselves and using AI but curious also if we can just get the second pull to pop up. I'd love to know how many of you feel like your companies are starting to use AI effectively. Given so many platforms… have come up. I just was reading as we were waiting to start this, that a company called hugging phase just received 165,000,000 dollars from Salesforce in investment in these types of platform. So they're not going away. Companies are taking them seriously and curious how many of your companies are using them… give it another second. All right. Let's close the pole and let's see. So sort of we're just getting started. Seems to be like, the winner and a few yeses. All right. Fantastic. I'd be so curious to know about the two people who said yes. We're using it for two plus years. That would be so interesting to learn about you. Maybe you can send me a LinkedIn message and let me know all about it. I'm curious. All right. So company are starting to use it or dabble into it. It's not going away, but really, it's helping you build personalized customer interactions. And this might sound counter intuitive. But if you know more about your client and you're able to put it in an e-mail or presentation or a touch point throughout the customer's journey with your platform, I imagine showing up on a kick off and you know, already everything that the salesperson has been talking to the customer about for the past six months without having a seamless handoff that would automatically create a personalized customer interaction. And then I'll show you in a moment. Some companies that are coming out, is there's more automated customer support? So you start typing in the question automatically. It helps you fill it in. And then all of the answers and as the new workforce and the new user of platforms, it earns more money and is becoming more of our decision maker. They have more experience. They don't want to pick up the phone. They don't want to talk to sport and they don't want to have a chat that's 20 chats back and forth. They'll close it and go find the answer on their own before they stick around. And for any of you who have kids, you probably know that just trying to get some sort of engagement with your team majors. It's very difficult. They'd rather figure it out on their own than come to. Mum and dad for help and then predictive analytics. So there's so many exciting things happening with customer success platforms, for example, really being able to understand what is the user going to do and why can we predict? Churn for example, and this is the biggest buzz with pared and ChatGPT, I know there's a lot of warnings about it. I'm in a junk professor at saint Mary's college of California. The professors are constantly talking about this content generation. How do we still make it authentic? Are our students and our users actually writing their own content or are we getting something that's just coming out of something like ChatGPT? So, how do we still use these kinds of platforms and yet create content that's applicable to our clients? And then feedback analysis? Too many companies collect C sat and NPS and all other kinds of surveys and do nothing with the data. That was, that's been one of my biggest frustrations with clients who have us do all this amazing work. We, we help them with the analysis and tell them how they can change the numbers, but they don't do any thing about it. So now this can happen so much faster with feedback analysis through these platforms. I encourage you to take advantage of them and then use that information as a leader to go back to your organization and act. And then there's so many onboarding platforms out there. I won't name them all today, but they're coming up with some really cool things that you can help not only with capacity planning, right? As you're onboarding your customer success, as you're onboarding your customers, excuse me, but really help them not only to get a more personalized customer onboarding experience, but help get, to their ROI faster. So the other one's product recommendations on demand, for example, based on usage, companies who have been doing this for a long time, instantly come to mind Hubspot and survey monkey. They give you pieces of the product free or for a very low price. And then the minute you want to go use another one or they recommend the product. I noticed G2, for example, has recently started doing that with their review platform. They're able to quickly recommend products to you based on how you're using, the platform. And then customer journey mapping, Mira, a jam board. All of these different platforms are helping with the customer journey mapping because it's not stale, right? If you're not looking at your customer journey map at least on a quarterly cadence or when you have a big product release, it's quickly becoming outdated and not relevant to your. Client needs so already talked a little bit about this churn prediction and prevention. Nothing worse than when we're talking to a client and they are telling us they're going to give their notice on a platform. This typically happens the most with the CS platform. And I just shake my head and think wow the CS platforms. You, you talk about health scores, you talk about how you help companies predict this, but you're not predicting your own churn your own prevention and you're not acting on it. So I do believe this is going to change with a you're able to get better health scores and act much faster language translation and localization. If you looked at this especially for anyone who works at a global company, it's so important to localize content. Something me being bilingual in Italian and English. Whenever I go back to Italy, someone trying to say something that they would say in Italian to me trying to speak to my children in English. It just comes out, in the funniest way, right? Because, it hasn't been translated except maybe, with Google, but that's really going to change and the localization will make it less funny, and just as sincere and then data driven insights. This has just become such a jargon word. But really it's really going to be helpful especially when you're doing those executive business reviews, having data that's applicable to those conversations. And Matik is doing that right now. And then we all want this right? CSM, want continuous learning and improvement. I have my son works in tech as well. And he, when he left his job last year, and I said Tyler, why are you leaving? You haven't been there long? He said, man, I've stopped learning like I'm too young to stay at a company where I'm not continuously learning. So that's a huge opportunity with AI to be able to enable your teams and especially keep, your team engaged. So some tools out there for you to consider Matik. Obviously, it's helping you automate the creation of your powerpoint presentations with data that matters to your clients. So I'll show you that in a moment and then update AI. I'm bias. We use it at our company. It is just amazing. It's listening to your calls with your customers. And then when you're done with that call, not only has it recorded, but then it's telling you exactly how much each person is talking, it curates your emails for you to send the client. And while it's not perfect. You always wanna put your own human touch to, it saves so much time, and our team is just loving it. And then as I mentioned, CSP are really applying AI to their own platforms and understanding how can we better help our customers, help their customers and prioritize for teams who aren't using grammarly as a leader? Make it a requirement. It is just so incredibly powerful. Even the free version, I have the paid version, I find so much value in it especially because I write such long papers. I wanna be able to really think about how is my tone? Is it more business like more friendly? And so this is really an incredibly powerful platform that just keeps getting stronger and stronger for.

Phone Caller #2: Thought…

Emilia D’Anzica: For support, it's really leveraging ChatGPT, to help support teams which I just love. And then cast ap and this platform, I've been watching it grow over time. It really automates what CSM do. So for your low touch customer segments, something like cast ap is really incredible. They're able to mimic that human experience but with someone that looks like human. But, but it's not. And so Matik, I mentioned it's a presentation enhancer. I recently got a demo with it and, it showed me how I would be able to help our clients, for example, give a more personalized ebr and the most, the best example of how a company would use this as we were talking to a prospect yesterday and I was asking what are your biggest pain points that your CSM are having? And they said, you know, what people are, we have a really high RR, we have a really high gross retention rate as well. But this, our executives are not showing up at the quarterly business reviews they got them. They say they'll be there, but they're not there. And I asked the usual questions are, you know, what are you putting in these presentations? Well, that's part of the problem. It's always the same content. So being able to give really customized information is incredibly powerful and it doesn't have to be in person necessarily just like ramerly slack. A lot of these platforms will send you a report Hubspot. They send me as the owner of these platforms for our organization, all of this incredibly powerful data in a beautiful presentation on that I can quickly look through. And then if I wanna talk about it, I can call our CSM and have more in depth conversations. So pitfalls that we should all be aware of. Let's start with the positive. First. I always look at everything in a positive way. First you want to embrace AI as a leader to help your team gain confidence. It is so amazing when a CSM is able to go to a customer conversation, talk to an executive and feel like they have the right tools. They didn't scramble to put together that presentation or spend needless hours trying to aggregate data and make sense of it. I, and this is a really powerful reason why I can help you obviously automation, how many times as leaders are you on your team's back about getting that data in their CSP or CRM? This can do the, a lot of the work for you. And then of course, speed, your CSM can get back to their customers and have real conversations so much faster if they're not doing things, that is now being. Are being automated or that they feel very uncomfortable doing so. They put it off until the last minute. And then it's poorly done. And, and that presentation or that conversation doesn't come off as naturally and successfully as it could have. And then the pitfalls data coming together right now, is inaccurate people are talking about, make sure you check where this data is coming from, before you just copy and paste something from Bart or ChatGPT actually look at the sources because a lot of the data that is being aggregated may have gender biases, may have data, that is from years ago with discrimination not being taken into account. So always, you wanna check the sources of where's this data coming from, and then the others data privacy issues. We see this with the government right now, really questioning AI companies. All right. Well, you're aggregating all this data? How do we know that you're keeping it safe? Nothing worse than for example, when last passed recently, and I'm a customer, I panicked and changed all my passwords. Is that data breach, right? You wanna make sure that the data is safe? And your customers are going to be asking you if you're an AI company? How do we know you're keeping the data anonymous as you're aggregating it? And then the fear of lack of transparency, right? So not knowing where there's data is coming from is scary. And, and again, as leaders, you need to not only be able to explain it to your team but you need to be able to explain it to your customers. So when we're doing this with customers and they're asking us to help them evaluate a platform. Obviously, we use our own methodology scored. We're trying to understand what is the strategy behind it? How's it going to be communicated to your customers? To your CSM? How are they going to learn it based on the cost? What's the ROI? And then, of course, the impact, one of the biggest pitfalls when you're purchasing an AI platform is who's going to operationalize it? How's it going to scale once it's implemented, who's managing it? So making sure you have someone who's operationalizing it is critical. And this is the number one reason I think CSP fail. When a company puts in a customer success platform, is they blame the?

Phone Caller #2: The platform?

Emilia D’Anzica: For not working. But when we look under the hood and we are trying to help them, it's actually it just hasn't been optimized. It's not being fully utilized. So the operational piece is important. And then relationships AI should be augmenting relationships, not destroying them. So how can we multi thread with AI? How can we get more relationships throughout a large organization for example with the platform? And then the execution piece is so important because as humans, we hate change. We really, we're comfortable doing what we're comfortable. Even if we grumble about it, we wanna make sure that we fully understand why is this change happening and what's in it for me? And then of course, data aggregation, security biases, all the pitfalls that I talked about, you wanna be conscientious of. And so the future, three things I'll leave you with, I know I'm being told, I have very little time. It's full of possibilities. There are many unknowns embrace them, lean into them. And then I believe we're just getting started. And I'm just really excited about it. So thanks be, thanks Pascal for having me on today.

Matik MC: Awesome. Thank you so much Amelia. I think we have time for one question. So from the audience, how are you seeing CS teams assess ROI, cost benefit analysis with AI initiatives they are pursuing?

Emilia D’Anzica: Yeah. So the number one way I would say is look at your top three pain points and your north star, what is your company revenue goals? Where do they wanna be? And then what are the top pain points you have? And where's the gap? Can this help me reach my north star and alleviate the pains that the CSM are having. If they're not being able to predict churn and they're a lot of a Jazz or ghosting or they're losing their champion. And then there's no multi threading. There's no one else in the company to go to that's how you can start justifying the ROI of a platform for example.

Matik MC: Awesome. With that, we do have to end our session. Any questions we weren't able to get to? We'll be passing along to Amelia so she will answer them. And then when the session recording is live in our new resource top, we'll include the answers to those questions. So thank you so much Amelia, for such an educational session, I think all of us learned a lot from you today. And thank you to everyone else for attending.

Emilia D’Anzica: Yeah, thanks everyone. Bye.

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