How AI will Transform Customer Success (AI + Customer Success Summit Session)

How AI will Transform Customer Success: Reshaping Post-Sale Experiences and Preparing for the Future

AI will quickly change the way that you deliver your customer journey and how your teams work to achieve your business goals. This is true whether you are in Success, Support, Education, Implementation, Services or Customer Ops.

Are you ready for what’s coming and what you need to do to prepare?

Join Rod Cherkas, CEO of consulting firm HelloCCO and the author of The Chief Customer Officer Playbook, as he facilitates a conversation with post-sale and AI experts about how ChatGPT and AI will transform Customer Success.

In this discussion, our experts will share:

How AI can help you optimize and streamline your internal processes
How AI can be used to deliver superior customer experiences
How you should integrate AI into your 2024 strategy and fiscal plan
What you should be doing right now to learn and test
Potential challenges and ethical considerations when implementing AI

Speakers

Rod Cherkas - CEO at HelloCCO and Author of The CCO Playbook [MODERATOR]

Mary Poppen - President at HRIZONS EX; former CCO at SAP & LinkedIn

Mary Poppen is President of HRIZONS EX and Professor of Practice at Michigan State University teaching in the CXM Master’s Degree program. She is also a CS Angel investor.

Prior to her current focus, Mary was Glint’s Chief Customer Officer at LinkedIn and Chief Customer Officer for SAP’s Global Cloud business before that. Mary holds a Master’s Degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and has over 20 years of customer success, business consulting and executive leadership experience. She is a well-recognized customer and employee experience thought leader, speaking at global events and authoring several publications in this space. She recently published a book entitled “Goodbye, Churn. Hello, Growth!”

In addition to her current roles, Mary enjoys serving as a Board Advisor and executive coach, and has a passion for giving back through female mentorship programs. In her spare time, Mary enjoys traveling with her husband and two sons, playing Pickleball, and wine-tasting with friends.

Monica Perez - Head of Customer Success, Americas at Notion

Ralphie English - VP of Customer Success at Deepgram

Ralphette 'Ralphie' English is a visionary Customer Success Leader known for her expertise in driving customer-centric growth. With 13+ years of experience in the tech industry, Ralphie excels at implementing strategies that prioritize customer needs to fuel business growth. Her unwavering dedication to placing customers at the forefront of business decisions has made her a respected figure in the industry, inspiring others to embrace customer-led growth.

Ralphie's customer-led growth strategies have proven transformative in the organizations she’s led. By leveraging customer insights, she tailors initiatives that boost customer retention and drive revenue. Her proactive engagement and focus on aligning customer objectives with organizational goals cultivates enduring customer relationships that fuel sustainable growth.

Recognized as the 2023 Customer Success Leader of the Year (Customer Success Excellence Awards) and 2021 Top 100 CS Strategist (SuccessHacker), Ralphie's leadership and accomplishments exemplify her mastery of customer-led growth strategies. She is also a member of Success in Black, an advisor to Black Women in Customer Success, GTM Circle Advisor (Focal.vc), founding member of RevRoom, a Coaching Corner Coach, and serves as a Customer Success SME Advisor to investors and founders. Ralphie holds a BS in Computer Information Systems from Strayer University, and a MS in CyberSecurity and Information Assurance from National University.

Syed Hussain - VP of Customer Success / CX at Hummingbird

Syed is an accomplished professional with eight enriching years in the tech industry. With a profound belief in the power of human-first leadership, they have pioneered the establishment of a best-in-class post-sales organization. This holistic vision brings together implementation experts, dedicated Customer Success Managers (CSMs), responsive support teams, and astute technical solution engineers, all orchestrated to provide an unparalleled client experience.

My journey is characterized not only by my adept navigation of the complexities of SAAS but also by my unshakable commitment to nurturing and guiding teams, both locally within the United States and abroad. I firmly understand that by prioritizing the well-being of your people, they, in turn, ensure the utmost care for your clients. This principle has driven my success in managing global teams, fostering cohesion across cultures, and fostering collaborative environments across borders.

Watch How AI will Transform Customer Success: Reshaping Post-Sale Experiences and Preparing for the Future

Additional Q&A

This is awesome! How do you go about helping employees see the benefit of adopting existing AI tools into their day to day? I use chat GPT for everything but have some skeptical team members.

Syed Hussain: In my opinion it is about showing the value add that you and other team members are having with leveraging the tool. If they see others in their role gaining value they will be more likely to see themselves in that same position. I also think training folks on best practices and giving them assignments that are fun and easy will help get them use to the tool.

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What kind of automations or AI would you recommend for voice customer support?

Syed Hussain: I do not know a lot about this company but a colleague of mine that runs a support organization is looking at https://www.liveperson.com/

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Have you utilised chatgpt for applications such as google sheets to help with data analysis of a data set? If yes, can you share some examples of how you have utilised it. Thinking of how we can use this as a CSM to show value to customers

Syed Hussain: I have not done this yet, but from what I have learned on how to leverage chatgpt it is ideal to use some sort of framework like BANT or SWOT this will help your request be formatted in a more digestible manner. Second, you will also want to build on the chat you are in (thread) so if you keep asking questions within a single chat, it will leverage the other questions that you have asked to build upon the next questions.

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What are some suggestions when you have a highly complex product with a high touch CSM model in operation? Scale will be a huge focus as we grow. 25 customers today with $65MM ARR.

Syed Hussain: Do an exercise where you look at the admin work that your CSMs are doing and then look at your tech stack to see what AI is offered and could alleviate that admin work. When you can remove admin work, you are creating efficiency for CSMs which will allow for scalability. We have done this by leveraging Matik to write the summary of your slides, and talking points. We have used Gong to help write follow-up emails and recaps of the calls. The team is finding that they are spending less time on these tasks and more time on the actions that create greater impact.

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How can AI be used to help build customer success plans?

Syed Hussain: I have yet to leverage it to put a CS plan together as of today, but I did use ChatGPT to help build out the questions that I want the CSMs to ask in their S.W.O.T analysis, which is a part of the CS plan that we do. We are looking at Churzeros new AI tool that helps look at usage data and compare it to other clients that are about the same and whether they are healthy. It will be a mix of looking at SAAS platforms that offer AI to help aggregate data and give recommendations and also help with building the process.

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Have you already experienced a scenario where an employee has leaked data into an AI tool without prior consent/governance and, if so, what was the impact?

Syed Hussain: I have not to date. One thing that we do it talk about best practices often and that includes what not do use Chat GPT for and that is customer data.

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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: Awesome. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Matik AI and customer success summit. You are currently watching how AI will transform customer success, reshaping post sale experiences and preparing for the future. I am incredibly excited to introduce our speakers. And as I introduce them, I'm going to have them answer our ice breaker question. What would you use AI to automate in your life outside of work? So to take us off, is Rod Cherkas, CEO of hello, CCO, and author of the CCO playbook, who will also be the moderator for this panel.

Rod Cherkas: Hi, everybody. So thanks for the introduction back. Looking forward to the great discussion we're going to have today. What I would automate is an alert that lets me know when my kids are starting to use apple pay at wherever they are. They tend to use apple pay all the time they think that, you know, mom and dad are paying for this, I'd love like a five minute heads up anticipation. So maybe I could text them on the phone, find out where they are.

Matik MC: Awesome. If anyone's looking for a product idea, I feel like there will be a lot of customers for this one. We also have joining us today, Mary Poppen in president of HRIZNS EX, and former CCO at SAP and LinkedIn.

Mary Poppen: Great. Hi, everybody. It's really great to be here. I'm looking forward to the discussion Rod. That was a really good one kind of puts mind to shame. But one of the things I get overwhelmed with is trying to figure out an itinerary when I'm gonna travel to a new place and for some reason, I either get voluntold or volunteer to do it. So I spend a lot of time doing it. So I would love for AI just to be able to surface an itinerary that my whole family would love and it would be perfect.

Matik MC: Another great idea. We also have Ralphie English, VP of customer success at Deepgram.

Ralphie English: Hi, everyone. I'm excited to be here today, Mary. I think your idea is really close to mine. If I could automate anything, it would be a personal assistant. I think maybe I might even need a robot. So when you have a really big family and you have multiple children who are in sports, you know, one is in college, managing calendars to do list events is really hard even like reminding myself when to set an appointment. So if I had like an AI powered personal assistant, I would be extremely happy.

Matik MC: Sign me up for that one too. And last than not with these, we have Syed Hussain, VP of customer success and CX at Hummingbird.

Syed Hussain: Everyone. Great to be here. So I would use it to essentially build my menus for the week. So I'm the cook and the family every Sunday, I sit down. I'm like what am I cooking this week? What type of food? Nice, say, Korean, whatever it may be. And then I put together the list of ingredients. So I would love, I just to be like, I want this type of food, this is the protein, this is the vegetable content. This is the starch for three people, two people, whatever it may be. And it literally just go in there and tell me what I should be eating. And then a little caveat is like mid week, it would know what's left in my fridge. So if I go up and I'm like I don't have time to do that. One dish is an hour and a half. Just tell me what I can make in 30 minutes with what's left in my fridge would be a game changer for me. My husband will love that one. Super happy and I would be happy. I'm not doing all the work.

Matik MC: If there are any fridge maker manufacturers and audience, this is the idea you need. We originally were supposed to have Monica for who's the head of customer success America's at noon. She's unfortunately under the weather today and I'm able to make the session. So we will have to make do without her, but without the do I'm gonna pass it off to Rod?

Rod Cherkas: Great. Thank you, Bex. We're looking forward to having a really good discussion for those of you that are tuned in. Our goal for this discussion is to make this as actionable as possible to give you practical ideas that you can go back to your business and apply things every day because there's a lot that's possible. But the idea is what can you go do and make an impact on your business? So we're going to be facilitating this discussion. Please feel free to ask questions in the chat along the way. We're going to leave some questions some time at the end for Q and a. Now, I remember when back last November, I got a text from my daughter at college, it says, hey dad, you have to try out this thing called ChatGPT. And, you know, in a month after that, there was so much hype about, you know, how it was going to change so many parts of the business world and thinking, gosh, it's gonna solve support issues. It's gonna write training videos. It's gonna tell us which customers are going to churn. And then over the following months, you know, the hype started, to die down and many of us in leadership roles started to think about, well, what can we actually be doing in our businesses now with the capabilities? Yes, there's a huge promise of, and Jenna and ChatGPT in the future. But what are some of the ways that we can be doing it now? So that's really going to be, the purpose of our discussion today is talking with some of these experts. So I'd love to start the discussion out with a question to Ralph about how are you using AI and your teams to optimize and streamline some of your processes?

Ralphie English: Great question. Rod, there are a vast number of tools that have hit the market to help with optimization. Just like you said tools that existed for a while, newer companies that are building disruptive products and it's actually been really cool to see the type of hyper growth in progress we've seen in AI lately. However like you mentioned, we've heard in the CS community a lot around, you know, being focused around ChatGPT, how can it make your life easier? How can your CSM become more efficient? Tools like ChatGPT are game changer? But I really want to encourage everyone to explore the possibilities of AI beyond just drafting communications or data insights or just meeting preparations. So I'm gonna give you a couple of examples of how I use, you know, AI in my day to day. So for me working directly with some disruptive players in the AI space has allowed me to think really beyond just, you know, the basic prompts, for instance, since we use, you know, we transcribe all of our customer calls and we use those transcriptions and summaries or coaching our CSM and our sales team. And since this tool is, you know, powered by AI, we're able to pull insights from those calls. So, for example, one of the use cases if our product team wants to listen to a call where X feature was mentioned, so every call where we're talking about, say our summarization feature, they're able to curate all of those specific calls and pull the data that they need from those specific calls. So using call transcription or analytic platforms that are powered by AI to capture your customer interactions, is one way we use AI to optimize a streamline again that enhances your training and coaching. It helps you to identify trends and performance metrics. And then you can go through and start to make better data driven decisions, but also enhancing your customer experience.

Mary Poppen: Another.

Ralphie English: Example that I'll give is one that we actually built internally with our applied engineering teams. It's a tool that we call navy. It's an API that takes our product related questions and uses our own deep gram on to generate those answers to those product related questions. So, it's not only generating those responses from our knowledge base or our documentation, but it's also learning from interactions that we've previously had with our customers in the customer communication channel. But, you know, I hear everyone, you know, maybe you don't work for an AI company or you're able to build these types of tools internally and there may be a point or you have to make that decision on, okay, do I build or do I buy? But like I said, there are a vast number of companies that are putting in the work to make our lives easier. So I say all that to say, don't limit yourself, explore the tools that are already in your tech stack. You know, many companies are really starting to incorporate AI into their core functionality. Also understand what you aim to achieve with AI. Are you looking to improve your customer attention, reduce churn, optimize, onboarding or enhanced support? So find those tools that not only meet your needs but they're also thinking about building for future growth and scale.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. I love some of those examples that are super practical, Mary, you've mentioned a couple of them, can you share some of the ways that you're using it with your teams and clients?

Mary Poppen: Yeah. And I was actually, I was getting excited as rate was talking about all of the possibilities because I was also thinking about how we've actually leverage AI in a few different of the organizations I've been in over the last few years, having it built into our platform behind the scenes like, a link for employee engagement. But what we actually were able to do with the data that we had is not just improve the customer experience, but we were able to take the data and identify gaps in our processes and that was internal for our employees but also for our customer experience. So we were able to remove duplication you know, duplicated activities, streamline and pull together a better experience. And then also one of the things that I think that is going to be even easier to do going forward. But one of the things I've focused on that's been really hard is to build role based navigation and content for your employees. And so AI has helped uncover opportunities to do that, but it's still not super easy yet today. But I think that's coming and that's one of the things I think we're gonna see AI really help us with is be able to streamline the employee experience. So when you have, you know, you're in a customer success role, you'll be able to have content available at your fingertips that is specific to you about the product, about your customers, about the hand off with sales, right? And so all of the other, hey to call it noise because it's important content for other.

Matik MC: Roles.

Mary Poppen: But you won't have to sift through to find what's important to you.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah, it's really great that folks, are testing and innovating. Say, do you have any examples that you wanted to share?

Syed Hussain: Yeah. I think, you know, one thing that has kinda conspired over the last year is, it feels overwhelming, right? I feel like in this market, we're all doing more with less and it's like, where do I even start? Right? And I think, the team at hummingbird and myself, I'm just like let's leverage ChatGPT and how do we do that? And I think what I realized is why am I spending all the time you know, rolling out processes and building wickies and trainings and e-mail templates when it can do it for me, right? And I think I've really leverage that over the last about eight, nine months and it's been a huge help and I just take that data and I make some small tweaks here there, right? I think for the team, I let them know that like it's really important to not to put customer information in it but also to do the same thing. Those smaller easy tasks that you can just put inside there and have it spit it out and then make the tweaks and make sure everything's appropriate. It's just easy, right? And I, I've taken a couple of webinars, more like four or five over the last year, one of them by update AI and we learned about frameworks and how to incorporate frameworks into chat, which has been super beneficial. And, you know, letting the team know about that. So that your outputs are even better than without the framework. So it's kind of how we're doing it a little bit here at humming bird…

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. When I've been working with my clients and I've been participating and leading a discussion group every couple of weeks about ChatGPT and AI and customer success. Mary has been part of that. You know, one of the concepts that we came up with is that as a leader, there are a number of different ways that you can be thinking about using AI and these solutions. One is for focusing on your internal processes, second is thinking about how you can use it to improve your customer experiences that may be through like resolving support tickets for example. And then the third can be how you might integrate it into your products to actually make your products better. And, you know, they require different amounts of effort. And a lot of the post sales and CS leaders I've spoken with are a little bit reluctant at this point to put AI, directly in front of their customers because they may not understand it as much. They may not be able to, you know, either buy or use the tools that are available. But many of the applications have focused on internal processes. Wanted to give two examples that I've seen with my clients. One of them, is a CS leader and they're trying to build out what is often called like digital touch or tech touch for a group of their customers. And they were, you know, sort of struggling with coming up with, you know, ideas on what to do. They wanted to for example, set up an onboarding process for new customers. And so wrote into ChatGPT, a prompt sort of describing their business and what they were trying to do and said, you know, I'd like to set up, send out one e-mail a week to new customers to help them learn these particular things. And then you could say, you know, in week one, I'd like to introduce my chief customer officer and tell them what we're going to do over the period of time in week two. I'd like to introduce them to our onboarding guide and show them how to get resources on our training community on week three four five six. And when you do that, it can come back with a pretty shockingly useful outline. And then the next step you can ask it, you know, write a draft of an e-mail and the idea here isn't that you copy and paste it. But a lot of folks struggle with how do I get from? I don't have anything to, I have something in practice and one of my clients within a week, add sort of this outline draft of emails and then could start testing this onboarding sequence with the new customers that we're going to come in over the month. So, the just taking this concept of experimenting and trying things in a way that is low risk and that may not put your, you know, put your customers data, your company's data at risk. If you're using, you know, publicly available models, well, that's yeah, it's an interest, really interesting time. So, I'd love to get folks thoughts about, you know, what each of the different teams, what you're seeing to help your companies or your customers learn and test new things so that you're constantly improving and being able to innovate in your business. So I add, any thoughts about, you know, how you, this concept of testing and trying things out?

Syed Hussain: Yeah. I think the first thing is just to take some kind of action, right? I think that it can feel overwhelming and you're like where do I start and begin? You know, you don't eat a cheeseburger in one bite. It's several bites to get there, right? So I think it's first to take action. I think the second piece is that, you know, using the existing tools like ROI talked about earlier is like what's your current text stack. Are there different AI option offerings that they have that you can leverage, right? Third is make sure that the data is right, right? Like these AI models learn from the information that they're taking in. And so if the data is bad, I guess what you're going to get an output that is bad, right? And so really making sure you're doing that data cleansing and reviewing that to ensure it's accurate, and learning from that. And I think the last thing is that you're not alone, right? I feel like so often it's like you can be in a silo and your CS and you're just working with the customers, you know, here at hummingbird, they came up with essentially an AI pioneer team and it's a cross functional team that's come together to talk about AI and how we're going to leverage it. Are we gonna build it? Are we gonna like, you know, resource other platforms to help us and so getting ideas from them as well and learning from them, right? And like not having to commit the same mistake because they maybe have gone through it and making sure you apply that moving forward to how, you know, invest in it?

Rod Cherkas: Yeah, Mary, any thoughts from you?

Mary Poppen: I love that. Did you call it the pioneering team?

Syed Hussain: Yeah, team here, team. Yeah.

Mary Poppen: I've been using swat team and cross functional swat team, but I really like I'm gonna steal your label because I think it's more descriptive, of what they're doing. But the reality is having a team that can do all the things that you were talking about, Rod and come up with new ways of doing things but not just trust, right? That just because the AI is recommending it, that this is the way to go, you need an opportunity to see in the business context and apply sort of the knowledge that your team has to how it really can work well. And so it's really that kind of a and B testing right here's. And I would also add I would start with existing processes because it's the most well known, you have the most data. So you can kind of say here's, the results from how we're doing it today. Here's, the new way of doing it, use those same measures and you can see where those improvements are. So, yeah, that's what I would add that I love that pioneer team cross function making sure it's cross functional and across, you know, apply, the outcomes across the whole organization.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. I love how you think about just integrating it into your testing process and thinking about, hey, could I try this in AI, and as we learn more about it, it's not about does AI do it for you? But can it make you more productive? Does it save you some time? Now? I was working with a client that wanted to write a new job description and explain to their manager why they needed to hire a customer success, operations person. It would be the first person in that role. So we, you know, typed in to see, you know, what would c ChatGPT say about the most critical, you know, for your type of business, what are the most critical behaviors and skills to bring into that role to just help bring clarity? Not that there aren't other job descriptions, but the value also is that as an expert, as a leader at your companies, you can assess whether the information that's coming out of ChatGPT or some other AI tool is accurate, right? It, it may feel like Jesus, is it gonna do? This is going to do your job. But, you know, my belief is that it's a productivity accelerator and we should be looking for ways to enable it to help us do our jobs more and be able to focus on those areas. Ralph, any thoughts from you about, you know, what you've done in your work or what you've seen? So the people are just learning and testing and don't necessarily get, you know, so fearful of some huge change that they get paralyzed.

Ralphie English: I think the most important component is the self learning piece. So, you know, start to really understand AI from, you know, a leadership perspective, focus on, you know, webinars and online courses, and do what you're doing today, join webinars that are talking about and focusing on AI for business or customer success. You know, subscribe to AI focus blogs. I do that a lot. I follow a lot of people that are talking about what's happening, what's trending in the industry. So, you know, it's already overwhelming because there's a lot going on in the AI space. But when you really start to dig in and understand those different components, it helps you to hone in on what you should be focusing on as a leader.

Rod Cherkas: And the, this concept of leadership working with your teams, right? So if you're a CSM team leader asking your team and seeing how they're using it and are there some best practices in there, you know, within the safety, your company may have some guidelines about what you can and then cannot do. So, we're definitely here. Not saying like go around that, but within those boundaries, there's lots that you can do even if you don't have a tool specific outcome that you can be learning and, you know, and testing with. So you, as you think about these opportunities, one of the areas that potentially is out there is for personalization, so that it might be able to give a customer specific or company specific or an individual specific responses. Maybe we can talk for a couple of minutes about how AI can be used today to provide more personalized and customized experiences. And then we can sort of speculate a bit about what that might evolve into over the next months and years. Mary, would you like to start?

Mary Poppen: Yeah. So Rod, now this is a huge passion area of mine personalization and at scale and across the entire customer experience, but also employee experience that I think partner experience. But we'll leave that for another, we could talk all day, right? We've been collecting data for so many years in silos, in our organizations, and functional leaders like CS leaders have been trying to make sense of the data that they have access to, and actually leverage it to make improvements in the business. But it's hard. We know that it's really hard. AI now gives us the opportunity to complete pattern matching and look across millions of data points in seconds right? Faster than any human really ever could. And so even your best data scientists if you're lucky enough to have them on staff still would have to know, you know, what questions to even answer and what data to be kind of looking for relationships in. And so AI will surface these insights and relationships that we never would have even thought existed. Which means we can now apply that to personalize our customer experience in a way that we never could before. So if you can uncover where in the onboarding process customers are the most successful in having adoption nine months after go live, that's a huge to win, right? Because you can now pinpoint the flags and the certain behaviors or content that have the biggest impact on your customer. And that's why I get so excited about this because we now have technology that will allow us to look across the data that we've been collecting and actually use it, right? To create value for not only our customers but employees. We can make the employee role more strategic. We can provide surface insights for them that will allow them to reach out to their customers to share things their customers never would have thought of. So now that employee is a hero to that customer. So there's tons of opportunities I think still to uncover related to this, but we have a starting point.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. Is there an example that you can think of that you or your team have used some type of personalized experience that's now available?

Mary Poppen: We have, we actually created what we call the, with the guided experience. And so we, of course, like most companies when you get to a certain size, need to scale and segment your customers in a way that you need to provide a, an experience is as white glove as you might want to. But how do you make that digital experience feel personalized in white glove? And so my team at Glen, we were actually able to take a lot of the data from our CS system, our support system, all of our product usage data. And we were able to run analysis and sort of figure out where the biggest value would be in the human touch along the journey for those digital customers self serve, and then which activities we could surface for them along the journey based on their maturity, that would help them implement faster but also adopt faster in upsell. So those are all the things that we use data to apply to that digital experience.

Rod Cherkas: Right? Rate. Do you have an example that you can share about creating personalized experiences for customers?

Ralphie English: Absolutely, and can take back in on the digital experience. And I think about digital customer success. I immediately think about conversational AI tools like chat box, and these solutions are really built to help like CS teams, engage with customers, automate responses, schedule meetings, you know, create that personalized experience. And again, that's just another way for you to, you know, use AI, but it also allows you to start thinking about how do I scale my CS team? How do I scale my customer base while you're also honing in on that personal experience? You can't really replace the human touch, but, you can give them a better experience as they're kinda going through, and you know, working with chat box or having that guided experience using a.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. I've heard a lot of folks say that it's a tough time right now to buy new tools and to get budget for add ons. And one of the ways to get around this has been to talk to, you know, to encourage you to talk to your existing solution providers, existing tools you have in your tech stack and ask them what they're doing around AI and I, you know, I was on a call with one of my clients that uses intercom for, their online engagement. And they have a new capability called fin that they were willing to turn on for a couple of weeks for free as part of their solution and just enable them to experiment, right? Because it would feel difficult, for the leader I was working with to go and get budget for a new tool. But learning from that and even just having that conversation and seeing the demo gave my client ideas about how they can improve their self service, how they can potentially leverage fin or other AI tools. Now, whether it's the right thing for them. Now, in the future, they can decide, but at least they're learning and whether you a ticketing system like Zendesk or, you know, tools that you use to create your customer education training resources. There's lots of folks that are starting to innovate. So take advantage of what they're doing and what they're learning and seeing with their customers super free. Easy way, to just get yourself up to speed. So, a lot of us are starting to get into our fiscal planning for 2020. 24 summer's just about over although it feels pretty hot and lots of places around the globe these days. So maybe summer isn't quite over. But planning season starting there's a lot of folks that are going to be looking to their CS leaders and basically saying, you know, budgets are tight. Think about how you can do, you know, the team around doing more with less many people may be asked to support growth at your company without increases in budget or headcount. And this could be a really great opportunity to leverage some of these productivity improvements that AI and ChatGPT can potentially bring. I'd like to get some thoughts on how we should be thinking about leveraging AI and ChatGPT and other solutions as part of our planning cycle this year. So how would you think about this?

Syed Hussain: Yeah, I think, you know, every year we kinda go through this process of headcount tech stack, like what is everything looking like, how we planning for the upcoming year, right? And I think the way I approach this is always like a moment of discovery, right? And sitting down with my CS leadership team, my amazing head of CS strategy and operations, Emily Smith, Christine, and we're just having these really in depth conversations of like, what are the problems in the gaps that we need to try to fix? Right? And once we kind of have that, then it's about taking that and putting an action plan together, right? And I think with AI, the way I've approach this is kind of breaking it up into two buckets is first, like I think we've talked about here is evaluating your current tech stack, right? It is amazing to me and we've already started this process, how intercom Gong work ramp, turn zero, Matik, all have some kind of AI functionality that they've built, right? And so how do we leverage that? Is that gonna fill any of the gaps? Is an additional cost? Maybe it's already part of our package. Like with Gong, it's very much already a part of what we purchased. So it's at no cost to us, right? So that's first and foremost, the second bucket is then, you know, start looking at like what is out there? So, the other gaps and the problems that we're trying to solve, are there systems and platforms out there that are either new or been around that are starting to do and help? What we're trying to solve, right? I talked to a lot of founders. I feel like this year that are like, hey, can I talk to you about a CS idea that I have for AI and I'm like, yes, let's have a conversation. And I think, you know, just knowing that and experiencing that, there's so much out there right now. So it's just about them taking some of that time and doing the work and the research and figuring out if there's anything else out there and that's kinda how we've approached it this far.

Rod Cherkas: So there's concept that you brought up of looking at tools and potentially budgeting for additional tools. And then a lot of times it can just be process improvements and productivity improvements. And, I sort of anticipate that there may be leaders cfos, your CEO'S that you work with that are going to come to you. Say, look, I don't know exactly how you're going to get these outcomes, but I'm going to, you know, sort of expect you to get 10 percent productivity improvements. These capabilities are coming, want you to experiment, figure out how to get it, setting some goals that don't involve just hiring more people. Do you think that's a realistic objective that we should expect from our executives and financial leaders Mary?

Mary Poppen: I absolutely do. And I think all the things that I just mentioned are really important to keep in mind, look at your existing text deck, see what you can optimize. I think what we talked about a little bit earlier in terms of the testing and innovation team, making sure there's a group of folks cross functionally with accountability to start to test these things and see what works for your organization. And then the other thing I would put on top which I think is really critical and probably should be done right now is a governance model. So, how are you making recommendations to your internal teams about how to use AI? Because like we just talked about, a lot of technologies will be putting forth different AI capabilities. So, how do you not overwhelm your employees? How do you make sure they're using it correctly? You're going to have some innovative folks who want to explore everything and it could be kind of dangerous maybe depending on what data they're working with. So as soon as you could give some guidance to your employees, I think that will be really important to keep in mind for fiscal 24.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. On, on a call just earlier today with Nick and Elisa Rosenthal, who's the vice president of sales at open AI. She was talking about open is primary thing that they sell our apis for companies to be able to tie into, the data and the models that open AI has. But not all of us work at companies that are investing in that yet or have teams that are able to, you know, kinda build that into that. So some people are going to have access to models where it's walled off and you can, you know, you can put in your customer information or your sales data to get insights about churn or predictive. And then others may have to rely on sort of public models. Whereas you mentioned Mary, I may feel a little bit risky to drop in your customer transcripts or, you know, drop in your NPS score feedback data or drop in your sales data from Salesforce or whatever it might be. So I think there's different ways that we can be anticipating it. Again, going back to this concept of identifying which areas may be internal processes that you can be more productive, which ways that you can test to improve your customer facing out to a, and all the meanwhile working with and at least staying involved with your development teams, your product teams about what innovation can be happening, in your products to improve the customers experiences, lots of different things. Ralph, what's your thought about, your approach to planning for next year?

Ralphie English: For me, I use my buckets. I said, okay, which areas can I make the biggest impact retention? You know, reducing churn optimizing and onboarding. And I did exactly what you know, said and Mary talked about is really looking at outcomes of each one of those buckets wherever I could make the biggest impact. Is why I really wanted to start focusing my time and that's what I'm going to continue to do. So finding ways to improve internally even externally in those areas is where I'm really focusing. So I think bucketing, your system. So you're not overwhelmed with those specific areas will definitely help you create that strategic plan.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah, for post sale leaders and customer success leaders, this constant improvement is just part of, our D and a and part of what we do. And I think this is a really great example of how we can use these new capabilities to continuously improve our outcomes. I'd like to ask one last question, and then we can go to Q and a just real quick question to Mary about some of the ethical considerations. I know that CS leaders I've talked to some of my clients are a little bit concerned about using these models and using these solutions in customer facing situations. How should, how should we be thinking about the risks and ethical considerations about this?

Mary Poppen: And this is, and this kinda goes back to, the governance model, and the guard rails if you will are so important. And there isn't like a quick win at the moment. Unfortunately, there isn't just a single playbook that will say do this. So, I think, you know, it's all of us need to kinda help put that together for the market. But I think as much as possible, letting your teams know, you know, what is appropriate to do, reminding them, what data they have access to and what they can do with it today. Thinking about not just trusting what AI is telling you or taking action. You don't just craft an e-mail with AI and send it out to your customer, you know, make sure that you're validating what's going to your customers and the information that you're that is being surfaced through AI. So trust but verify as maybe it's a good way, to think about it. But, but I think really thinking for your organization, what's going to be needed to best guide your team and how you can as quickly as possible, put some of that in motion.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah, I'm just so excited about, the next couple of months as people are going through their planning cycle. And then seeing how that plays out in 2024 it's going to be a very interesting year for innovation and in customer success and post sale teams. So be, can you help facilitate some discussion from the Q and a what if a of…

Matik MC: Course. So first question, this is awesome. How do you go about helping employees see the benefit of adopting existing AI tools into their day to day I use ChatGPT for everything but have some skeptical team members? Hi, sorry. Did you get that or?

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. Anybody when I answer?

Syed Hussain: I think, you know, from my perspective is the Proof is in the pudding, right? And I know that change can be tough. And I think again like taking small bites is really important. And so if you're leading a team and you're wanting people to adopt this to make their life easier, it's really about showing them right? Like, hey look at what so and so did. And you see the efficiency they're gaining. They're not spending time on XY and Z anymore, right? And I think it's also creating a road map for folks, right? Like when you're asking someone to shift the direction that they're used to walking in, right? Help bring a road map to the table to be like let's start here, right? Small bite. Once that gets done, they're going to start, they should start feeling the benefit of it, right? And if they feel that benefit, they'll be more inclined to lean in, right? And then you can take them to the next level and continue to kind of like grow that experience. And then, you know, hopefully after some time, they're knee deep in it and they're right along with you and everyone else.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. I think that's a great point. So, I'm just trying things out. When I'm working with my clients, I try to find little ideas that help prove how you can use ChatGPT or AI, you know, Mary was talking about using it for talking about travel and staying in touch, with others. And I think about we've got this question like we're trying to come up with maybe a premium support offering for our group of customers. What would be characteristics that they might want to see in a premium support offering? And it just comes up with a starter list. Again, you don't copy and paste it and then just put a price on it and offer it. But it might help accelerate your brainstorming and thinking about it. So just keeping that going, love, the testing mindset, right? Ex, what else?

Matik MC: When you talk about AI personalization, leveraging customer insights and then applying it to CS to drive is faster time to adoption. All that sounds great. But what tools are you using to use AI to pull those insights? And how is AI different in developing insights versus other usage behavior tools?

Mary Poppen: Yeah, I'll take that one. Can you hear me? Okay? I think I might have cut out a little bit. Okay? So there are lots of different technologies out there now that can help you integrate your all of your data across multiple sources very quickly. Like involved at AI is one of those, it will help you surface those insights because it has the AI and frameworks running in the background. Another thing that you can consider is the AI that you do have within the systems of your current tech stack and then getting some assistance whether it's internal data science or external at this point to get some help, in shaping and surfacing those insights. So it really starts with being able to centralize your data, leverage the AI capabilities of your existing text stack and, or leverage a technology like involved and some consulting to be able to uncover those insights. And then that will help you shape a future framework of how you wanna leverage AI as capabilities continue to evolve.

Rod Cherkas: There's some new capabilities that were recently released with ChatGPT capability called code interpreter, which allows you to drop in, for example, pieces of data in a spreadsheet format and then ask it questions such as tell me trends, what are the insights? How would you segment this? So I would encourage people to experiment with that. Again with the constraint of guard rails, keeping in mind customer information, intellectual property, things like that. For those of you that have a private instance of one of these models, you may be able to do that more easily by dropping in your proprietary data. And for others, you just want to be aware of it.

Syed Hussain: Yeah. So.

Rod Cherkas: I'd love to ask a question of the audience if you could put into the chat, please like one thing that you've used ChatGPT or AI for in your business to date, like how have you tried it? What are you using it for love to get your feedback? So as you're putting that in be, what else are folks asking about?

Matik MC: What kind of automations or AI would you recommend for voice, customer support? Okay?

Ralphie English: That one, so I see a lot of my customers using transcription and analytics tools that allow their, you know, support engineers that are doing voice customer support to see, you know, with the transcription keywords that then pop up, you know, knowledge base articles or kinda take them down the path of how they want to service that customer. So you can use, you know, keywords, you can pull out different types of insights and then build workflows based on those insights within your platform using AI. It also allows you to pull additional, you know, trends and analytics that you can then, you know, measure your support engineers in all sorts of things as well. So, there's a vast number of tools out there that allow you to do, you know, transcription and pull that analytics. But the biggest use case I've seen is giving your support engineers kind of a workflow of how to service the customer based on what that conversation is about.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. There's I think there's a ton of promise in how I can help on the support experience to, you know, in some cases, it might be enable customers to self service because it's providing like more contextually relevant information. And then in a lot of ways how it supplements the ability of one of your support agents or support engineers to be able to understand the questions that people are asking, see a transcript of what the call is as they're talking, and then being able to populate information from your knowledge articles or from other documentation to present an answer, right? At that time. I think it's pretty exciting and looking forward to seeing how that works?

Matik MC: So, thank you. So I think we have time for one more question. What are some suggestions when you have a highly complex product with a high touch CSM model in operation scale will be a huge focus as we grow 25 customers today with 65,000,000 in a?

Mary Poppen: This is where I'll jump in. I think that the, from a content, you know, generative AI perspective, this is where you can gain a lot of scale and in templatizing communications using AI to summarize meetings and create, right? A value review deck, for example, that you can review with your customers using AI to get information to put into a QB template. These are all things that will help a CSM who has 25 customers, try to stay proactive. And then I think on top of that are the things we talked about related to using the data that exists. So here's where your biz ops team really needs to get involved. Maybe it in starting to help teams leverage the data that exists to start to predict what customers are gonna need and, or at least share an easy summary of where the customer is, so that the CSM can take, you know, quick accurate action.

Syed Hussain: Anything, one thing that I feel like it's important to that we've done is your tech touch is for like, you know, those customers that maybe not want a CSM, but if you're you have your high touch customers, you should fold that in there, right? Like, and so I'm gonna put, you know, Matik has one pagers that we've created and they automatically go out as like a QBR to, our customers that necessarily don't warrant a CSM. But that same thing I leverage in the customers that we do talk to all the time, right? And sometimes it's just that e-mail to give them some data points on like how things are trending or going. Then they come to your monthly check INS or whatnot with more information. And then you can have a richer conversation, right? And so, you know, leveraging and kind of folding what you're doing with, you know, the customers that don't have a CSM with the customers, helps that scalability and the CSM can do more essentially.

Rod Cherkas: Yeah. It's there's, lots of ways I think that people can experiment with, you know, in this high touch model to help make your CSM teams even more productive summarizing, you know, we just kind of described summarizing interactions. You could get summaries of your summaries because you might have multiple people that are working with different business units to understand your trends. And also as a way to help you highlight some of the areas, for investment where you need to follow up for understanding sentiment. So we're just about at the end. I wanted, to thank everybody for their engagement. And just really for those of you that are listening, encourage you to innovate and try things out in a safe way, right? In a way that helps you learn, helps you improve your internal processes, helps you improve your customer experience. And as these tools and solutions get built out, they're surely going to help even more ways. But you don't necessarily need to wait for that future. You can be starting now. And there's lots of great peers out there that you can learn from.

Matik MC: Awesome. Thank you. And with that, we are at the end of our session, I know there were a few questions actually not a few, quite a number of questions we weren't able to get to. Well, we'll be passing those along to our speakers and sharing their answers along with the recording of the session in our resource hub. So all some attendees will be notified when the hub is live. So thank you so much to all of our wonderful speakers today, for joining us and thank you to everyone else for attending.

Ralphie English: Thank you.

Rod Cherkas: So much take.

Syed Hussain: Care.

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