Unlocking Growth With Customer Conversations

Masha Krol 0:23

What is analog customer success Are we ? Are we breaking out an abacus to calculate their invoice totals ? Or like what I'm a fan of ?

Alex Turkovic 0:32

the old abacus . Once again , welcome to the digital customer experience podcast with me , alex Turkovich . So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience . My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs . If you'd like more info , need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it . Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom . For now , let's get started .

Alex Turkovic 1:06

Greetings and welcome to episode 64 of the Digital CX Podcast . My name is Alex Tergovich . It's so great to have you back this week Before we get into this week's episode . Next week is episode 65 . And , as you know , every fifth episode I do a solo show , so be sure to tune in for that .

Alex Turkovic 1:22

For this week , however , I am pleased to share a conversation that I had with Masha Kroll , who is CEO of Glowstick .

Alex Turkovic 1:32

Now , I've been hosting quite a few founders on the podcast recently , which you might have picked up on , and part of the reason for that is there are some people doing some absolutely incredible things for CS . I mean , for a long time , cs was this kind of void of tooling and I think with the proliferation of AI and the drop in expense around development of apps , we're seeing this proliferation of new apps come about that are specifically for post-sale and customer success team , and Glowstick is no different . So we definitely talk about what Glowstick does , which essentially uses some of the conversations you're having with your customers to help you tease out cross-sell , up-sell potential and whatnot . But we dig into Masha's background quite a bit . We talk a lot about collaboration between , especially , cs and commercial teams , so she's been thinking a lot about that and specifically around the concept of CSQLs , which I know is top of mind for a lot of us as well . So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Masha Kroll , because I sure did . Let's keep trucking with it , masha . Welcome to the show .

Masha Krol 2:46

Really happy to have you . Thanks for having me , Alex .

Alex Turkovic 2:48

For sure . When we first met a few months ago , I was like , immediately , the vibe is there , you have cool stuff to talk about . I was like , okay , let's go , come on the show , let's talk about stuff , let's do this thing . That's right . I mean , obviously we want to get a little bit into who you are as a person and I mean your background is just insane . I would invite anyone to go and go look at your LinkedIn profile , like history and stuff , because there's some pretty amazing stuff on there . But do you want to give us a little bit of sense of your journey and where you've been and what you're doing today ?

Masha Krol 3:30

Yeah , I do hope that folks take you up on that invitation because I love LinkedIn friends . I'm not on any other social media , which is so weird . That's awesome , literally .

Alex Turkovic 3:41

LinkedIn . What does that say about me ?

Masha Krol 3:42

I don't even know , but yeah , so I mean , I grew up in computer science and psychology , which in the real world translated into being first a developer , then a UX designer , then a product manager and actually , just before starting Glowstick AI , I led the human AI interaction team at a high growth AI startup in the last peak of AI hype back in 2018 . Some of us will remember deep learning .

Alex Turkovic 4:14

That's right .

Masha Krol 4:15

Yeah , the buzz phrase of the past , which I mean the techniques , have survived and we don't call them that anymore , I guess . But yeah , I got into customer success in particular when my co-founder , who had stood up the developer on call program for the CS team at his previous company , kind of introduced me to this brave customer success world and I just thought , oh man , like this should have been my first stop as a product person , like as a developer , as a designer , as a product manager .

Masha Krol 4:49

How sad is it that I've never heard of this department before and I'd been at huge , like huge companies , like I'd started my career at IBM and . I worked at mostly B2B SaaS companies , but just I'd been all around the block and kind of really just put the blinders on as a product person and never really stood next to those commercial teams , including customer success . I always wonder , thinking back , like how many other product people are kind of in a similar situation to me .

Masha Krol 5:22

We talk about echo chambers . Right , we were just talking about the CS echo chamber before we kind of got on the podcast , but I feel like that's true for every department . I'm all about now . I'm all about break down the silos , take the walls down .

Alex Turkovic 5:38

Yeah , it's an interesting phenomena , right , and I've had a couple of other founders and a couple of other product folks on as well who have expressed kind of similar things where I mean , in some cases I'm just like blown away at how separate product and CS teams tend to be in organizations , like from a just non-communicative standpoint , because there's so much insanely valuable feedback that comes by way of customer success or we'll just call it post-sale teams in general . But then on the flip side too , you're having product feed , drip feed . All of the stuff that they're working on through CS teams for distribution to the customer base is like such an overlooked thing A lot of times . There's some , there's some organizations that do that stuff like really well , but I think it's there they are the exception .

Masha Krol 6:37

Yeah , it's quite rare , I find , and it is always interesting to me because I remember one of my bigger challenges when I was back working on user experience design for products . I would always be looking for users to talk to . I would always be looking and it just boggles my mind that I never thought and never got introduced into those teams , like sometimes I would get some introductions to sales folks but never post sales . It's been interesting , an interesting journey of discovery .

Alex Turkovic 7:06

For sure , and now I mean with Glowstick . You're deeply embedded into the problem , basically , right , Do you want to talk a little bit about what you're working on there ?

Masha Krol 7:15

Sure , yeah .

Masha Krol 7:16

So with Glowstick AI we're really kind of the sidekick for post-sales teams in particular , analyzing their conversations that they're already recording with their customers , and we look specifically for signs of growth within accounts and kind of surfacing that up to the right folks at the right point in time .

Masha Krol 7:41

And our thesis for the problem was always that these are the things that our customers are telling us , that is pure gold that is locked in these recordings that nobody ever goes back over , nobody ever checks and they just get lost . And that is the source of potential opportunities , potential commercial opportunities , but also potential product improvements , potential ways to increase the quality of service , whatever it might be , whatever the outcomes are that you're driving towards the business . The clues toward how to get there faster and better are locked within the customer conversations and , thanks to the proliferation of platforms like Zoom , like Gong , like Chorus , we're recording all of those things . It's just it's not humanly possible to go back over and figure out what's happening in them . So Glowstick is there to kind of be the AI kind of sieve to catch the gold right your data .

Alex Turkovic 8:47

It's your backroom data analyst team . What I especially like about that we were talking about silos . Another silo that exists , or division that exists , is between your revenue sales team and your post-sale team , and so I think a lot of times , when we think about AI tools and things that aggregate out of call transcriptions and stuff like that , we're thinking about things that can identify risk and churn risk and all of that kind of stuff , which is , of course , insanely important . But what I think is missing in a lot of those tools is actually the opposite as well , which is to say , that indicator of expansion and explicitly focusing on expansion . But I would say that you know , by association , you're also pulling out just the wins . I think in digital , a lot of times , what we miss in terms of digital motions is just celebrating our customers and just like identifying those moments when we can give our customers some high five for doing some cool stuff .

Alex Turkovic 9:50

And I would imagine that's kind of tangential , kind of output that you're getting there as well .

Masha Krol 9:55

Yeah Well , this is the interesting thing is when a customer expresses a particular need or goal that they are interested in hitting and you have a product offering that matches that particular need , it usually comes on the heel of them having experienced some kind of a valuable outcome for their business with your original offering that you engaged on . That's the crucial difference , I think , in kind of pre-sale and post-sale right or , if you want a left side of the revenue bow tie and right side of the revenue bow tie , like that is , the crucial difference is that you already have a lot of that data . You can make much more intelligent proposals , pitches , ideation sessions with your customer based on all the information that you already have , and if you're not doing that , you're missing out .

Alex Turkovic 10:46

Yeah , for sure , and we leave that stuff on the table all the time , and I think that'll be the bulk of our conversation today , because it's a cool topic and one that I urge everybody to kind of dig in a little bit and maybe , hopefully , walk away with a couple of tangible things that they can go implement in their org today . One of the things that I do want to ask you , though , which is a question that I ask all of my guests , which is what your elevator pitch of digital CS would be , and I'm particularly interested in your kind of answer here , because you're not traditionally from CS , you don't live in digital CS all day long , and I love answers from people like you , because you bring a fresh perspective probably .

Masha Krol 11:30

Yeah , I'm sure you have heard this gripe before , but I kind of struggled with this one because , like in our current day and age , what isn't digital customer ? Success in the sense of what is analog customer success . Are we breaking out an abacus to calculate their invoice totals , or like what ?

Alex Turkovic 11:49

I'm a fan of the old abacus . I keep mine right down here , yeah .

Masha Krol 11:56

This is your ROI Works great . No , but if you

Maximizing Customer Success Through Digital Integration

Masha Krol 12:01

? I guess , if I consider this question just from the perspective of kind of scope of work right , everything we do is digital in some form , like my notes , for sure , have moved from scribbling on post-its or notebooks to online platforms like Obsidian or whatever . I love that . I basically think now only in Miro post-its like there's no other way to think .

Masha Krol 12:25

I have a whiteboard behind me , but as soon as I start scribbling on it , I'm like , how's my team going to know what I'm thinking about ? So I just move over . So I think , yeah , and the main crucial , I think , task of customer success or customer facing teams in general being engaging with our customers that also all happens digitally , right , whether it's on email or in Slack . Teams in general being engaging with our customers that also all happens digitally , right . It's whether it's on email or in Slack or on Zoom . Like sure , we are present there to have those conversations more often than not .

Masha Krol 12:54

But yeah , and we look at what's happening in our products with digital analytics tools , right , google Analytics or PostHog or whatever . So what analogs things do we even do ?

Alex Turkovic 13:04

when , I work anymore .

Masha Krol 13:05

So , anyway , all that to say , I'm generally , I think , a person that refuses to be put in a box . I think everything we do is digital , but the thing that I will say is that if we think about digital less as the overall kind of umbrella term , but more in terms of tasks that we want to do manually , versus outsourcing to an automation or an AI , then I think we can have a much more interesting conversation around okay , what are the tasks that we believe should be outsourced ? And this is like near and dear to my heart , because I've been thinking about human AI teaming since 2018 . So then , how do we think about that ? And how do we think about that in an intentional way , but there's an element of some kind of automation or AI , I would hope again , being a founder of an AI company that focuses on high touch conversations- right .

Masha Krol 14:02

I would hope that there's an element of that across motions and across segments .

Alex Turkovic 14:08

What I love about your approach to the answer is that it reinforces something that I and others have been just preaching a lot lately , which is to say that digital and CS kind of should work hand in hand . It isn't like you've got some customers that only get your digital stuff and some customers that only get your handheld white glove kind of stuff , and there are a lot of organizations that operate that way , but ideally you'd have both intersecting to where the human feels supported by the digital motions , whether it's the human customer or the human CSM or the human post-sale , whatever you want to call it . The tools are there to support the human .

Masha Krol 14:52

And so .

Alex Turkovic 14:53

I think digital CS , as much as it started out being very customer focused and we're going to do these email drip campaigns and all this kind of stuff . I think the pendulum is swinging to where it's even more so like internal team support and all this kind of stuff . I think it's the pendulum is swinging towards even more so , like internal team support and all that kind of stuff . And I had to laugh as you were talking about your note taking habits , because here I am , I still use my trusty old three by five note cards .

Masha Krol 15:18

I love that for you . If that works for you , that works for you . Right Again , you've decided that's a task that you don't want to outsource to a digital second brain or whatever of .

Masha Krol 15:27

We used to segment our customers by things like employee count , spend , industry , things that are quite discreet and again you'll notice my inability to be put in boxes , come through here but wouldn't it be much more interesting to segment our customers based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve and or based on the tasks that they are trying to perform that they are hiring our product to do right ? So then , the best method of delivery , of supporting information that is required for customers or for the internal teams to deliver it , would be chosen independent of where the account sits in a traditional sort of segmentation map right ?

Alex Turkovic 16:27

Yeah , because the go-to is okay , customers over X ACV get this and customers under X ACV get this . Okay , sure , it's a starting point , but and I get the need to focus on your higher value customers Totally get that , but what about those customers who A big logos that are only spending a small amount of money , for instance , or something like that ? Or what about customers who are using a certain product where it's easier to do in-product stuff versus customers that are in an on-prem , easier to do in-product stuff versus customers that are in an on-prem Like ? The variables that go into deciding account segmentation should extend beyond just how much money they're spending with you .

Masha Krol 18:51

Totally segmentation in the sense that your super high value account .

Masha Krol 18:56

If they're interested in training on a particular super nerdy aspect of your product , it ought to depend on the person who's interested in receiving the training , whether they get it through a digital resource or they get it through a digital webinar or they get it through an onsite visit from a super trainer who sits beside them and holds their hand .

Masha Krol 19:19

Again , within reason , right , I'm not saying that we should blow away our margins , but from the perspective of if I'm a super high spend account with you , Alex , I still might want to do things on my own right . I still might not want to get on 55 calls a year with you . So I think it's an interesting question and I do feel like part of it is just tractability of the problem . Right , it's very easy to sort by highest ARR and just focus on the top 10% . Right , and to your point , that immediately misses all the opportunities of smaller spend accounts that have high potential . You don't know if they're tammed out and that's why they're spending a lot , or they're spending a lot and they want to spend more because they have propensity to spend more .

Alex Turkovic 20:09

And I mean we could go down this rabbit hole forever , but then identifying your key personas and what they should do to drive success in your platform and driving those behaviors yeah , it's like a whole science and an art . One of the things that I think this directly correlates to , though , is not just kind of driving behaviors with your customer and customer personas , but then those internal behaviors too . In prepping for the show , you and I talked a lot about kind of that relationship between commercial teams and post-sale teams and CS teams , and I wanted to dig into that a little bit more , by way of just understanding what you've learned over the past few years of things that you feel like you've seen work particularly well , maybe among your customers or elsewhere , with like playbooks between CS and sales and things that have fallen flat on their face , maybe those kinds of things .

Masha Krol 21:06

Yeah , no , it's a great question . I think this is a multi-dimensional problem for sure , and the right answer for each individual company kind of evaluating those internal collaboration models is going to be different . So the dimensions that I've kind of thought about and I think are worth considering are first , again , what outcome is your customer trying to achieve , like that they're hiring your product to do ? How complex or simple is it ? So , by the way , by simple I don't mean easy but , I , mean , how grokkable is it ?

Masha Krol 21:49

right , I'm trying to get some lunch ? Or is it more complex , like I'm trying to increase sales of my e-commerce store , right ? And then therefore , as a second dimension , how simple is your product that is trying to solve and help the customer get to that outcome ? Is it I hook up Stripe and now I can accept payments ? Or is it I've set up this new software stack to support this process ? But how do I get people to use it and change management and doesn't work as well as I wanted to ? What are the crawl , walk , run steps for this ? Right ? There's gradations kind of in all directions . And then , of course , who are the people that I have on the team ?

Masha Krol 22:41

A lot of the times , as you and I talked about , cs teams and commercial teams , sales teams , account management teams are really focused on adoption and

Driving Customer Success Through Strategic Collaboration

Masha Krol 22:52

making sure that the customer is getting value , whereas a lot of the times , the commercial teams are much more focused on extracting the value from the relationship , and sometimes they can cause friction . However , it would be incorrect to say that is always the case . There are customer success managers that , as soon as they've identified an opportunity to create value , figure out how to share in that value with their customer . And it again may be a very simple motion like adding more seat licenses if that's a model that you charge by , or turning on a particular feature , or maybe the customer is doing that themselves right . So it depends on kind of again the motion of the product .

Masha Krol 23:48

But then a lot of the times , customer success teams truly will not be interested in going through the rigmarole of negotiations , especially if there's a large contracting exercise that needs to be done . Maybe there's an RFP , maybe there's multiple teams involved , maybe there's procurement , et cetera , et cetera . So that might be better left to teams that are focused specifically on facilitating those transactions . And I think that was a really long-winded way to say it depends .

Masha Krol 24:16

I really tried to avoid saying it depends , but really there are just these multiple kind of dimensions to evaluate against and try I guess that's the other thing I will say is that any team that we've seen try certain things , we've also seen try other things right , and they've either told us stories of things that they have tried in the past and haven't worked , or they told us things that they've tried in the past have worked , then broke , and now they're looking to try something else . So I think there are also natural inflection points and ebbs and flows within the stage of maturity of the company the product , the offering , the industry right and the category , and therefore your customer's adoption of all things said before .

Masha Krol 25:06

That require different models .

Alex Turkovic 25:09

Yeah , there's a couple of things that you highlighted that I found particularly kind of noteworthy in my brain . Anyway , one of them kind of points to this notion of CS as a strategy , not just a team , right , because ultimately we're all responsible for the customer's success and well-being , even though we're not always comped on it , right . I mean , the classic problem is that you encounter is your sales team is not somehow incentivized on the renewal . And so stuff just gets tossed over the fence from the ensuing melee we all know and love .

Masha Krol 25:52

I guess .

Alex Turkovic 25:53

But I think that's where the strategic element really comes into play , to say , look , these are the things that we know we want to drive with our customer , or this particular customer wants to drive this , and we can document it and try to keep that all in one place and all that kind of fun stuff . But ultimately what it boils down to is like the strategic foresight to not just put those things in place , but then also make sure the incentive structure is there for your teams to go drive that thing , because if they're not , then you might as well just not do it .

Masha Krol 26:29

Absolutely .

Masha Krol 26:30

And I think this will maybe dovetail us nicely into kind of the next topic of conversation . But we see this a lot in particular with customer success , qualified lead programs that customers try to stand up , and so there are also natural progressions to the problems that you're trying to solve or the outcomes that you're trying to drive with your CSQL program , and you ought to be pretty explicit about those as you stand them up Because , as an example , if your big thing that you're trying to solve for is identifying potential leads , you , depending on where you are in standing up the program and depending on the maturity and the lack or abundance of sales skills across your commercial team or your post sales team , is going to determine how , where you sort of place your bets .

Masha Krol 27:43

That was one of the things that we found working with folks enabling , kind of using Glowstick AI's technology to essentially kind of search back through the conversations that are being had with the customers to identify the portions of the conversation where the customer is speaking to that need , and then augmenting the sort of collaboration between the CSM and the account manager to facilitate those discussions , but with input from the customer's own mouth , because that's the thing that gets lost a lot . But if you're specifically targeting okay , we just need to see if we can identify some leads then you might actually incentivize on logging a CSQL and then over time you might find that you've got way too many of them . If the key plot here is to just draw your CSQLs and plot them by CRM stage and look at the shape , of the graph that you've got right , and if it looks like a U , then you've got an issue .

Masha Krol 28:41

But congratulations , you've got the next issue right . You used to have an identification issue . Now you don't have that anymore . Now you have a qualification issue . So maybe you change your incentives from spiffing on just logged CSQLs to spiffing on conversion , or maybe even only like percentage of closed one revenue . Maybe you go back and you tighten your qualification criteria . Sure , it's just an interesting kind of dynamic which I think cannot be prescribed and needs to emerge through experimentation in the space of the outcomes that you're trying to drive , the product that you're trying to sell or the offering that you're trying to sell and the team that you have in place to execute it Right .

Alex Turkovic 29:28

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Alex Turkovic 30:08

Now back to the show . I mean , when you boil it down to the basics and I don't think I'm being biased here I think a CSQL if I was a seller would be one of the most welcome things ever , because it is about the warmest lead that you're going to get short of a customer calling you and saying , hey , tell me about this module or whatever . Yeah , we've had direct conversation with the customer about this . They're ready to go or they need some more information or whatever . I mean that's like silver platter territory in terms of leads .

Alex Turkovic 30:46

Go To your point . We have a . I think we tend to have a habit of bastardizing those a little bit with overcomplication or just making things kind of maybe too difficult too much as they really need to be , to kind of dilute the intent behind the lead . And again , from an incentive structure you're spot on . If you incentivize somebody in CS putting in a CSQL , you're going to get a bunch of duds and that's going to lessen the value of the CSQL and lessen the perceived value of the CS organization overall versus if maybe drive entering of CSQLs one way but then really compensate on closed opportunities or something like that . It's amazing to me that more orgs just actually also don't use CSQL . Are you finding that ? Are you finding a lot of orgs that are just sleeping on CSQLs ?

Masha Krol 31:43

Yeah , we do see now that a lot of the sort of more mature companies have stood up the motion and are taking advantage of it .

Masha Krol 31:54

A lot of what we see , though , is , interestingly , the opposite of what you would expect , which is that these are the warmest leads you could ever have . Why wouldn't you welcome these with open arms ? This is the silver platter lead , and what we found is the underlying notion is one of trust between the CSMs and the sellers , and a lot of the times and I don't know if this stems necessarily from inherent interpersonal kind of tensions or the fact that they are gold on different things , and also , candidly , the fact that a lot of the times , these teams report up into different leaders and so they hear different messaging , and therefore that all trickles down into the sellers just essentially trusting only the pipeline that they themselves generated , and maybe the pipeline that was generated for them by BDRs , who are within the same organization , but largely , I'm seeing .

Masha Krol 33:00

I had a conversation with an account manager at the Pulse conference , and we were enjoying a well-deserved beverage after days , as you do Kombucha .

Masha Krol 33:10

It was kombucha , but it was late .

Masha Krol 33:12

It was late in the evening , and we were having a great conversation , and it was the last day of the conference , and they mentioned to me that they're going to button it up and call it a night to take an 8am call with the customer the next day and their exact words were because we can't have enough pipeline .

Masha Krol 33:33

And it just struck me really as a fascinating statement because I knew , in particular , that these particular teams had so much in terms of CSQLs coming from their CSM team . So there is , we've observed a really interesting anomaly in the behavior of customer success and sales teams , attempting to sort of bridge that divide . And while some teams have seen actually most teams , I would say have seen actually most teams , I would say have seen value from CSQL programs , the majority of them are not being run optimally and the majority of them are not in fact inspiring the building of trust between these teams and are potentially even destroying them to the point where the receiver commercial sellers treat CSQLs as noise , noise which is , at the end of the day , unfortunate for the customer more than anybody else right , yeah , for sure , I to me this .

Alex Turkovic 34:36

I mean this just points back to the importance of change management with this kind of stuff . If you go and implement this kind of stuff , you got to spend probably 10 times the amount of effort to actually talk about it and reinforce it and those kinds of things than you actually did to build it and put it in place .

Masha Krol 35:00

Yeah , coming from so many different systems into our CS teams , into our post-sales teams , into our pre-sales teams , candidly , that once sellers identify at least some ways that they have realized they can generate opportunities for themselves , it is very difficult without , to your point , effective change management , to sort of drive behavior change and even if it seems like a complete no-brainer to chase after essentially one step down after hand raisers .

Masha Krol 35:49

After essentially one step down after hand raisers , which is a CSQL , it becomes something that is just added to the platter . So all of a sudden the silver platter is not visible because there are just so many things on it . So , yeah , that's been a really interesting discovery for us as well in trying to figure out how to fit in . I don't think there is space anymore for yet another tool , yet another kind of addition to the stack . There's just too many things happening and the climate is just not there to introduce super niche point solutions . Be partnering with Gainsight to drive our signals into the Gainsight platform available to then Gainsight customers , so that they don't have to go somewhere else and look at those things . They can just get it all in one place within that kind of unified customer 360 , right ?

Alex Turkovic 36:43

Yeah , it's a super important point because you're right there there , especially now with the cost of development kind of plummeting there's a lot of apps out there and there's a lot of players out there that just they do there . There's so many like niche use cases , but what you're left with is a really confused customer base . They're like what , okay , I don't have I don't have any more space for another tool to come in and try to solve this problem in a slightly different way than the other ones are .

Masha Krol 37:18

Well , and then you get the whole and this is my current soapbox but you get idea of paying for AI . One of the reasons we started Glowstick was that , back at my previous company called Element AI , where I ran the human AI interaction team , we learned that one of the things that you will not be able to ever get your subject matter experts to do is to essentially label data for the sake of labeling data , but if that kind of labeling resulted in tangible revenue outcomes for them , then they will do it all day long . From the start , we have been designing Glowstick , to be sure , ai at its core because we believe the technology has the capability to allow tasks that were previously intractable to become available to us . However , the point was never to sell AI . The point was always to sell outcomes and then , as exhaust , generate more data for AI models to improve and therefore continue to generate ever better outcomes . So it really concerns me when , in every freaking tool today , there is a buy AI option .

Alex Turkovic 38:37

Yeah .

Masha Krol 38:37

And it's additionally , I feel , deceiving because all of it is just making calls to open .

Alex Turkovic 38:43

Yeah , it's kind of like when you go buy a car and the dealer is trying to charge you with a $2,000 kind of inventory fee and all this kind of stuff , and this is the cost of doing business . If you're going to have a tool that does this kind of stuff , the AI element is like part of the mechanism that gets you there and the outcomes to your point is what you're purchasing . The value is what you're purchasing , not the fact that it's like referencing a large language model .

Masha Krol 39:15

But also the same large language model that I'm paying in this next tool for access to . Like . That part is really concerning me and I'm pretty sure we're just in the really weird spot in the market right now where all these things are arriving . But I , you know it's kind of I wonder if we're going to have the sort of netflix moment of yeah ai in the sense that wait , hold on . Let's see if we can drive this analogy okay , I'm just curious , because we had we used to have .

Masha Krol 39:48

We used to have over the air , like . You had access to basic channels , right , you had access to basic cable don't even remember if you had to pay for that . But eventually we got to a point where it was like oh , pay-per-view , right , and you started to have bundles , you started to have satellite and all of a sudden you were paying to access these sets of channels and then every time you wanted to watch a single movie , you had to pay for the channel to get that one movie , which then translated into the whole torrenting and pirating ecosystem . Remember line wire napster .

Alex Turkovic 40:24

Right I was .

Masha Krol 40:25

I was an mirc geek there you go , there you go . Oh my gosh , remember icq

Navigating AI Ownership and Integration

Masha Krol 40:32

they just shut down did you see 27 years ? I'm like people don't live well .

Alex Turkovic 40:36

It's funny because I got really sad and nostalgic when I saw the announcement that they were shutting down , but then I was like I haven't used it in 20 years , oh no okay , hold on , so back to what I was trying to make so we would .

Masha Krol 40:49

They essentially got unbundled by the fact that you couldn't buy a singular movie . You had to get a full channel . And so that's where pirate kind of approaches came into play and the whole torrenting thing . And then you could get that . And then the Netflix's of the world came about to kind of or the iTunes of the world came about to kind of offer you an ability to very easily and legally purchase the individual or singular thing that you were trying to get , and then even they moved on from that . So we've made the full circle . Back to now . You have to pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime and Crave and whatever else , Hulu to get the one show right .

Masha Krol 41:33

So it does feel like there's kind of a cyclical ebb and flow to it , and I wonder if we're kind of in that moment of AI-ing access to large language models for the purposes of this conversation , where right now you're essentially paying for the same thing across multiple tools and at some point we're just going to get the like unification of that and somebody's going to offer the okay , carry your own ai with you , pay for it once , apply it everywhere , and then the merry-go-round will continue .

Alex Turkovic 42:04

it's yeah jolly I think there's something to that for sure , because I mean , I'm just thinking about it . It's like where all am I paying for AI ? I'm paying for it through OpenAI . I have a perplexity license , which I freaking love perplexity what else ? There's one of the podcast platforms I pay for AI . There's several tools where they've monetized it really well and it's interesting because I mean they're all tied to various . In most cases , I think they're tied to various features . Right , they still tie to .

Alex Turkovic 42:53

you can get whatever transcript summaries for blah , blah , blah blah , blah blah power , and sure they've got to be able to pay the processing bill , so to speak , for that kind of stuff . But at what point does it just become an expectation that should be part of the product , versus a nice to have or an upsell opportunity ?

Masha Krol 43:05

Exactly and how many times do I have to pay ? Am paying miro ai to summarize my post-its . I'm paying loom ai to summarize my videos . I'm paying whatever and notion ai to search my own notes .

Alex Turkovic 43:20

We've got different models too right , so you should be able to like take your preferred model and use it somewhere yeah , so I am curious about the .

Masha Krol 43:32

Will we ever have the sort of the notion of bring your model kind of a vision where we used to have bring your own interesting yeah , byo ai , and then also , if I'm going through the work of we started this conversation with , it's not really about a segment of customers getting all digital interactions or tech touch interactions and then a segment of customers getting all high touch . That's not the point of digital . The point of digital is everything is digital . So let's think about the individual outcomes that they're trying to achieve , the individual tasks that they're trying to perform . Which of them are best supported with a high touch motion , a tech touch motion , automation , AI , actual manual work , human interaction , et cetera . Now can we kind of think about our jobs in a similar way , where our jobs are largely collections of tasks ?

Masha Krol 44:31

right , obviously , we have to curate the tasks , and they're especially in the current world .

Alex Turkovic 44:38

They're pretty unbounded we end up doing 20 things , all sorts of things ?

Masha Krol 44:42

yeah , but there are . They are tasks , and some of those tasks are best performed by us . But then if outsourcing means I am designing whether it's just through prompts , not even just prompting an LLM in a certain way and then I have that little sort of coworker in my pocket , right , do I get to carry that with me to my next role in my next company ? Or does that stay behind with embedded in the individual tooling , or is it staying behind embedded in the individual companies ?

Alex Turkovic 45:17

Yeah , well , then you get into IP and because obviously I mean we can use the model of your work devices or whatever . When you leave it , when you leave a a gig , you got to ship your stuff back and ideally you haven't taken anything off of the device or whatever . But uh , in the case of artificial intelligence , I mean , um , yeah , what do you take with you versus what stays ?

Masha Krol 45:41

and I think I don't know .

Alex Turkovic 45:45

I I like to think that the lines are pretty clear on that . Just because you're doing stuff , you're being paid by someone to do stuff for them using artificial intelligence , and because they've paid you , does that then remain the intellectual property of that employer case that we probably have today , where people are just using their own personal subscriptions to open AI or chat GPT to do a bunch of work that ideally should ah , it's tricky .

Masha Krol 46:19

Well it's . I think it's really tricky as well . I don't think the lines are very clear at all because and I think the best analogy is not actually thinking maybe about maybe we led ourselves astray by comparing it . To bring your own device where of what you never speak to them again after you leave the company . That's some of the bigger value for hiring my next VP of sales or my next CRO or my next AE that they actually have relationships at my target that they can then bring with them and I'm pretty sure that's not something that we can actually constrain and free .

Masha Krol 47:11

Okay , fine , maybe even the Rolodex . But everything I learned in this job I'm taking with me to my next role . Right , you can't lobotomize me after I'm gone . And then , even though some may try , I don't know . Did you ever see that ? I think it's an Apple show . See , now we have to think about what channel it's on .

Alex Turkovic 47:33

Oh , yeah , totally Right . Is that what we're talking about ? So bizarre yeah .

Masha Krol 47:37

So is AI kind of similar ? Because , of course , yes , there are off-the-shelf things , but if I'm tweaking it , if I'm prompting it in a particular way , that works really well in a sense that is kind of my IP right .

Alex Turkovic 47:50

So you actually just reminded me of , I think , one of the undersung CSQLs out there , which is the tracking of a customer's employee who moves to a different company that isn't your customer . I mean , what a great opportunity to expand your footprint and really drive those things . I mean , I think there's a couple of platforms and things like that again out there that are tracking those things or helping you track those things .

Masha Krol 48:20

But that's huge in terms of I think even LinkedIn now has that as a feature , and I know that there are some platforms that are working specifically on solving for that use case . But that's totally , and you can't . I don't know how to force people to forget their friends as they leave . So , yeah , that's an interesting one . Remember your friends .

Alex Turkovic 48:40

Well , look , we are dangerously out of close on time and I want to be respectful of this hour you've graced us with . So thank you very much for that time . But I wanted to just quickly understand what you're paying attention to out there . What's in your content diet that might be useful for the listener to know as well .

Masha Krol 48:57

Yeah , I think , like I said , I'm a LinkedIn kind of fiend and sometimes I get on it and get really sad for the state of the world . It's not the best place to look for content that is inspiring outside of your work .

Masha Krol 49:12

So I will tell people this I'm an avid rock climber , so my best experience in terms of content diet has been going outside and touching rocks . That is the content that I am here for is touching rocks , sitting , touching grass , I don't know , sitting below trees staring , maybe not directly at the sun , but at least basking . And yeah , that's been the biggest , most awesome addition to my content diet and I'm very glad that summer is finally here in the northern depths of Montreal so I can actually enjoy that without freezing my butt off .

Alex Turkovic 49:56

That's amazing , that's cool . Yeah , I mean , some of my best ideas come when I'm out for a walk or out running or whatever , and then yeah , I have lots of audio notes in my phone that are me just panting talking about stuff .

Masha Krol 50:11

Totally . I do that a lot .

Alex Turkovic 50:13

But cool . Well , hey , thanks again for the time . Where can people find you , engage with you and interact with you ? Linkedin , obviously .

Masha Krol 50:19

Yeah , absolutely Definitely LinkedIn . Search me on LinkedIn . Also , check out glowstickai , find me . I would love to show you the platform and connect . But yeah , I love my linkedin friends , so just at me at me bro cool .

Alex Turkovic 50:34

Thanks again .

Alex Turkovic 50:35

Have a good rest of your day thanks for having me , alex thank you for joining me for this episode of the digital cx podcast . If you like what we're doing , consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice . If you're watching on YouTube , leave a comment down below . It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience . You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom . This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media , a media production company founded by our good mutual friend , dylan Young . Lifetime Value aims to serve the content , video , audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community . They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time . So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom , go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent you . I'm Alex Trukovich . Thanks so much for listening . We'll talk to you next week .