AI & the CSM (AI + Customer Success Summit Session)

AI & the CSM: The Day-to-Day of Leveraging AI in the Customer Journey

If you’re wondering how you, a CSM, should be using AI in your day-to-day interactions with customers, this session is for you. Hear from top CS leaders on how they are planning to help their CSMs, and themselves, use AI to enhance customer relationships and uplevel the whole customer journey. Panelists include customer success innovators from Mixpanel, Glassdoor, Hubspot, and RideCo.

Speakers

Spencer Davison - Head of Technical Account Management at Matik [MODERATOR]

Spencer Davison is the Head of Technical Account Management at Matik. Prior to Matik, Spencer was part of LinkedIn’s insights team. At LinkedIn, he helped develop tailored business cases and ROI reports for the sales & customer success teams, and saw first-hand how data-driven content increased engagement and penetration with target buyers and customers. Spencer also previously worked at The Marketing Store and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Connel Valentine - Director of Technical Services in Customer Success at RideCo

Connel is Director of Technical Service at RideCo, where he leads a team of business analysts in the Customer Success division at RideCo.

He has been working in the technology sector for nearly 20 years, starting inIT Operations, moving to Business Intelligence and now in Customer Success.

Today, he is responsible for guiding his team through customer journeys that lead to high retention in a high-touch customer environment.

Daphne Costa Lopes - Head of Customer Success, UKI at Hubspot

Follow Daphne at:

Website - www.daphnelopes.com

Podcast - https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/daphne-lopes/

Farzan Faramarzi - Enterprise Customer Success Manager II at Glassdoor

Farzan Faramarzi is a skilled Customer Success Manager who uses data and analytics alongside his exceptional storytelling abilities to build strong relationships. He is a devoted consultant and brand expert who strives for excellence and has a deep understanding of the importance of communication.

Although he values hard work, Farzan is also interested in the potential of technology to enhance our productivity and efficiency. He is knowledgeable about innovation and keeping up with the latest trends and is an early adopter who embraces emerging technology. Farzan recognizes the power of AI and emerging technology and works diligently to ensure that both his clients and colleagues understand how to utilize it to create better strategic plans for their customers.

Ryan Seams - Senior Director, Customer Success & Services at Mixpanel

Ryan is passionate about helping companies create exemplary customer experiences for their end users and internal employees. Through his 10+ years of experience in consulting, customer support, and customer success, he helps companies of all sizes collect, implement, and analyze data across their technology stack to understand who does what and more importantly, why. These efforts result in companies who move fast and are data informed, key ingredients for companies to build the best products, teams, and customer experiences. Outside of work, Ryan loves to travel to new places, explore new technologies, and participate in triathlons.

Watch AI & the CSM: The Day-to-Day of Leveraging AI in the Customer Journey

Additional Q&A

This is all very about the theory, potential, and risks about of AI which most of use have already read about. In line with the webinar title - can we please get some concrete examples (Hubspot or Gainsight or ChatGPT to create QBR decks or ???) being used today by their CSMs and how?

Daphne Lopes: Matik’s product is actually exactly that! Automating presentations using your product and CRM data. We used it at HubSpot to create our first automated EBRs!

Ryan Seams: We also use AI to turn any qualitative and unstructrued data into actual insights quickly. Doing things like sentiment analysis of win/loss notes, churn risks, NPS/CSAT surveys, etc. so you can summarize themes across all of your customer base quickly. If you overly simplify though, a CSM will send emails, prep for a meeting, host a meeting, assess risk/plan post meeting, and follow up. AI can help with each of those steps and shorten the cycle of that process from days to minutes or hours. And also involve the perspective of best practices all along the way

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One of our most tedious activities is logging activty/calls/emails in salesforce and tracking time spent for clients. Are there any AI tools to help automate this process in salesforce?

Daphne Lopes: ChatGPT can do that, if you ring fence is secure! HubSpot has built this natively internally using ChatSpot, takes info from Gong and does exactly that!

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What is the first tool Farzan mentioned?

Farzan Faramarzi: Grammerly Go!

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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: Okay. Hello, everyone. And welcome to Matik, AI and customer success summit. You are currently watching AI and the CSM the day to day of leveraging AI in the customer journey. So I am excited to introduce our speakers and I will in and as I introduce them, I'm going to have them answer our ice breaker question, which is what would you use AI to automate in your life outside of work? So first we have Spencer Davison head of technical account management at Matik, who will also be our moderator for this panel. So, hello, Spencer.

Spencer Davison: Hey, everyone really excited to have this conversation today. If I could automate anything, this is gonna sound kinda lame, but I think it would be like dinner reservations live in Chicago. There's a lot of good food. So if I could just automate, that whole process, that would be great.

Matik MC: I like it great. And next, we have Connel Valentine, director of technical services and customer success at Rideco welcome. Connel.

Connel Valentine: Thanks, Jessica. And hello, everyone. So if I were to use AI for anything right now, I've just recently joined chess dot com and I've started my journey in chess. And if anyone has, you know, tried to play chess, you'd know how one, it's one of the most frustrating journeys to be on especially when you're just starting out. I think the app is a great job of letting me know what mistakes I'm making in real time. But what I guess what I'd like it to do is to actually just track the patterns and trends of the games I've played across my time and suggest where I am weak, so that will help me hopefully improve my game.

Matik MC: I like it. Very good. Thanks, Connel. And next, we have Daphne Costa Lopes, head of customer success, UKI at Hubspot. Welcome, Daphne.

Daphne Lopes: Thanks, Jessica. It's great to be here. I was torn between two things and I was thinking about this question. But one of the things I'm really passionate about is travel and I put a lot of thought into travel, I love really thinking about where I stay and where, you know, where to visit and the tier for every day. So if I could get AI to really design this for me but not only just give me the recommendations but book everything for me. All I need to do is show up in the day with my passports. That is what I'd…

Matik MC: I love that answer. I would use that as well. Great. And then next we have Farzan Faramarzi enterprise, customer success manager to add Glassdoor. Welcome, Farzan.

Farzan Faramarzi: Thank you, Jessica. And hello, everyone. This is a really good question. So personally, I'm involved in various community work outreach and activism outside of my job. And I believe an AI assistant could be a great help in managing these tasks.

Matik MC: Very good. And then last, but not least, we have Ryan Seams, senior director of customer success and services at Mixpanel. Welcome Ryan.

Ryan Seams: Thank you, Jessica. Hello to everybody out there for me. My mind immediately jumps to where do I spend the most time or what am I most passionate about? And I think on the time side of things, automating driving would be very beneficial. So the whole driver list cars revolution is very interesting for that. And then on the passion side, I'm willing to try out the ones. And so if there was a way for me to just automate the whole training schedule, what to eat when, how to go to bed, all that stuff? It would be ideal so that I don't spend hours of my time daily doing the same thing. So.

Matik MC: Great. Good, good answers. All right. Well, great. Thank you everyone. And so before we start the session, just a friendly reminder to please add any questions you have to the Q and a which can be found in the Zoom controls bar. We will spend the last 10 to 15 minutes answering your questions. All right. So over to you Spencer.

Spencer Davison: Awesome. Thank you, Jessica. Love those answers. I hope trip advisor is listening to this and we get some AI itinerary travel all automated in the future. Great. So.

Connel Valentine: As…

Spencer Davison: Mentioned, you know, today, we're really going to focus on the customer and how AI is gonna transform, improve and just generally change the customer relationship you have. So this could be day to day interactions, bigger scope planning anything. So we've got a great set of questions here that we're going to ask the panel and really look for their expertise in working with customers and how they think AI is going to impact that. So we'll get kicked off here with, our first question which is just kinda setting the context, and that's how do you anticipate customer interactions changing with AI? So again, there's a lot of different ways that this could impact us. But looking forward to the answers here. And Daphne, I'd love to have you get started with this one if you want to share your thoughts.

Daphne Lopes: Yeah, thanks, Spencer. Gosh. There's so many ways I think that the customer experience is just going to change in general but I like to maybe think about this in two different buckets. So the first bucket is like how we service our customers. So I think what we're seeing already is AI is a copilot to all of the people that provide services to our customers. We're also seeing bot. So a lot of that stuff that's already out there today. I think it's going to get better and better, our bots are going to get more sophisticated with better answers. Are people are going to be able to access the right information faster, prepare for calls in a better way, generate presentations automatically, like all of that good stuff that we're already seeing I think is just gonna get better. But the other bucket is perhaps the one that is a little bit more futuristic. But I heard the cto and Hubspot talk about this and it really kind of flip my thinking about AI is the use of interfaces. So today we have customers that come to our product and they have to click through our product, right? They need to understand the workflow, the interface in order to get stuff done. So in Hubspot is a CRM. If you wanna go and create a contact or create a, you need to know all buttons to click to go and do that. And generativey, I really showed us that there is this really easy path for people to add, adopt product which is like a more natural… way of interacting, which is conversational, right? So you are able to come in and chat environment and say, to the CRM instead of having to click through and say, I just talk to Steven from Matik. I think there's an opportunity there. I'd love to create him as a content. You can literally like write as if you're talking to the CRM and the CRM is gonna go and update all of those things for you, create the contact, maybe create the deal, suggest the next task for you. And with that, I think adoption of product is going to be much more. It'll be faster. It will be accelerated because people are going to be able to interface with many products using conversational interfaces versus actually having to learn how to click through the product. I think that would be a really cool thing. I mean, I use many platforms every single day and I've gotten used to actually navigating them. But I'm sure. I'm not making the most use of everything that I have because I just don't know. How to? So, yeah, I'm really excited to see how interfaces will change.

Spencer Davison: Love that. Yeah, I think there's massive opportunity for just learning about workflows, and how those workflows can be automated or optimized. There's obviously blind spots with, in any workflow. And I think that's going to be a huge impact. I'd love to pass it over to you. Connel if you have any thoughts here that, you want to share around how customer interactions might change?

Connel Valentine: Yeah. So, in our industry, we're predominantly working with high touch customers. And what I think there's a where I could really help is with personalization. You know, we think about how we want to analyze, our customers results. And, you know, NPS and C sat or like one of the two predominant metrics that we in customer success look at. But, you know, we're our C SMS are constantly under the pressure of taking care of more clients with the same volume of headcount, right? And they're struggling, for time in order to, you know, have that work class customer service if they're handling one or more clients. So, I think, you know, that personalization piece open AI is looking at our high touch customers and are able to provide our CSM with that suggestive knowledge beforehand is something where I think our customer interactions will change. I think, you know, we've been told by, our sales person that don't let your QB R be just another report guard, right? Every customer interaction, is a sales opportunity, right? We're all in sales at the end of the day. So we're always selling. Yeah. So, you know, that and nothing sells better than making your customers feel like you personally know them. But getting to personally, you know, people take time and resources and this is where I think I can definitely help well that's for high touch, but, you know, for tech touch customers, we are familiar with Amazon and, you know, how suggestive they can be when you purchase products. So, so that's really popular. And, you know, I've seen, you know, been companies popular management consulting from, they did a survey of, you know, 30,000 banking customers in like 11 countries. So even in the banking industry, that survey confirmed that more personalization even in the banking industry led to high NPS. Or the other way I can think where, you know, our interactions with customers would change in tech touch, is e-mail marketing campaigns. You know, these days, when you buy a product, you can almost tell that no matter what you're gonna get the same emails coming at you over the course of the next couple of weeks, right? But, I think, you know, those e-mail marketing campaigns that are triggered through E, I guided knowledge would certainly help take that personal touch with the customer to the next level.

Spencer Davison: Yeah, I think that's one like a really interesting way to think about.

Ryan Seams: Words not necessary.

Spencer Davison: I automating things for you but it's gonna up skill, you make you more knowledgeable, so you can get more personalized interactions, and touch points with your customer. I hadn't even thought about the e-mail tech touch, but I think that actually makes a lot.

Ryan Seams: A sense.

Spencer Davison: Where you could kind of learn the language that has the best metrics in terms of open rates and click throughs and then sort of adopt that, and use that, to create better and more personalized emails. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts here as someone that's on the front line. So to speak on how this might change your customer interactions.

Farzan Faramarzi: Thank you, Spencer. So with the customer interaction, I think as done mentioned, customer experience is really important for us for, as a CSM and to add that delivering value to customers is always top of mind for any CSM to achieve that. You know, we need to be a strategic and we need to manage multiple tasks while being flexible with a, we can automate some tasks. As a matter of fact, we can automate many admin tasks. So CSM can be focused on delivering the RI. For example, you know, Matik that we use here at Glassdoor has this presentation enhancer tool, and this AI can write executive summary for your presentation as well as tag tracks. And I've seen this first hand how this saves time on my end and enables me to focus on more strategic areas and how like the client enjoys receiving these, you know, executive summary and the bullet points in advance. You know, usually, you know, you have, you know, when you especially when you have like a large team, like for example, from different departments. It is really helpful to, you know, feed these, you know, bullet points in advance a few days before the call. So different people can look at this e-mail and get familiar of what to expect when they are joining the call to go, where the, or what?

Spencer Davison: Yeah. I mean, I think, the real point there, is it's gonna get rid of a lot of the busy work, you know, which is what you mentioned there's a lot of just like repetitive tasks that AI would, you know, could potentially replace. And then you can focus on the more strategic efforts… Ryan. I, I'd love, to hear your thoughts here. You know, as someone that's working with, you know, CSM on a regular basis. And, and really, you know, trying, to think about the future, with their customer interactions.

Ryan Seams: Yeah. At Mixpanel, we're a product lead growth company. And so we have this really long tail of accounts that all spend a little bit each month with us. And, you know, traditionally you would just keep hiring more CSM, right? To cover more and more of these accounts and have a bigger and bigger book of business. And I think what's really exciting about AI, right? I, the overall number of customer interaction should actually start going down. We won't have as many one to one human interactions because AI can actually automate a lot of the best practices and guiding the user through a workflow et cetera, without needing, you know, someone on my team to go and speak with them. And so, you know, what Ron said to build on that you could actually spend that time and be a lot more proactive and strategic with that account, right? Versus spending a lot of your time just educating users on the basics of using the product or setting it up or the implementation. You could actually take that time and go, you know, spend it, on much more strategic activities. And so we talk a lot about this internally where, you know, you don't wanna do the same call over and over as a CSM. It's not exciting for you. It's not super valuable for the customer that's what AI is gonna solve for, right? All of those things that are very repetitive will be something I can solve for, and you can go spend your time on the more strategic exciting creative part of the job.

Spencer Davison: Yeah. And I think, you know, what is AI do best? It handles repetitive tasks it learns and what CSM do best is build relationships, and really focus on the bigger picture. So, the more CSM can be kind of dragged away from, the former and into a more of a relationship sale. I think that's gonna be really impactful. Great. I'd love to jump to the next question, and I think, you know, you sorta answer this, in, directly, in the.

Connel Valentine: Last one.

Spencer Davison: But Connel, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what are some of like the big problems that CSM space today, that by using AI could potentially improve?

Connel Valentine: Yeah. So what I've as I mentioned in the last question, like you said, you know, the constant challenge.

Spencer Davison: Of…

Connel Valentine: Being able to take more care of more clients with that high touch, high quality experience that they get, it starts get more challenging as the customer base for CSM grows, you know, they're struggling with. You know, I've seen a QPR is then either getting delayed or even cancelled. You know, lack, of prep time to have those quality meetings. And, you know, the scope of what we consider high stake customers starts to get thinner, right? Just because, you know, we don't have, the resources and you mean you in a perfect world, we have nothing but high touch customers. But the only reason we don't is due to the lack of resources and, you know, adding onto that, it's just, the avalanche of data that the CSM sometimes need to sift through. Like we, ourselves, in the industry that we are in, we have over 40 KPI'S you know, to measure the success, of our client. And, you know, our CSM can probably agree on like, the top five, but then beyond that, you know, deviates into everyone having their own opinion. So, I think, you know, generator. I can certainly help by creating customer summaries for CSM before they go into the QPR before their meetings. You know, things, you can imagine a world where, you know, they get e-mail three hours before the next client meeting. You know, with the summary saying here's, what's going on with this customers help here's, their engagement here's, the adoption go get.

Spencer Davison: Yeah.

Connel Valentine: You know, I think that's a really great world that I can see that we're living in and, you know, GainSight this year a pulse, they announce enhancements to their existing, you know, horizon AI, you know, with this new generator I capabilities that they have which, you know, includes things like cheat sheets, and survey takeaways, and things that I have. So that's, really helpful. So, I think, you know, every customer defines success in different ways. There's no one size fits all. But I think AI generated health scores would certainly help, you know, where waiting is decided based on input from the client during onboarding along with, you know, our, your own organizations, best practices.

Spencer Davison: Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head with the biggest issue which is… prioritization and resource constraints. Like you said, you know, we'd all like to treat every customer with a white glove experience, but that comes at a cost. But if you can get close to that, with automation and recommendations, then everyone's gonna benefit your company, the customer. And, and ideally that will lead, to more commercial oriented conversations. Define, I'd love to throw this one back to you on your, you know, some of the biggest problems, CSM space probably pretty well. So I'd love to hear how you think this is gonna maybe, this kind of revolution is gonna improve some of those problems.

Daphne Lopes: Yeah. I think in Hubspot, one of the things that we do is we have a BI model strategy, right? We have large customers, but we also have the long tail that Ryan was talking about. So many free customers or starter customers that we need to service. And honestly, I think not just Hubspot, but many companies out there today. They really look at the customer journey in as two separate one, one, the digital journey and then the other one the high touch human leg journey. And many teams are split like as a digital team or high touch CSM team. In that high touch CSM, you might have a pool model, and like dedicated CSM model, but like those things are pretty compartmentalized. I think what I, what I'm excited about is to build on what can said is this ability should be dynamic and meeting the customer where they are with what they need. So whether you are a large customer or whether you're a very small customer, if you're going through a challenge, let's say an adoption challenge or usage has gone down for your use case, you can compare that to the data on what does that customer look like based on the customers, like them, same industry, same region, same size, and what the customers are high performing in those cohorts, what do they do and, can we match recommendations to that? And you can meet them where they are when that happens? So they don't have to wait a month until they meet a CSM for their regular touch point to have that conversation as soon as it drops, that will come to them as enablement, and will help them overcome those challenges. So, I think like what AI will do and hopefully most companies we're gonna see this convergence of the three different experiences, the human lead the polls and this, and the digital coming together being super charged with AI that will meet customers where they are as those challenges happen. And on the flip side, I think in CS, we talk a lot about risk, right? Customers that are like adoption drops or, you know, something goes wrong. But conversely, what does grace look like? What is the customer that has high propensity for growth looks like? And how can we nurture that growth, in an education, national way to build the customers to build demand so that they're ready for an expansion, whether that is a cross sell, whether that's an upsell, like how can we nurture and do that on an ongoing basis? Not just when a CSM does a QB I and says, here's a great opportunity that we should be discussing like the customer is getting information. Like that all of the time they're getting it in app, they're getting in their inbox, they're getting from their CSM. So ideally you have like this really rounded experience not just for, the point of contact that CSM would have as well like the decision maker or the business that the user, but actually across all of the users. So I'm excited about like being able to be everywhere all at once with CS.

Spencer Davison: Yeah, I love the way you frame that and I think the way I was when you were, you know, talking, I was thinking that it's almost like a side kick or like another person on your account team that. And, and I think that's kinda the best things you get but even just like writing into ChatGPT, when you get an answer that provides a different perspective that I didn't think about it that way. So it's not just maybe automating a task but it's giving you a different lens to be the customer, their health and give recommendations that you can rely on. Awesome. I'd love to kind of now go a little. We went kind of big picture and now wanted to kinda get like day to day. So I'd love to think about just if you think about like day in day out for a CSM, those workflows, how do you think AI and it could be any type of AI will change their kind of day to day interactions with customers, their day to day workflows? What, and I'd love to kinda pass this on to far son who, you know, is in customer success and has probably put a lot of thought into this already.

Farzan Faramarzi: Thank you, Spencer. You know, one of the one part was I think, in your first question, I answered about the reporting and, you know, using the AI to generate these executive summaries and give us like, you know, really.

Spencer Davison: A…

Farzan Faramarzi: Condensed version of the report. But the other one is about the task management and how can AI can help us? For example, if you are keeping track of notes in Salesforce or another CRM, this tool, I mean, even like the Matik, AI can be a big help in creating detailed notes. So, while the tool writes the executive summary for you, using the AI, you can take, you know, care of a pressing matter or an urgent e-mail or jump on a quick call with another client. And without needing to worried about finding the time to write the summary, right? If you are looking for ways to make your client calls more productive, there's this tool that we use, you might consider using, you know, tools like Zoom it which we use here at Glassdoor, or Gong has the same capability. They are great because they give you a really good summary of your station and even offer some tips on how you improve. I know for example, one were talking about improving the technology and the client, but, these tools can improve, your career and personal growth as well. So, for example, with Zoom it, you don't have to worry about taking notes during the call. The AI does that for you. This means that you can really focus on your customers and give them your full attention. In addition to Zoom iq and Gong, I can give you a lot of helpful insights about your call. You can find out how fast you speak, how long you talked during the call, and how much time you spend listening. This tool is great for you as well as your manager and management team because you know they can see and highlight the areas where you can improve your communication skills, which is one of very important skills for any CSM.

Spencer Davison: Yeah. And it kinda goes back to just the blind spots that everyone has, you know, the there's so many things going on in the world, of the CSM, and, you know, you don't have visibility to everything. So if they can kinda fill in those blind spots, and give you more perspectives, better view into the customer, it's again, it's gonna help it's gonna help the customer and your business. Awesome. I'd love to kind of go. This all sounds great. But obviously, there's going to be challenges along the way. And so I'd love to talk about what some challenges you anticipated or have are currently experiencing when kind of using AI, in either tools that exist today or challenges you could foresee in the future with tools, that are kind of on the, it could be developed one day. And so I'd love to pass this back to you Ryan on what's some challenges you kinda foresee in using a.

Ryan Seams: Yeah. I mean, I think that, the real obvious one is more around just privacy and security, right? If you're you know, using your companies financial information, your customer data, your user data, et cetera, and feeding that right into some AI model, you have to have the right security and privacy constraints around that so that, you know, the model isn't learning from that proprietary information. And so, I think there's probably a lot of work to be done just more in the security and legal side of things to, you know, get some of these larger companies having their whole CSM team using AI and I see that's kind of one of the questions maybe in the Q and a as well. I think beyond that, I think one of the biggest challenges, right? Is that if AI ultimately is really successful, people will fear for their jobs and you will think like ultimately, if this thing works really well, I won't have a job here. And I do think that's one of the biggest challenges to get someone to adopt something like AI, is that if it's going to, you know, automate a bunch of the stuff that you think you do day to day that's valuable. What am I gonna do next? And I think it's an exciting challenge because you can actually go and do the creative proactive what I consider fun part of the job and less of the administrative tasks that you might have to do day to day. But I do think for many people, right? That that is going to be a challenge that's going to be a hard one to overcome.

Spencer Davison: Yeah. I mean, I think you hit two really important things there, which is security, which is always top of mind whenever you're sending data to anything. And then, yeah, I mean,, is this like a friend or enemy from my potential career? And we'll get to that kind of the, that thought in a bit here. But I'd love to hear from you Daphne in terms of, what challenges you're currently experiencing or what you anticipate could be a challenge in the future.

Daphne Lopes: Yeah, I will say that I'm very lucky with Hubspot. They've made a big bet in AI, while Ryan was saying about creating that ring fenced environment where you're not training the data that's something we've done early. It's already available for us. So, we have started building an app called chat spot which is a little bit of the interface work that I was talking about like really just helping people have conversations with the CRM versus having to update everything. There's AI in our product. You know, Hubspot has a marketing tool and what, and was talking about, in generating emails that's something we're already doing. So Hubspot is like really at the edge of already leveraging and utilizing this type of technology. So, I'm very proud of that. I think our leadership team has made like serious investments upfront. And I see a question in the Q and a there like, you know, making the right investment is this is not, this is not small, right? I think it's important to consider. Now, in terms of challenges, I do think that I kinda echo Ryan said about people… being afraid and not really necessarily wanting to adopt. The one thing I'm going to say to people on this call or people that are going to listen to this recording is like the cat is out of the bag, right? It's it's happening and it's moving fast. And if your leadership team makes that decision, like independently of whether you decide to adopt this or not like it's one of those strong forces that just comes and wipes it because nobody needs you to buy into AI for AI should be running in the back of the systems. Only the leadership thing needs to buy into it. Truly. So I would say the like the challenge of AI with the embracing it and really leveraging to maximize your own career, your own development, I think is one that everybody should embrace. Then the other thing I'm really like kinda afraid of is again being in the marketing industry. We already get a lot of emails and a lot of content in our inboxes that we don't want to open a right to. I guess I honestly, my personal e-mail is a little bit of a mess. I'll be honest to hear a bit vulnerable. When I open my e-mail every morning, I think I have over 80 to 100 emails from things that I either signed up to ages ago or maybe I didn't sign. Up, somebody bought a list and my name was there and they were marketing to me with people being able to create content at the velocity and the speed in which AI can create content. I really fear this high volume of really crap content hitting people's inboxes and immediately losing value, right? Like people will no longer open those things. So, I think we have to be careful with how much content we send to our customers. We don't want to span people. We, we want to help them. We want people to pay attention to what we say. So, I think that volume piece is something we need to watch carefully.

Spencer Davison: I think that's a great point. You don't want, your customers, to get cynical when it comes to, you know, what, who's giving me this recommendation? Who's sending me this? Is it just a robot or is it, you know, someone that's really thinking about, my experience? And I think that's something I mean, we've already seen today with, you know, news articles being, you know, generated, with AI, and, you know, some of the, a negative feedback those outlets have gotten. So, I think that's a really good point. I, you know, we're running close almost out of the time and I think, you may have answered this already but I'd love to just go round Robin and just think about that question on is AI a threat, and kind of what your perspective is today? And then, and maybe in the future. So, Connel, I'd love to throw it back to you and get your thoughts here.

Connel Valentine: Yeah, I can only picture a couple of folks on my team saying, you know, what about my Tableau and Barb, I dashboards? And, you know, the things that we've been doing. But yeah, I think the biggest is people feeling that, their jobs, are going away.

Spencer Davison: Large part.

Connel Valentine: Of, you know, what people do traditionally is very ops related, but I think the way, to mitigate that threat is it goes back to leadership and fostering the kind of culture which promotes problem solving and creativity over, you know, all, the operational work will always exist there's it'll never go away. But I think having kind of leadership that is always embracing change, always thinking about what's next, you know, and utilizing resources by having them take on tasks that are more problem solving in nature, the more creative in nature. I don't think any amount of AI is gonna get rid of problems that a company faces as a company grows and expands, it brings new problems with it. And, and we need problem solvers and creative thinkers, to get to those.

Spencer Davison: Yup, we're about to get to the Q and a and Ryan and Daphne, you sort have already answered this, but I'd love to hear Farzan's perspective here, on the threat or potential threat of a.

Farzan Faramarzi: I think what it reminds me this time talking about AI, it reminds me of the time of industrial revolution back then people were afraid of all these factors and everything. They're gonna lose jobs and everything. But it actually created more jobs. So today we open AI, you can write an article to your point but, you should know how to write a right prompt to open AI or ChatGPT to get the right answer. So it means that you need to be more technical, more strategic and more adaptable. So, I guess that could be challenges and risks, but I see more opportunities.

Spencer Davison: Yeah, it almost reminds me of when, like excel was first invented and how many jobs, that was potentially putting in risk, but it's not like there's any fewer accounts. I think a lot of these things, they, you know, move an industry forward. And I, it's probably less likely that it will actually cost jobs in the long run. So I think that's a good perspective there. And again, yeah, you can't put the cat back in the bag too great. So thank you all for answering these questions. Some really great insights there. I'd love to just pass it off to the Q and a though and see what some of, our attendees think.

Spencer Davison: Awesome. All.

Matik MC: Right. Great. Sorry, Spencer. You're I'll go ahead and thanks. I'll go ahead and ask some of, the questions that we've gotten in and thank you all so much for this dialogue. There's been some really interesting insights and we've got some great questions in, from the attendees as well. So one of those is what are your top three AI tools for CSM to start using today?

Daphne Lopes: You say chat to three times in a row?

Daphne Lopes: No, no. In all seriousness that I think is a fantastic copilot like we talked about, you know, making sure you're ring fencing your environment to a, not train the larger model with your company's. Private proprietary information is important. Now, the likelihood of the model spitting out, the one answer that one of your customers gave based on the volume of data is very low, but even then it's not ethical. So we shouldn't do it, but I think that is great for like for example, if you are preparing for a call and you have somebody a persona in an industry that you're not super familiar with and you're trying to brainstorm what are their challenges? What, what do they struggle with? What are they interested in learning? I think it's a really, great tool to do that. Even if you don't have that ring fencing that we're talking about, you can already use it for that. But if you do have the ring fencing, then summarize in your emails, follow ups, summarizing your CRM notes, like you can just do so much in there. And then the other AI use less than a it's not as much of a tool as it is like actually having a team that actually codes and builds machine learning and AI is actually building smart alert systems that can really look at all of your product data, understand what your customers are, how are they behaving? And then spit out to you like what is risk? What is opportunity? I think a tool that do that well is hook. I haven't used hook myself but I have seen demos of hook in Hubspot. We've built that from the ground. Obviously big investment. But I think hook is, it looks to me like the tool that's closest to doing that like really taking a product data and giving you insights. So those would be my two top AI tools.

Farzan Faramarzi: Yeah. If I have to go with another two, I would say may go is a good one because like not, it doesn't write anything for you but sometimes you are delivering this really tough news or having this hard conversation over e-mail and a lot of things can get lost and this tool can get you set the right tone. So I love to play with different tones. And the other one that I enjoy and I mentioned that is Zoom, it gives me all the stats, I know. Okay, we're the action items. Everything is summarized and I have it in one e-mail so I can take it and then, you know, do the rest after.

Ryan Seams: Yeah. I mean if you're gonna turn this into like a day of the life in the CSM, right? Like you're sending some emails, you're gonna use a tool like auto bound AI to help personalize those and make them really cool. You're prepping for a meeting. You're probably messaging ChatGPT, who is this person? What's going on with their company? Summarize some key themes, you're hosting a meeting. So Zoom, I Clary copilot update AI, somebody summarizing that meeting with action items and what you should do next. After that meeting, you're brainstorming, what should I do? What's my plan for this customer? You're probably chatting with Jack ChatGPT. What would you advise here there? And then, you know, you're actually going and executing, and following up. And so there's like different tools along that whole journey. And then, you know, to denies point there's these more holistic tools that will help you analyze a lot of your data and tell, you know, what are those look alike customers that are really good? And what are those ones that are in a bad place that you need to go focus your time on? And there's lots of tools there hook, but top line AI there's also heads up as well. Those are all some tools that would help you there.

Connel Valentine: Yeah. Just to add on, hopefully I'll answer Dan's question to me as well. All I haven't used the tool but I've read a lot about it. But I guess any tool that helps you just like GainSight rise in, I, to actually look at, your customers data. And when it comes to that personalization, you know, it could look like you're getting into a client meeting and you're saying, you know, thanks Spencer, you know, you attended nearly all of our last webinar and shows that your adoption rate is like currently, you're using 80 percent of our tools. So that's really great. These are the kinds of personalization, that can certainly help facilitate, you know, conversations as CSM will have with your high tech customers.

Matik MC: Great. Thank you all for your responses there. We'll go ahead and try to get another question in. So another question that came in that that's interesting is do you have concerns about AI automation becoming the same nuisance as interactive voice response or I VR systems when it comes to regular communication?

Spencer Davison: Yeah. I think definite kind of alluded to this with the, you know, those are the amount of emails people get. But yeah, I would love, to hear some other people's thoughts here.

Ryan Seams: I assume we're talking about the phone menu where you got to go in and be like, please guide me to this person and you're just pressing zero over and over again to talk to the human. And it like never works. I mean, I think look like AI should be a lot smarter than that. So the hope is it can actually solve, you know, 80 90 percent of your use cases there, and it will be faster. I think there's always going to be a need for like a human at the end of that line, right? If there's something unique or specific that needs to go and get resolved. But I mean, from my perspective, I would hope that it's a lot smarter. And if it's not, I'm sure that we'll keep iterating until it is.

Connel Valentine: Yeah. You know, I made reference to one of the challenges or maybe, and, but one of the challenges I find, with, is having that knowledge base, right? It, it relies on knowledge and you certainly need to drive, that culture of making sure that, your team is facilitating that knowledge. But at the same time, you know that the knowledge piece is also a benefit of AI, if you want in the kind of industry where you're saying that it is impossible for one person to know everything I can do that, you know, I've read that all state insurance, for example, they have Amelia. I think her name is, and she's been trained on 50 insurance topics and insurance regulations across all 50 states. I presume the one person can't know all of those things, right? So if someone's calling in and talking to Amelia, I think Amelia would be better equip with answering more questions, than a person would.

Matik MC: Excellent. All right. Well, we are at time. So with that, we are going to end our session. So any questions we weren't able to get to, we will be passing along to our speakers and sharing those answers along with the recording of this session in our resource hub. So all summit attendees will be notified when the resource hub is live. And thank you so much to all of a wonderful speakers for joining us today and thank you to everyone else for attending.

Spencer Davison: Thanks everyone. That was great.

Daphne Lopes: Thank you.

Spencer Davison: Bye. Thank you.

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