Explore developments in Digital CS, learn about AI's impact on customer teams and hear predictions on future enhancements from Gainsight and Floqast.
0:00
*Ding*
0:03
*Singing* When love is king, when boy meets girl, here's what they say.
0:14
When the moon hits your eye like a bigger pizza pie that's for more than...
0:28
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine that's some more
0:35
than...
0:36
Bells are ringing, tingling, tingling, tingling, you'll sing the beat of that
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land.
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Hearts are play tippy tippy tippy tippy tippy tippy tippy like a guitar on that
0:53
land.
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When the stars make you drool or just like a pasta pie that's for that small
1:02
egg.
1:04
When your dance down the street with a clouded you'll feed your inner heart.
1:13
When you walk in a dream, but you know you're not dreaming sin your head.
1:23
Scores away, but you see back in old Napoli that's for more than...
1:31
When the moon hits your eye like a bigger pizza pie that's for more than...
1:42
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine that's some more
1:49
than...
1:52
Bells will ring, tingling, tingling, tingling, you'll sing the beat of that
1:58
land.
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Bells will ring, tingling, tingling, tingling, tingling, tingling, tingling, t
2:05
ingling, like a guitar on that land.
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Lucky fella, when the stars make you drool just like pasta pie that's for that
2:20
small egg.
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♪ When you dance down the street with a clove ♪
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♪ You'll feel your love ♪
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♪ When you walk in a dream ♪
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♪ But you know you're not dreaming ♪
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♪ Sing your rest ♪
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♪ Scoozing me, but you'll sleep back in whole life ♪
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♪ Only that's the morning ♪
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- Thanks everyone so much for joining us today.
2:58
Great song for us to kick things off with.
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So welcome, thanks everyone,
3:04
for attending our final entry
3:06
in our Digital CS Chef's Kiss series today.
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So excited to have everyone with us.
3:10
My name is Tori Jeffcoat,
3:12
and I lead the product marketing
3:13
and go-to-market team here at GainSight.
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And before I kick things off with an icebreaker
3:17
and introduce my fellow presenters,
3:19
just a quick bit of housekeeping,
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we would love for any questions any of our attendees have
3:23
to be submitted in the Q&A
3:25
as we go through our content today instead of the chat.
3:28
It's just helped us better capture those
3:29
and make sure we can address those questions
3:31
at the end of today's webinar.
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So again, this is the last
3:35
in our amazing Digital CS Chef's Kiss series.
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And we'll be focused today on how AI
3:41
will help us get more predictive
3:42
and effective in Digital CS.
3:45
If you're just joining us in this series,
3:47
you can catch all of our previous webinars on demand.
3:49
And if you've been here for every episode,
3:51
welcome back.
3:52
We're thrilled to be wrapping things up today
3:54
with this final webinar.
3:56
And so we are fully into the holiday season this time of year.
4:01
And with our cooking theme,
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wanted to kick things off with an icebreaker,
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asking everyone what your favorite holiday meal or food is.
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Feel free to drop those answers in the chat.
4:11
And I will go ahead and ask our guest chefs
4:14
or guest presenters today
4:15
to answer this question as well.
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My own answer to this question is
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that I have a great recipe from my grandmother
4:24
for a hash brown casserole,
4:26
plenty of sour cream,
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butter, all of the terrible for you things in there.
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So that is both my nostalgic and delicious
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go to holiday dish.
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To introduce our speakers and ask them the same question,
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we have with us today Tyler McNally,
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who is the senior VP of Customer Experience
4:43
and Operations here at GainSight.
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And has actually been one of the key hosts
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of this entire series.
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So excited to have Tyler back sharing his wealth
4:50
of knowledge on digital scale programs
4:53
and some of those tactics
4:54
that he'll actually be sharing with us today.
4:56
So Tyler, what is your favorite holiday meal or food?
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- Whoops, I was meeting.
5:18
Honey beans, ham is the short answer
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to your question, my favorite.
5:22
- Awesome.
5:24
I wasn't sure if that was just me or everyone.
5:25
So sorry about that Tyler, but thank you.
5:28
That does sound super delicious.
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And we also have with us our amazing guest chef,
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Julie Fox, who is the senior manager of CS at Flowcast.
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I'll give her more folk thorough introduction in a bit here,
5:40
but she'll be sharing some amazing ways
5:42
that Flowcast is using AI for their CS teams.
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So Julie, super great to have you with us.
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What is your go-to holiday dish or meal?
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- Thank you, excited to be here.
5:52
Can you guys hear me?
5:54
Yes.
5:55
Okay, perfect.
5:55
Just wanted to make sure.
5:56
I would say my favorite is pumpkin pie.
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I also really love my mother is Jewish and so,
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and father's Catholic.
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So I've grown up kind of celebrating everything.
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And we make like a traditional kubil,
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which is like a traditional Jewish meal.
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And we only do it really during the holidays.
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So it's really a special meal.
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- Awesome.
6:22
Well, thank you for sharing.
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We have some really amazing answers in the chat as well.
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Spinach dip in Hawaiian bread,
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mashed potatoes is not a lame answer.
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That is always a great one.
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Cookies.
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So before we all get too hungry,
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but thank you all for sharing all those great answers.
6:39
I wanna walk us through what's on our menu for content today.
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We'll be sharing a little bit about where digital CS
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and AI stand as we look back at 2023.
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And the impact AI in particular
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is having on customer facing teams.
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We'll then dive into our maturity model
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and our final predictive stage,
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sharing some tactical programs that have worked really well
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and some new ways that we're getting more
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and more predictive with AI.
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And finally, we'll hear from Julie more about AI and CS
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at Lookest.
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And we'll also leave plenty of time for questions at the end.
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So again, just a quick reminder to use that Q&A feature
7:13
to drop those questions in as we go.
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But to kick us off talking about where digital and AI
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have made massive impacts on CS this year,
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as well as Will in the future,
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I'll hand it over to Tyler.
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- Thank you so much, Tori.
7:26
I am really excited to talk about two dishes
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that were made for each other,
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digital customer success and AI.
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I'm gonna mix metaphors too.
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It's the holidays.
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I have my favorite sweatshirt on.
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I like to think of digital customer success
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as the unicorn Santa is the CSM.
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And AI is this lightsaber.
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And we're all going where we've never gone before into space.
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Well, let's ground this again.
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I wanna start with a stat from our 2023
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customer success index report.
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And what we were actually I think pleasantly surprised with
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is nearly 50% of companies already have
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some specific digital CS experiences running.
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And when you dig into the data, what you see is it's even higher
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for the lower end of revenue.
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I just think companies with one to 10 million in revenue
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and at the higher end, $100 million and plus.
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And what my interpretation of that is,
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is new companies are envisioning digital CS
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from the beginning, just like a couple years ago.
8:27
It became table stakes to have customer success
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as part of your company.
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And then companies passing a 100 million ARR
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and embracing digital at their scale and efficiency goals.
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And now the middle group is catching up.
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Let's talk about the other dish, generative AI.
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And AI has been around for a long time.
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It's generative AI that's blown up over the last 16 to 18 months.
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But we see it as emerging as a really critical capability
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for post-sale teams.
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This is data from another report that we ran a survey
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of 400 companies about what are they using
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or exploring with gen AI.
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And I can tell you customer support
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is certainly the killer use case so far.
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If you think about it,
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large volumes of tickets with responses,
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that's your training data.
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The job to be done is a lot of summarization.
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The port ticket answers are typically
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emphasizing existing documentation to a customer request.
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And there's already a notion of a chat UI.
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You know, gen AI was kind of built for support.
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We also believe that success
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and the people we surveyed agree is very close behind
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while the content may be different.
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There's a similar workflow in that
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a meaningful portion of what a CSM does today
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is take a customer question,
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go find the relevant resources,
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and then summarize an answer and share back.
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Gen AI is built for those kinds of jobs.
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We were also excited by the level of interest
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beyond support and CS.
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And so you can see services, education and community.
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And when you dig into the responses,
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what they're most excited about
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are things like content creation,
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content recommendations,
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and then bringing this experience,
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this is where the combination with digital comes in
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as close to the product or user as possible.
10:18
I spent a lot of time focused on AI and post sales.
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And my aha moment was about 15 months ago.
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It was pre-chat GPT.
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It was called GPT-3.
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And it was pure auto-complete.
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You typed in something,
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and then the AI would just try to predict what else you wanted.
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And the results were far better than I imagined
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for a free tool that just had kind of been put out there.
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And I think the next point I wanna make
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is the most important point.
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So if you go to the next slide,
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today is as bad as it gets.
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When you look at Gen AI capabilities, it only improves.
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And I wanna give you two examples to bring that to life.
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Left-hand side is a company called Mid-Journey.
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They do image generation.
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This is the same prompt given to Mid-Journey
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nine different times over the last year and a half.
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And you can see it goes from what actually is really good,
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in my opinion, amateur artist in the top left
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to apply definition photo-realistic in the bottom right.
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And that's in 18 months.
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On the right-hand side,
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this comes from the Journal of Internal Medicine,
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and they had clinicians evaluate doctor responses
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and chat GPT responses to medical questions.
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And they looked at the quality of the response,
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and they also looked at the empathy of the response.
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And it's pretty astounding that clinicians
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are already ranking chat GPT,
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which wasn't tuned, wasn't designed for medical answers,
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way higher quality, way higher empathy.
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I believe it's only a matter of time
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before your diagnosis will be aided,
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not fully run, but aided by medical grade,
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generative AI.
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And if you go to the next slide,
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again, this is some more data from our state of AI.
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I think what's really important is that we
12:15
and other companies that we talk to,
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they're seeing that generative AI
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is not a replacement for CSMs.
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It's gonna save tremendous time.
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And the idea is that it'll create more hours
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in the day for CSMs to be strategic,
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value oriented, and be able to support more customers.
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And you go to the final slide here,
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think about how at each stage of the customer journey,
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AI is taking on those important,
12:45
but either routine or lower value activities
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so that CSMs support service
12:52
and develop stronger relationships across the journey.
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And so I wanna pass it back to Tori now
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who's gonna share a couple specific examples
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of a weave infused generative AI
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and why we're excited for AI
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to enable the customer success motions.
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- Thanks Tyler.
13:10
So one way that AI helps make
13:11
that customer's digital journey even better
13:14
is actually by helping CS teams
13:16
to better understand their customers
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as quickly as possible.
13:20
Getting a new CSM or an executive up to speed
13:23
ahead of customer conversations
13:25
really helps make those interactions more meaningful,
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do features like our just launch cheat sheet
13:30
which actually helps CS teams
13:32
to instantly sift through customer content
13:34
and surface the right summary points,
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risks and priorities to have better customer engagement.
13:40
So we're also learning how AI will impact CS programs
13:44
and to help kind of uncover some of that
13:46
and paint the picture for what's possible with AI.
13:49
I wanna showcase a really quick video we put together
13:51
of what cheat sheet looks like in action.
13:55
Save countless hours preparing for customer interactions
13:58
with the new customer cheat sheet
14:00
powered by her eyes in AI.
14:01
With customer cheat sheet,
14:04
instantly analyze then surface key customer information,
14:07
timeline notes, renewal discussions, key changes and more.
14:11
Never miss customer risks with a fuller picture
14:14
of each customer's history,
14:16
highlighting their evolving needs and paying points
14:18
and elaborating when needed for more.
14:20
Easily summarize insights
14:24
and share with executives manually or by email
14:26
to key stakeholders.
14:28
Cheat Sheet makes it easy to summarize months of content
14:31
at the click of a button and stay ahead of customer needs.
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- Yes, that is my voice.
14:38
You are still hearing from me in case anyone's wondering.
14:41
Another really amazing way though
14:43
that we're looking to use AI
14:44
is to make customer experiences more engaging and effective
14:49
through features coming soon for gain site like search assess.
14:52
This feature will let customers quickly find answers,
14:55
help them to summarize key content
14:57
and even link to those resources referenced.
14:59
So customers can really quickly and easily dive deeper
15:02
into that content and the on demand support that they need.
15:05
To show you how search assess works,
15:08
seeing is always better than talking through it, right?
15:10
So I have one more quick overview demo to play
15:13
to help everyone take a look.
15:14
- For both you and your customers,
15:17
navigating your resources, data and content just got easier.
15:21
With new search assist functionality,
15:24
gain site is harnessing the power of generative AI
15:27
to generate quick contextual answers from all or select sources,
15:31
then surfacing both summary content
15:33
and source resources for deeper browsing.
15:35
When your answer sparks more questions,
15:40
asking for more as a breeze,
15:42
making it simple for your customers to get to the content they need
15:45
while in your community.
15:46
And there's even more on the horizon.
15:49
You can help customers find answers in your product
15:52
via the Knowledge Center bot search,
15:54
guiding users to the right content
15:55
without having to leave your application.
15:57
And the icing on the cake,
16:01
you can even find your own answers better and gain site CS,
16:05
leveraging the same technology to quickly ask
16:08
and answer questions on your accounts,
16:10
ask for more information
16:13
and navigate your customer data with ease.
16:17
With search assist, get the answers you need without the hassle.
16:20
- The music definitely makes those videos
16:25
very exciting to listen to.
16:27
But I hope those have been helpful
16:28
in kind of bringing to life some of the data points and insights
16:31
that Tyler shared from some of the survey data
16:33
and help paint the picture of what AI can do in action.
16:37
To talk more about our maturity model
16:38
and walk us through how AI will actually impact the future of CS,
16:42
along with some of the great tactical CS program examples
16:45
from gain site, I'll turn it back over to Tyler.
16:47
- Thank you very much.
16:51
So as we talked about at the beginning,
16:53
this is the final of six part series.
16:55
We went through in previous episodes,
16:58
the full maturity model,
17:00
and it went deep on proactive.
17:02
Proactive was all about,
17:04
you don't need much data at all to get started
17:06
with digital success.
17:08
You can create accelerate time to value
17:10
by creating just in time resources.
17:13
And all you need to know is that somebody is new
17:16
to your product or a new customer.
17:19
The second stage was personalized,
17:21
and that was about using a little bit of data
17:24
to guide end users to adopt
17:26
in ways that are gonna generate our life.
17:29
And so think of confirming what somebody's role is
17:32
and the next time they log in,
17:33
having a personalized experience based on their role
17:37
or how they should use the product.
17:39
And so now we're gonna move into the final stage,
17:42
which is predictive.
17:44
And predictive has a couple key elements for me.
17:46
It's about only across the lifecycle,
17:51
and it's about omni-channel experiences.
17:53
I'm gonna break apart some of that jargon for you.
17:57
If you go to the next slide,
17:59
what we really believe this means is
18:02
that how you drive behavior change with campaigns
18:05
that are integrated.
18:07
And think of seeing the same message multiple times
18:10
wherever you live in the product or outside of the product.
18:14
Number two, it's about optimizing what you're doing
18:17
with digital success by using customer data.
18:21
Personalize those campaigns and put them in the lifecycle
18:25
where they'll have the greatest impact.
18:27
And then finally, by leveraging AI,
18:30
being able to provide directly to the customer,
18:33
think Search Assist, that's a direct digital enabled AI
18:37
experience that takes the load off of CSM
18:41
and enables a user to get value immediately.
18:44
I wanna go through a couple examples.
18:46
First up, multi-channel campaigns.
18:51
So here's an example where what we have found
18:54
is the more you can make these campaigns consistent
18:57
across the places your users are going to be,
19:01
the more likely you're gonna drive behavior change.
19:03
And a lot of this learning comes from marketing,
19:05
it comes from sales, and we're seeing this now adopted
19:08
in the post sales world.
19:09
So as an example, we have had tremendous success
19:13
with customer events.
19:14
One of the challenges of making sure the right people
19:17
show up to the right events.
19:19
And as we have standardized our campaigns
19:22
and gone up through a flow like this
19:24
where it starts with an in-app teaser,
19:26
trying to generate a little bit of awareness.
19:29
There's a follow up email that has more details to register.
19:33
And then ultimately everything lives in community
19:35
so people can self-serve.
19:37
And we've been able to see an increase
19:39
in the number of signups and the number of attendees.
19:43
Two, these one to many events,
19:44
which themselves take the load off of CSM
19:48
to have to have those conversations one on one.
19:50
Let's go to the next example.
19:53
So thinking about how you use customer data.
19:57
And this is an example of game site
19:59
where we combine three different types of data
20:02
and then always have this campaign in the lifecycle
20:06
because the results,
20:08
we can see results every time we run the campaign.
20:11
So what did we do?
20:13
We printed a pilot group.
20:14
In this example, it was customers who had scaled CS
20:18
as a goal in their success plan.
20:21
However, according to our usage data,
20:23
they were not using our email tool meaningfully
20:26
and they were three months post onboarding.
20:29
We ran it as a test campaign.
20:31
We had a control group and a test group.
20:35
And with the test group,
20:36
we saw just the people that opened the email.
20:38
We saw an adoption improvement of email automation
20:41
of 6 percentage points 10 weeks out.
20:44
And those that clicked on it, it was 7.5%.
20:47
Based on the results of the pilot,
20:50
we now embed this and it's part of every customer's lifecycle.
20:53
If they meet those criteria on the right-hand side,
20:56
they're gonna have this as part
20:57
of their ongoing adoption program.
21:01
So let's bring Tori back
21:03
to showcase two more AI features from GameSight
21:06
that'll help you generate automated insights
21:08
that you could potentially take action on.
21:10
Digital.
21:12
- Thanks Tyler.
21:13
So Tyler just shared some really great ways
21:15
that we're getting more and more predictive today.
21:18
But I wanna touch on two ways we're actually starting
21:21
to use AI to drive even better customer outcomes
21:23
and value realization moving forward.
21:26
One of the biggest ways that we can improve
21:28
overall customer experiences
21:30
is by capturing and taking action on the overall sentiment.
21:33
Either where things are working or running into friction.
21:36
So this image here is just an example,
21:38
not actual customer data points,
21:40
but by using AI to better capture the key opinions
21:43
customers might be expressing in surveys
21:46
and in timeline data, we can actually see
21:48
where positive and negative sentiment
21:50
is popping up at a glance
21:52
and then understand where we need to dig in
21:54
with AI generated summaries and quick hits.
21:57
This helps save tremendous manual time from our teams,
22:00
trying to assess text based responses
22:02
across the customer base and gather the right data points.
22:06
It also helps us understand where the noise is coming from.
22:08
So when you can see kind of the count
22:10
and the overall sentiment together,
22:12
you can help better understand if specific statements
22:14
are popping up for just one certain customer
22:17
with specific needs or if they're actually reflected
22:19
across your larger customer base.
22:22
And so while this AI ability with takeaways
22:24
is relatively new in gain site,
22:26
just released a couple of weeks ago in November,
22:29
we're already starting to see it make an impact
22:31
on our understanding of our customers' needs.
22:34
So I don't have any customer data or programs
22:38
to kind of point to here.
22:40
I do want to give one more video,
22:42
but a really quick overview of what takeaways
22:43
actually looks like and what it does
22:45
to help convey what this feature has already started to do
22:47
for our CS teams.
22:49
Analyzing survey, timeline and other data
22:52
to better understand where customers
22:54
are needing more support has never been easier.
22:57
In the new takeaways module powered by Horizon AI,
23:00
instantly analyze direct and indirect feedback
23:03
to summarize and surface common customer needs
23:05
and recurring opinions categorized by theme.
23:07
Understand the number of responses applied
23:10
to a specific statement,
23:12
the overall sentiment on each key opinion
23:14
and get an instant summary of what's working well
23:17
and what needs improvement.
23:19
They're deeper into a specific opinion
23:20
by simply clicking in to get an instant AI powered summary
23:24
of the overall feedback as well as sentiment score.
23:27
This lets customer facing teams quickly understand
23:30
deeper needs and click in for more details
23:33
to surface and follow up on individual responses
23:35
from any given source around the key opinion.
23:38
In short, takeaways will help you see at a glance
23:41
overall feedback trends and dive into detail when needed.
23:44
- Awesome.
23:47
So another great example of AI
23:49
in our own workflows here at GainSight
23:51
is using our new meeting assist feature.
23:53
This feature in GainSight CS has actually helped
23:55
our own CSMs to skip taking tedious meeting notes
23:59
and actually use the AI generated summary of calls
24:01
that they've recorded through GONG,
24:03
which is what we use internally at GainSight,
24:05
to better capture the highlights of conversations
24:07
as well as recommended action items
24:09
that can really quickly be turned into CTAs
24:12
as well as capturing the risk and issues
24:14
that might have surfaced during that call.
24:16
Again, what you see here is just example data,
24:18
but really similar to what's generated for real customers.
24:22
One of the big things here is that creating CTAs is optional.
24:25
So we're not adding work to anyone's plate automatically,
24:28
but really making sure they add the CTAs
24:30
that make sense for them.
24:31
A funny example that was shared in Slack at GainSight
24:34
is that someone had a CTA recommended
24:36
to re-book a customer's flight.
24:37
They've been talking about re-booking it on the call, I guess,
24:39
which certainly would have been going above and beyond
24:42
as a CSM, but maybe not a real CTA to capture there.
24:46
Otherwise, that this has made a massive impact
24:48
is in saving us just the GainSight users of this feature,
24:52
an estimated 1,223 hours of time
24:56
in just the last 10 weeks
24:57
since we started using this feature ourselves,
25:00
assuming that's about 15 minutes per call saved.
25:02
And if you estimate that out annually,
25:04
that's a really impressive over 5,800 hours
25:09
or almost three full-time employees worth of time saved.
25:12
I think it's really helpful to give a visual
25:15
of what these features look like
25:16
and how the AI actually works for CSMs.
25:19
So I have one final video
25:21
to showcase what meeting assist looks like
25:23
before we turn it over to Julie.
25:24
Enhance your team's productivity and efficiency
25:29
with GainSight's new meeting assist feature,
25:31
powered by Horizon AI.
25:33
Take capturing tedious meeting notes
25:35
off your CSM's plates,
25:37
letting meeting assist instantly generate
25:39
a detailed and comprehensive summary of your call
25:42
with recommended action items
25:43
and highlighted risks and issues
25:45
surfaced during the conversation.
25:46
Easily add any action item as a task,
25:50
editing the task information, due date,
25:52
and assigning it to the right team in.
25:54
Choose the task that makes sense for your customer
25:57
and eliminate any unnecessary recommendations
25:59
with a click of a button.
26:01
When you're ready to add the call and summary to timeline,
26:04
easily edit the generated notes, activity information,
26:07
and click log activity when ready.
26:09
With GainSight, capturing and logging meeting notes
26:13
just got easier, giving you more time
26:15
to focus on your customers.
26:19
Awesome.
26:20
And so we hope some of those great examples
26:23
that Tyler shared as well as some of those features
26:24
I just showcased really help paint the picture
26:27
for how predictive digital strategies can impact CS teams.
26:31
I'm super excited though to turn it over to you
26:33
and hear from Julie Fox at Flowcast,
26:36
combine both of those words,
26:37
and hear what she and her team have been doing around AI
26:40
in their own CS motions.
26:42
Just a quick introduction before Julie takes over,
26:45
she's a proven CS leader that has experienced building
26:47
and scaling CS teams.
26:49
Top 25 creative CS leader for 2023
26:52
and a top 100 CS strategist is incredibly active
26:55
in the CS community,
26:57
and again currently works as the senior manager of CS
26:59
at Flowcast.
27:00
And fun fact, she's actually co-authoring a book
27:02
on hiring and recruitment in CS.
27:05
So super excited to hear more about her learnings
27:07
on this topic,
27:08
and with that I'll pass it over to you, Julie.
27:10
- Thank you so much, Tori, excited to be here.
27:12
And I do feel like I need to give the disclaimer.
27:14
I did choose on purpose an AI generated headshot.
27:18
I felt like it was appropriate to the topic,
27:21
so just wanted to make sure that I was being honest here
27:24
that that's not actually me,
27:25
it's the AI version of me.
27:27
As Tori mentioned,
27:30
I am a senior manager of customer success at Flowcast.
27:33
Flowcast is an accounting operations platform
27:37
that enables organizations to operationalize
27:40
accounting excellence.
27:42
And I joined over a year ago
27:43
and really put a special focus and attention
27:46
on how we scale through leveraging
27:48
digital customer success strategy and programs.
27:51
If you wanna go ahead and go to the next slide,
27:53
I can tell a little bit of my story.
27:55
So when I joined the team at Flowcast,
27:57
the team was already a world class customer success team.
28:01
Early on, we were challenged with
28:03
how to scale exceptional customer experiences,
28:06
which historically had been more reliant
28:08
on one-to-one meetings and interactions,
28:11
and how we can help our team to become more and more outcome
28:14
versus output focused.
28:17
Taking a step back, literally by definition,
28:19
customer success should be centered
28:22
around the success of our customers.
28:24
It seems simple enough,
28:26
but what I have found is that companies get
28:29
consumed with the metrics of our business
28:32
that we forget the basics.
28:34
So what we did is to really bring the focus
28:36
back on our customers.
28:38
Ensuring customers are achieving value
28:41
in their desired outcomes,
28:43
it should be at the forefront of your interactions
28:45
with your customers.
28:46
And the good news is that what we found
28:48
is that the more that you focus on your customers
28:50
and them achieving value and reaching their goals,
28:54
the metrics are impacted really beautifully.
28:56
Digital CS, scaling efforts, AI,
29:02
it's not just about supporting the customers,
29:04
but it's also about supporting your team,
29:06
the team that you work with.
29:08
I talk to a lot of CSMs and CS leaders,
29:11
and there's a common theme that I've been hearing,
29:13
especially over the past couple of years,
29:15
and even more so this year, I would say,
29:19
is that teams feel very spread then.
29:21
They're pulled in a million directions,
29:23
maybe even feeling a sense of overwhelm or burnout.
29:26
And in my experience, a lot of this overwhelm feeling
29:30
comes from spending too much time
29:33
and energy on reactive tasks.
29:35
They feel like they're on this hamster wheel,
29:37
they're running, running, constantly moving,
29:39
but they're not really getting anywhere
29:41
or not getting where they need to be
29:43
or spending time on getting off the hamster wheel.
29:47
Leaning on AI and digital customer success
29:51
is really what transforms teams
29:53
to be able to be more proactive and predictive,
29:56
more focused and intentional,
29:58
which helps them feel better,
30:00
and it also helps the customers achieve more value.
30:05
So one thing that I did, or I guess we did,
30:08
this by no means was just me,
30:10
is starting to talk to my team around
30:12
kind of where they were spending their time and energy.
30:15
People on my team even did kind of more
30:17
of like a time management and time tracking exercise
30:20
where we really were able to understand
30:22
where our team was spending time
30:25
and if it was in the most productive value driven ways.
30:30
So what we found with that is that tons and tons of time
30:33
was being spent on preparing for calls,
30:36
preparation type activities, meeting notes,
30:41
following up, all of these different ad hoc administrative
30:44
tasks and projects that kind of get added and added
30:47
to the to-do list.
30:48
And now all of these are important activities.
30:51
None of this we were willing to say, okay,
30:53
these are low value tasks, we shouldn't be doing these,
30:56
all of them were high value and really important.
30:59
And so that's where we really started leaning on AI.
31:03
So if you wanna go to the next slide.
31:05
So we've done a lot with AI,
31:09
some of the most impactful to the customers
31:11
in the team are a couple of what I'll mentioned.
31:14
So when I think of the difference
31:15
between a good CSM and an exceptional one,
31:20
a few things come to mind.
31:21
Ownership mentality is a big one.
31:23
That's probably one of the biggest things
31:25
that I look for as I hire CSMs or as I look at promoting
31:29
my team members is that they're taking more
31:31
of an ownership mentality around their customers
31:34
and the value that we provide.
31:36
As part of that, it's incredibly important for CSMs
31:39
to know what is going on with their customers.
31:42
They should honestly be running their bucket business
31:44
like a CEO knowing exactly where the opportunities are,
31:47
exactly where the areas of risk are
31:50
and on top of all of them.
31:51
And so as part of that preparing is incredibly important.
31:55
There's a saying in sales, show me you know me.
31:58
And I think that kind of rings true here
32:00
for customer success.
32:02
I think whether it's an email or a meeting,
32:04
customers are drowning in content and in touches
32:07
and they wanna feel seen.
32:08
They wanna know that we know them
32:10
and understand what they care about
32:12
or how their business is run.
32:14
And the gain site cheat sheet is really just that.
32:17
It's our cheat code.
32:18
It's our ability to understand our customers
32:21
at a pretty deep level and how they're using our software.
32:26
One of the areas that they're focusing on
32:27
what's going on in their world and their business
32:29
and what they need,
32:31
this allows us to make better decisions
32:33
and have better quality and more focused calls.
32:35
And as I was talking to the gain site team,
32:38
it's interesting because it was mentioned
32:40
that Flowcast is one of the highest adopters of this test
32:45
as we are going through the beta test of this.
32:48
And it definitely made me laugh,
32:49
but honestly all joking aside,
32:51
like could we live without gain site cheat sheet?
32:55
Yeah, I'm sure we could, but would we want to?
32:58
Rather not.
32:58
I think as you get exposed to these different things,
33:02
you recognize just it's hard.
33:04
I guess it's once these things are peeled away,
33:07
off of your plate, you realize that not only
33:09
is that time that you're getting back,
33:11
but ideally the AI is doing a better job than we could have.
33:14
It's doing it in a more efficient way,
33:16
but also it's more effective.
33:18
We're getting more information
33:19
than what we were getting previously.
33:21
Now, the perfect call isn't perfect without documentation,
33:26
follow up and follow through.
33:28
So truly, I mean it,
33:31
I imagine having an amazing call with a customer,
33:34
but there's no notes,
33:35
meaning that there's a good chance
33:36
that a lot of the details are lost.
33:38
And there's not a great follow up on action items.
33:41
This would not be a good example
33:43
of that ownership mentality.
33:45
So this is an example of where AI has supported our team.
33:50
We use AI to capture meeting notes,
33:52
note the action items who's responsible for what
33:54
and help support sending follow up messages.
33:58
We've tried a handful of different technologies
34:00
with update AI, Sible,
34:02
Gong has built in capabilities,
34:04
game site now does as well.
34:06
Using AI continues to get easier and easier.
34:09
It's been really interesting,
34:10
kind of in the past six to nine months
34:12
as we've tried these different technologies,
34:14
just how good they are getting.
34:16
Just the, we were impressed at the beginning,
34:19
but now it's really capturing really, really well,
34:23
the action items, next steps and all that,
34:25
as well as making it very easy to follow up
34:28
with our customers in a really great way.
34:32
And I think that's something,
34:34
that's a point that I wanna make here
34:35
is that the technology is leveraging AI
34:38
or expanding the use cases.
34:40
So companies like Gong are building AI-fueled
34:43
revenue intelligence platforms,
34:45
game sites building in predictive AI capabilities
34:48
that will empower customers at every stage
34:51
to grow with omni-channel experiences,
34:53
which I absolutely love.
34:54
I have been spending a lot of time with my marketing team
34:57
and I'm really excited about ways
34:59
to make it easier to provide consistent messaging
35:02
across multiple platforms and in different ways.
35:05
These are things that honestly,
35:07
they're gonna help us to do better,
35:09
more meaningful work at scale.
35:11
Now, one thing that really excites me at PloCast
35:14
is how we are taking our own experiences
35:17
of needing to do better work at scale
35:19
and applying it to our own customers.
35:22
So we are harnessing the power of generative AI
35:24
to empower our customers to unleash their full potential.
35:27
So again, it's all about our customers
35:29
and what they can do.
35:32
Now, because we are in accounting operations platform,
35:35
data securities paramount as we evaluate both the risks
35:38
and benefits of new technologies.
35:39
And I think that's something that is worth mentioning.
35:43
But yeah, it's been really cool seeing that
35:45
kind of full circle moment of how the experience is that
35:48
RCS and other teams at PloCast,
35:51
the experiences that we're going through
35:52
of trying to do more and better work at scale.
35:56
It's the exact same thing that our customers are going through
35:59
and trying to make sure that we are investing in our product
36:02
that helps our customers achieve their goals
36:05
and achieves more and more value.
36:07
I think it's really important to kind of make that note
36:10
because part of the customer experience,
36:12
it's not just what we are doing
36:14
or how we're interacting with our customers,
36:16
but it's also how they interact with our product
36:18
and that our product is helping them achieve value.
36:22
All right, on to the next slide.
36:26
We started using AI really focusing on what we were doing
36:31
that we could automate or do better.
36:34
So more consistently with the help of AI,
36:37
but I think the next wave of AI is transformative.
36:42
So it's not just looking at what we're already doing
36:45
and making it easier, making it better,
36:47
but it's also helping us do better,
36:49
helping us do things that we haven't even considered.
36:52
As we focus on what's next,
36:54
we're focusing more than ever on the goals
36:57
and outcomes of our customers.
36:58
We're continuing to leverage data, segmentation,
37:01
personas, et cetera, to create personalized experiences
37:05
that bring our customers value,
37:07
while also supporting our team.
37:08
I think that's really important is that
37:11
we're looking at how these different tools
37:12
can create better customer experiences
37:15
and create better employee experiences.
37:18
All right, and then wrapping up on the final slide,
37:21
I will give us a couple of takeaways here.
37:24
So as far as a few takeaways,
37:26
before we open up to any questions,
37:28
there are three that I mentioned here.
37:31
One is focusing on outcomes versus outputs,
37:34
really understanding what our customers care about,
37:38
how they define value and making sure
37:39
that we're driving towards what matters to them.
37:42
Using AI to streamline manual tasks.
37:44
So this is kind of the today state that I mentioned
37:45
of how different ways through Gainsite cheat sheet,
37:49
through meeting, note capture,
37:51
and automated follow-ups, different things like that,
37:54
for us to streamline the manual tasks
37:56
and then delivering more value realization.
37:59
So especially as we look towards the future,
38:01
making sure that what we are building,
38:03
the ways that we're doing things
38:05
and leveraging these different technologies
38:06
is helping us to deliver more value.
38:09
- Awesome, thank you so much, Julie.
38:12
So much great content that you shared.
38:14
So super appreciate it.
38:15
We do have some questions that came in,
38:17
some we've answered in the Q&A,
38:19
some I got directly in chat.
38:20
So before I dive into some of these questions
38:22
and kind of feel these to you, Julie and Tyler,
38:25
final call for any questions anyone has
38:27
to go ahead and submit those in the Q&A feature,
38:30
or the chat, I see when they just came in.
38:32
So definitely feel free to continue to drop those in
38:34
as we go here.
38:36
One of the questions that we got early on,
38:38
I think around some of the programs
38:40
that you were sharing Tyler,
38:41
is how you coordinate across the different channels
38:44
for those predictive programs that you mentioned,
38:45
the in-app and community, et cetera,
38:47
is that one team that manages all of those?
38:50
Or is it kind of a cross-functional effort?
38:51
What does that look like at GainSight?
38:53
- Yeah, it's such a great question
38:55
because every company's trying to figure it out
38:58
and there's not one answer.
39:01
What has worked for GainSight is we have different teams
39:05
that are collectively supporting campaigns.
39:07
So marketing, product marketing and post-sale.
39:11
What it takes, it could be as easy as a monthly meeting
39:16
that you get together the stakeholders and say,
39:18
what campaigns is marketing running?
39:20
What campaigns is customer success running?
39:23
Often we find there's overlap in the campaigns
39:26
and so we try to combine them or connect them.
39:29
The other thing that we do,
39:30
I think of as like a, it's very tactical,
39:33
but it becomes very strategic
39:35
is we have a shared campaign calendar.
39:37
So customer success teams know
39:40
that we are running this digital success series
39:42
and we're doing our promotion of it
39:44
as marketing is reaching out to prospects.
39:47
And so there's, it's a good example
39:49
where there's not one like, the thing we're doing,
39:52
we're just talking to our cross-functional partners
39:55
and we're documenting what we're doing,
39:57
but that has enabled us to move and go a lot farther
40:01
by working together as opposed to kind of being slightly off
40:04
or slightly in parallel.
40:05
- Awesome, thank you, Tyler.
40:09
I think it's definitely one of those,
40:11
as one of those cross-functional stakeholders, I should say,
40:13
it's one of those things that we definitely collaborate
40:15
around, I think, to get that best final output
40:17
for our customers.
40:19
We have another question that actually just came in
40:21
for you, Julie, on some of the content you just shared
40:24
around how you manage the change within your team,
40:27
specifically was there any resistance to or fear
40:30
about using AI among the CSMs?
40:33
- Sure, I love that question.
40:35
I, first of all, quick disclaimer,
40:37
I'm lucky and I recognize that I'm lucky in the fact
40:41
that at Gaines at low-cast, we are a very innovative team
40:46
and a lot of this came from the top-down.
40:50
So we had executive leadership that was really excited
40:53
about some of these capabilities
40:55
and wanting us to explore what we could do with that.
40:59
And so we were early adopters in the sense
41:02
that we started having conversations almost immediately
41:05
and doing it in visible ways through Slack
41:08
and in different leadership meetings,
41:10
different things of what are we doing?
41:12
How can we use all of this stuff better?
41:14
And so I started having those conversations.
41:16
Of course, security is of the utmost importance.
41:20
And so that's something that has always been part
41:22
of the conversation.
41:24
Anything that we use that is customer facing,
41:28
that is impacting our customer data, our team's data,
41:31
anything has to be vetted by our IT and securities teams.
41:35
Like we can't just try things and go rogue
41:39
that wouldn't be the right thing to do.
41:42
And so that's something we've had to be very clear on.
41:44
But one tangible thing that I'll leave you guys with
41:47
that I really liked that we did at low-cast
41:49
is that as we have started adopting certain things,
41:52
so as things get the approval, as we start launching
41:55
things out to our team and start using
41:56
these different technologies,
41:58
what we have done is created different leaders
42:01
within the team.
42:02
So these are individual contributors, CSMs,
42:06
support people, implementation people,
42:08
and per each of the different teams
42:11
and geographical kind of pods,
42:13
we've selected different leaders on the AI front
42:15
so that they are constantly sharing and trying.
42:18
And they're kind of the ones champion in a lot of this.
42:21
I think that's something that's really important
42:22
is to constantly share, share the wiggle
42:25
or share the what good looks like of,
42:27
hey, here's what I'm doing and here's how it's impacting
42:30
my book of business or my customers.
42:31
Here's what I'm trying.
42:33
What we have found is that by selecting specific people
42:35
to tell those stories, it gets other people sharing to it,
42:38
gets them talking about their challenges
42:40
as well as their wins and creative ways
42:42
that they're trying all this.
42:44
- That's an amazing tactic.
42:46
I use that all the time as well.
42:47
It's so valuable to drive change
42:51
and identify those sparks that can help you do it.
42:55
Toria, I figured I could try and take
42:56
these two questions that are outstanding here.
43:00
So are these new features automatically rolled out?
43:02
No, they are not automatically rolled out.
43:04
We take data security privacy very seriously.
43:09
There is an opt-in process and then the company's admin,
43:13
the Gensite admin will go need to turn on the toggle
43:17
and there's we have instructions and your CSM
43:19
and support can help you.
43:21
But no, this requires that you want to use the AI features
43:24
and then an admin is in there.
43:27
After turning on the toggle, the nice thing is
43:29
there's not really setup that needs to happen.
43:32
The AI works, I answered another question in the chat.
43:35
It takes anywhere from a couple of days to a week or two
43:38
depending on how long you've been using Gensite.
43:40
After you do that training period,
43:44
you can generate a customer summary for any customer
43:46
in a matter of minutes or less.
43:49
And then Daphne on your question,
43:52
I have seen a lot of different models.
43:54
The model Gensite has and I'm thinking broadly here
43:57
is we have an AI council.
43:59
It has functional representation from across Gensite
44:03
led by our CIO and CFO and we're experimenting.
44:07
So do we want to use AI with our Red Ops team?
44:10
There's an experiment and evaluation going on.
44:13
For customer success, like I mentioned to the last question,
44:17
you don't need a big CS Ops team.
44:18
These features have been designed to turn them on
44:21
and they work.
44:22
There's very minimal setup,
44:24
which I think is something super powerful
44:26
about our AI functionality.
44:29
And again, we're trying to take the load off of you
44:33
and load off your companies to manage
44:35
some of this AI complexity.
44:37
- Yeah, awesome.
44:38
Thanks, Tyler.
44:39
And I think that question about the,
44:41
is it automatically turned on,
44:42
goes back to Julie's point, right,
44:43
around transparency, rolling it out effectively,
44:46
making sure everyone's on board with those programs.
44:49
One more question that came in earlier.
44:51
Julie, I'll ask this as our final question
44:53
as we're approaching the end of our webinar time here.
44:56
But one question that came in early was around using cheat sheet,
44:59
being an early beta tester, using it today.
45:02
Curious Julie to hear if you feel like those outputs
45:04
are valuable, accurate for your team.
45:07
Has that been, I know you mentioned it being something
45:09
you wouldn't want to live without.
45:11
But just curious on kind of your take
45:13
of actually using the feature,
45:14
what is it really like for the CSM team?
45:17
- Yeah, in preparation of this webinar,
45:19
I actually asked a few of my CSMs and was asking like,
45:22
"Hey, are you guys using this as a valuable?"
45:25
And it was interesting hearing kind of the different takes
45:27
from people being like, "Oh my gosh,
45:29
like this is the first place that I go to."
45:31
Like if somebody asked me a question about a customer,
45:34
I go there as my like way to understand
45:37
kind of what the situation and scenario is.
45:39
I'm depending on kind of team structures.
45:43
You have often like, I mean, you can have 25 to 100,
45:47
200s of customers depending on company structures.
45:51
And so being able to not feel like everything's in your head
45:54
or that you have to sift through data
45:55
and being able to get it really quickly
45:57
with the click of a button is huge.
46:00
It also really helps me on the leadership side.
46:01
So on my side, as I'm looking through our churn
46:05
or risk mitigation forecast or looking
46:07
at different expansion opportunities,
46:09
being able to quickly look at something
46:11
and use both the health data that we have in Gainsite
46:13
as well as the cheat sheet information
46:15
of what conversations have been happening
46:18
and going through all the different timeline entries,
46:21
all the data.
46:22
It just makes me do my job way faster
46:25
and much more effectively.
46:26
- Awesome, thank you Julie.
46:29
So I know we only allotted 45 minutes for this webinar.
46:31
So we're technically just a minute over time.
46:34
So I'll go ahead and end our Q&A there.
46:36
Such great questions and anything that we missed,
46:38
we'll definitely try and get back to you,
46:40
post webinar as well.
46:41
We will also share out this recording.
46:44
And again, I'm a bit sad to say
46:46
that this is the last webinar
46:48
and our Digital CS Chef's Kiss series.
46:50
So if you're just starting off,
46:51
this is the first webinar that you've attended with us
46:53
or you want to go back and revisit any of our past entries,
46:56
including this one,
46:57
we have all of these webinars available on demand
47:00
and I highly recommend catching up on some of them,
47:03
potentially a great way to binge watch these
47:05
over the holidays perhaps.
47:07
But with that, like any good webinar, any good meal,
47:10
it does come to an end.
47:12
So I want to go ahead and just thank our presenters
47:14
Julie and Tyler and our attendees today
47:16
for such great conversation and questions,
47:19
especially anyone who's been with us through this entire series.
47:21
This has actually been, I think,
47:23
one of our record breaking webinar series for us
47:25
and we've had such great interests, amazing guest speakers
47:28
and just so much excitement on this topic.
47:30
So super looking forward to providing
47:33
as compelling content, hopefully in the new year,
47:36
but want to just end us with wishing everyone
47:38
a very happy holiday season and a great new year.
47:40
So thank you all so much and have a great rest of your day.
47:43
Thank you all.
47:44
- I really thank you.
47:46
[silence]