Speaker 1: 0:03

I think we're going to see a lot of natural language interfaces. I'll just tell you what to do, right? Why do you want me to learn where you are, in which menu? You know? This click, that click, four clicks, and then I get to the thing that I want to do. I'll just give you an instruction, right, you figure it out.

Speaker 2: 0:18

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. Greetings and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. My name is Alex Terkovich. I'm so glad that you made it back this week and every week as we talk about all things digital CX.

Speaker 2: 1:01

It is episode 67, but before we get into the episode, I want to let you know about an upcoming event. I've mentioned this before, but Sam David and Scott Wilder and I are hosting what will be a monthly digital and scale meetup. That's going to happen on roughly the first Thursday of every month. First one's coming up on September 5th at 11 central, and we are going to have a special guest, dcx podcast veteran, aaron Hatton, on to talk about all things personalization in digital CX. So that is coming up September 5th midday. We made it to where most time zones could attend. So to sign up and to register for that, go to digitalscaleorg. There you can register for that event and the other events that we have upcoming. We have a whole lineup of cool people coming up towards the end of the year in Q4.

Speaker 2: 2:02

For today, I had a great conversation with Joy Deep Sen Sarma, who is founder CEO of ClearFeed, which is an amazing tool that is all about turning Slack into an effective customer management tool or basically a support tool ticketing function, slas, like all kinds of fun stuff. If you've ever tried to use Slack in a customer-facing kind of way, you know it's a hot mess, and so what ClearFeed does is it helps make it more manageable. So we talk about that, obviously, and a bunch of other stuff related to technology and CX. So I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Joy Deep, because I certainly did. Well, look, joy Deep, it's a pleasure having you on the show. It was a pleasure meeting you and I wanted to make sure that we got you on the show because I think what you and the team are doing is fascinating and, um, you know, very relevant to the world of digital cs and, and you know, we'll get there. It's just a pleasure having you on the show and thank you for taking time out of your evening night to be here.

Speaker 1: 3:20

Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a. It's a. Hopefully I'll have a fun talk for your podcast.

Speaker 2: 3:27

Yeah, for sure. I want to go back into the history books a little bit because I feel like so. You studied computer science in a very interesting time, which is to say the late 90s.

Speaker 1: 3:41

Yeah, I did.

Speaker 2: 3:42

If I'm remembering correctly, it was in for like a, a bachelor's, and then you went to was it pittsburgh?

Speaker 1: 3:49

for your master's?

Speaker 2: 3:50

yeah, for a master's yeah that must have been a trip yes, of course, you know.

Speaker 1: 3:56

Uh, it was a very different era, you know, I think nowadays, you know, the world is very connected. So, even if you're physically separate, everybody's watching the same netflix and everybody's watching reading the same news hanging out on the same social media. It was a much more disconnected world back then, so the there was a big gap between these two countries, like both economically as well, as you know from, I would say, from more from a ideas and sort of knowledge or you know, all the things that you know we are able to share so easily. So it was a business very big jump, you know. Nowadays, you know, I think, it's not such a big jump anymore.

Speaker 2: 4:33

You know, because yeah we are much more connected world yeah, and I can only imagine the environment in which you were learning all this stuff. I mean, I remember you know those are the days of like mirc and those kinds of like fun little back roads of the internet where you know the initial like stages of the internet, where we were all just learning about how to communicate and chat with each other and do all those kinds of things like yeah, yahoo had just launched and it was like one of the hottest companies.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Everybody had just started building applications in PHP.

Speaker 2: 5:09

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:10

I was, you know, from, for good or bad. You know, I was from one of the IITs, which is, you know, as many people know, it was one of the top schools in India and now, of course, you know, well known throughout the world. So we were, you know, we were supposed to do big things. We were taught on mainframes and Unix and all this stuff. When the internet came out and everybody started building apps and PHP, all the people from IIT were not so impressed by all these young startups and all these crazy little languages coming out. I think there were a lot of learning lessons even there.

Speaker 2: 5:50

Don't take new things lightly. You know they tend to become big, important things. Yeah, definitely, yeah, so interesting. Um, I just saw the other day actually it might have already happened that icq. Do you remember using icq? It's like a?

Speaker 1: 5:59

yeah, I think that was a long time back.

Speaker 2: 6:02

Yeah, like they're, they're shutting down, like now, which is like wow, I didn't even know they existed still, but it was like they existed, owned by some russian company, but I guess. I guess the point is like you saw a lot of things happening then that are kind of happening now in the, in the realm of you know, generative ai and all that kind of stuff machine learning like it's. It's it's's basically a very similar renaissance.

Speaker 1: 6:27

Yeah, absolutely. I think we saw I've been sort of, I would say, through two sort of really big sort of inflection points in technology. One was of course the internet, which is when we kind of joined the workforce. I would say my experience level was not that high at that point, so I don't think I fully understood what we were going through. But then I think the cloud was, I would say two, three things happened.

Speaker 1: 6:53

The cloud was very big in my life, in my personal journey. The whole sort of all the software and even now infrastructure and everything moving to the cloud was a very, very big sort of a wave that we went through. Yeah, I guess that was the last you know, 10 years, 10 to 12 years. That was a big part of my previous startup journey there. You know there have been a lot of other waves also.

Speaker 1: 7:16

I was actually I spent a lot of years in the storage industry before I started working in internet. So the storage industry went through similar sort of curves. I don't know how many people know or remember these things now, but it went through a curve where the tape got displaced by disk and then disk got replaced by solid state right, all the flash and sort of non-mobile RAM and those kinds of things, right, all the flash and sort of non-multile RAM and those kind of things, right. So there were sort of like waves and you know, but there was a little bit less well-known than the internet and cloud waves and of course there was a mobile wave. I don't think I was ever a part of that journey, but I think it was also a very, very important one, obviously for people who were working in that sort of sphere.

Speaker 2: 8:03

Totally. Yeah, I looked back the other day at Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone announcement and I don't know if you've watched that recently, because it's interesting to look at it now. I mean, steve Jobs was always a really good kind of presenter and I think he really flourished in product announcements and things like that. Just that watershed moment of you know bringing together, I think, what, what are the words they use? Like we're, you know, three new products. It's a? Uh, it's an ipod with a touch screen and it's what was the other? Oh, it's an internet communications device and oh, it's a new cell phone or whatever it is.

Speaker 1: 8:49

And then you know he's like you know, all in one it's like everybody went wow, and now it's like whatever, but that was.

Speaker 2: 8:55

You know that? I mean, that was. That was a a one pinpoint moment where, like, everything changed. It's crazy, right, right crazy.

Speaker 1: 9:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know I was at facebook. I remember I think I was. Yeah, I think I was at facebook at that time. Um, uh, we were all on blackberries. And then, you know, we started using uh, iphones. I still remember when I got my first iphone I was a little frustrated. I couldn't get the buttons. I was used to the BlackBerry stuff. I wasn't too fond initially of that screen experience. You wanted the tactile button.

Speaker 1: 9:34

It's kind of funny to remember now I was complaining to the IT guy this is not working. I remember the battery was really lousy initially so we had to like turn off location tracking or whatever they had at that time.

Speaker 2: 9:50

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:50

The equivalent of GPS and I had to turn it off because otherwise it would just die like really fast. But I don't think we got it right that this was going to be like so big Right and it was very important for Facebook as a company. Actually that was the other part that I think it took even facebook some time to realize that it was very important for facebook. I mean, of course, like like with everything else. Once zuckerberg sort of got the hang of it that this was important, he kind of just nailed it right. He bought instagram and then he fixed facebook um, but it took us a while to, you know, come out of the desktop sort of thinking mode and focus on that.

Speaker 2: 10:25

Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating to think about. Well, look, we are on the Digital Customer Experience podcast and one of the things that I do like to ask every single one of my guests is essentially, their own definition of digital customer success. And knowing that your background isn't necessarily in customer success, but you've been supporting, you know, the these, these motions and whatever I I wanted I wanted to desperately get kind of your take on. You know what is. If you were to describe digital cs to somebody on an elevator for a couple of seconds, what would that be?

Speaker 1: 10:58

yeah, so yeah, I think, uh, you hit the nail. I think you know all of us are shaped by our personal experiences. My personal experience over the last 10 plus years has been building applications and infrastructure in the cloud, and so I've been sort of what you might call the SaaS, b2b sort of part of the economy. You know, when I look back at my experience, and if I were to summarize it in just one line, I think the era of transactional approach to customer success or customer support is something that you know. I think, at least in large parts of the industry I think, are sunsetting or in transition mode. Yeah, so I think you know what happened with the word cloud is, for many, many companies, you're sort of in the subscription business and you're trying to grow your business. First, you land and expand. Right, these are famous acronyms.

Speaker 2: 12:01

Sure yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:03

And every company you know a big part of its growth comes from expand. You know making existing customers grow and you know get new use cases, yeah, make sure they're happy, make sure they don't leave. The churn is low and so on. Right, and that's something very different from the era where you were not selling subscription. You know you were just sort of selling these c CDs of software or maybe a hardware box, right, and once you made the sale it was done right. And so once you made the sale, any support you did was pure overhead your sale was already done right.

Speaker 1: 12:40

But you've gone from that era to one where your initial sale is actually very little and you know your entire focus is on growing the revenues over time, right? So I think for me, like that is the definitive sort of, I would say, the change, I would say, and I worked in those industries I worked in network appliance, which was a hardware appliance maker, and we had great customer support and we had great reputation for being a customer-friendly company. But I think the nature of customer interactions was very, very different. And so I think what I really feel is that, at least for people in my part of the industry the SaaS, b2b kind of industry it's all become about non-transactional, a little bit sort of white glove. You know something in between. You're a product company, but you're kind of not just a product company, you're also a bit of a services company.

Speaker 2: 13:36

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 13:36

You know you're working closely with customers. You're sort of making sure they're successful, making sure you know you are part of their team, right? So I think the non-transactional part is hey, we are an extended part of your team. You can come and talk to us anytime with your problems and we'll do our best to solve it. Of course, that leads to a lot of issues and I'm sure we'll talk about some of them, but I think that is the approach that is really required to succeed in this cloud era. And I think there are a lot of layers and layers of things that I can talk about here.

Speaker 1: 14:07

But I would say, particularly for if you're not one of the big cloud vendors like if you're like Google, amazon, microsoft then I think you can afford to be maybe a little bit transactional because of your overwhelming sort of market dominance and sort of your size and sort of stuff like that. But I think you know you're, uh, anybody other than those companies and you're trying to build a sort of a bit of a niche sort of a business. Uh, I think I think, right, glove, customer service, you know. Quick response, a lot of love, growing usage, yeah, non-traditional service.

Speaker 2: 14:39

I think these are very important parts of what I think of a cs for me yeah, I agree, I agree, and you know it's funny because I still don't quite understand why a lot of people especially you know a lot of people who work in SaaS but may not be, you know, super familiar with the business of SaaS don't actively and fully realize that the money is actually in the post sale, like that's. That's where your revenue is. Sure you need to feed the funnel and sure you need to go out and close new deals, new logos and things like that, because that's how you grow, but you know your money is in the post sale and and securing the renewal and driving value and those kinds of things which is made also, also even in some of the growth you know, referrals are a big part of growth.

Speaker 1: 15:29

Right, you know some of the stories that again, everybody has their own biases, but I love some of the stories that that come from companies that grew by mostly word of mouth, like one of my favorite stories is a very famous company unfortunately got bought out recently, called MailChimp. Yeah sure, I just loved reading their story. You know the way they grew by just, you know, just treating every customer well you know they didn't. I don't think they had a sales force. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think.

Speaker 2: 15:57

I think they were quite famous for not having a sales force. I think there's a couple others like that too, like Canva. Canva grew very organically without a lot of sales and I guess that gets into PLG versus SLG and all that kind of fun stuff and how people like to categorize us.

Speaker 2: 16:20

But I mean ultimately, it's interesting and I think this is where what you're building fits in amazingly well. So I don't like putting words in founders' mouths, but essentially you're building customer-facing the ability to easily engage customers over Slack and Teams. Do you want to talk a little bit about ClearFeed and where it came from?

Speaker 1: 16:43

Sure, yeah, I think this is a good continuation of the topic that we just started off. So, like I said, my background was in building infrastructure and applications for cloud-based infrastructure applications. Growing usage and business was a big part of my role, even though I was not directly a CS professional, but I was a founder at my previous company. Yeah, increasingly, these chat tools you know whether it is Slack for you know Slack native companies, or you know, for others it's Microsoft Teams or maybe for some of them it's even Google Chat. I think the world is sort of shifting there. You know, people just want to like, log into their favorite chat application, like, and just stay there all day and just do all the work there.

Speaker 1: 17:28

I think people don't realize how dramatic the change is Like. People don't realize how dramatic the change is Like I think if you're an older company, you're probably still spending a lot of time on email and you know spending some time on these chat tools. Sure, but I think if you look at the younger companies who are getting born today, they're just completely on Slack or whatever. You know their tool of choice is so anyway. So you know, I think. But this also creates a lot of problem, I think when I started this company I had this sort of a little sort of vague mission in my head that how do we make it easier for people to deal with sort of noise in the workplace? And I found that the center of noise is often these Slack channels. And obviously, you know, using Slack for like dealing with hundreds of customers is not something it's designed to do.

Speaker 2: 18:10

So I think, you know, in that spectrum of sort of pain, you know, I think this particularly stood out as um easily identifiable um and something that you know a lot of people were having problems with I mean, look, I'm looking at my slack notifications right now and it just I makes me want to close it and forget it, right, because it's just like no, and and me just thinking about having to support customers using, using it like gives me anxiety, right right, right, right, yeah, but customers love it.

Speaker 1: 18:41

You know, I think, I think, you know, while, while a vendor may be dealing with 100 customers and it might be seemed like a nightmare for every customer, you know this is a direct, yeah, line of contact with a bunch of really important stakeholders on the other side, and customers love to chat with experts. They love to chat with their solutions architect, with the support person, with, maybe, the engineer, the PM. They just love it, right, so, yeah, so I'll just jump to where we are. So we've built a software that essentially converts Slack into a help desk. It's sort of a little bit unique. It's not a classic sort of a customer support software so you can be in touch with hundreds of customers on Slack and they will feel like they're just chatting with you. But our system sort of picks up every conversation, every message posted by customers, posted by responders in the team, and brings it internally into a very structured format where, if you are, let's say, head of support or head of technical services, or you're running onboarding or pre-sales and all these functions that are responsible for onboarding customers, supporting customers, growing customers, you can get a single view across all of your customers. You can monitor one single dashboard or one single or a few single, a few Slack channels and just sort of, you know, be able to tackle this entire thing, you know, just from one console. That's been very, you know, successful for us. Cons that's been very successful for us.

Speaker 1: 20:14

We are in production at a lot of very, very classic infrastructure and applications software in the cloud. Some names I can just cite some of them, like Chronosphere is a big observability company which helps customers, I think, monitor their cloud infrastructure. It's a very well-known company in their space. Teleport is another one on the connectivity space. And Astronomer in the data space. So you've got a bunch of these really well-known technology B2B SaaS companies using us for exactly what I described to you. Yeah, but we are also a horizontal tool, so the same way you can serve your customers, you can obviously serve your employees as well. Um, so we are also increasingly being used internally that's fantastic.

Speaker 2: 21:05

So there's a couple things I want to dig in in on here because, um, you know, when I first learned about you guys, I was like, yeah, that I mean, yes, let's go.

Speaker 2: 21:15

But like one of the things that is a commonality in that earlier question that I posed to you about what is digital customer success, and a lot of people define it as getting the right information to the right customer contact at the right time where they are right. And I think that last bit is super key because, to your point, like you know, the go-to is always email. Well, guess what people get lost in? You know you get lost in inboxes like super, super quickly. And you know, especially in an environment where maybe you haven't, you know, implemented in-app stuff yet, or in-app communication, or you're not a, you're not a platform. If you're a non-platform, you know provider where you can't do in-app this kind of stuff, you know, along with other things, maybe sms or something like that is is it is an amazing way to do exactly that, like get in front of your customers where they are when they need it yeah, I think in-app.

Speaker 1: 22:22

You know like, um, that's a really interesting point in a lot of modern sort of software you know there is no app. So, for example uh, let's take an example of one of the companies I just mentioned, right chronosphere, which is a observability company. You know, most of the times you're interacting through to to that company or that product through things like alerts. You know you're not really logging in and watching an application. You know it's some alert that's coming to you, it's some dashboard that might be embedded inside your software.

Speaker 1: 22:54

So I think the world has become very like, you know it's very, very fragmented, I guess, for lack of a better word. You know like a lot of people don't have apps or the app is not their primary experience. The primary experience could be a terminal, it could be a virtual machine, it could be logging in somewhere. Terminal, it could be a virtual machine Sure, it could be logging in somewhere. You could be selling something in the network layer or in the cloud optimization layer, and there's just so much stuff out there. So I think, for all of these reasons, this medium has also emerged, because of these reasons that, hey, this is the natural place. We don't really have the app as the dominant construct. Um yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:37

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about the show. Did you know that roughly 60% of listeners aren't actually subscribed to the show, on whatever platform they're listening to it on Now? As you know, algorithms love, likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. So if you get value out of the content, you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well, please go ahead and follow the show, leave a comment, leave a review. Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show. And while you're at it, go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 2: 24:19

Now back to the show. Are there some interesting use cases that have come out of your customer base? I mean, surely there are some people using, you know, ClearFeed for just interesting things beyond just like having a a specific customer channel and things like that yeah, right, yeah, we discussed a little bit of this, I think, when we first met.

Speaker 1: 24:43

Um, yeah, it's. It's definitely been a learning journey for me as well. We have seen some interesting patterns. Uh, let me try to recall some of them. You know the classic one, of course, you know is is just working with your customers on Slack. You know that's just one-on-one and it's very traditional.

Speaker 1: 24:59

I think the thing the couple of things that I think took me a little bit by surprise is support teams are a very important part of this overall equation and support teams usually love the support team. So you know, like, if you're in a Zendesk shop, you know the support team is spending all of their time on Zendesk. If you're on Intercom, you're spending a lot of time on Intercom and so on, right. Similarly, you know, if you're engineers, you know you're probably spending a lot of time on Jira or GitHub or something like that. You know wherever you track your engineering issues, right. So one of the things we found was that, while people love to collaborate on Slack, there are people there are sort of other software that are a very important part of the ecosystem and some people actually prefer to work there. They don't actually want to come and work in Slack right. So it was a little bit surprising for me, but integration is actually a very, very important part of this puzzle, which is sure customers love Slack, but if your support team is on Zendesk, bringing them into loop as and when required easily is very, very important for the business. And also similar dynamics for the engineering team. I would say slightly weaker dynamics, because engineers anyway are very comfortable with Slack, but they're also, you know, the ability to take conversations and convert them into feature requests, to track them and then provide updates. I think that has been an interesting observation. That was one.

Speaker 1: 26:31

The second thing that I think I was also very surprised by is not everybody is a B2B SaaS company and not everybody works directly with like sort of large customers on dedicated Slack channels A lot of the parts of the world. You know Slack is not even that popular. You know, if you go to sort of outside the US and go to, like you know, sort of developing markets, you know the messaging is there is WhatsApp, it's not Slack. What is very interesting is that let's call these B2SMB companies, because typically these are not exactly B2C companies, but this would be a large, let's say, a tax consultancy or maybe a digital marketing agency or a health insurance provider, so anyway. So there's all these companies that you know work with customers in these tertiary systems, you might call it right. They're chatting with their customers on WhatsApp or on phones or, like you said, sms. There's a whole bunch of like stuff that's almost out of the corporate sort of umbrella.

Speaker 1: 27:36

But when you have a customer problem, even at these companies, people bring them in, and where they bring them in is typically the company's internal chat system, right. So if it's Slack, people would just come and say, hey, I've got an irate customer over there, they were trying something and this is not working, can you please help? Right, so they're acting as proxy for the customer. So what we found was that we were also able to help these companies so, even though they were not classic sort of B2B, saas and the industry segment where my experience was mostly in but these were like companies that were dealing with SMBs, but they were internally sort of having a setup where people were proxying the customers, so to say, and bringing issues, and they also needed a way to structure those conversations, because chat is unstructured. Right, you want dragster? Yeah, and so we were also able to help a lot of these companies. That was very interesting for me because I didn't have exposure to you know, those kind of setups yeah, it's fascinating.

Speaker 2: 28:37

I mean, um, you know, two very distinct, different topics here, both equally fascinating, I think, from from the perspective of workflow, efficiency and then also really trying to serve customers who may not. You know, I I mean, obviously, in the software industry we're very, very focused on B2B and my observation is that B2B in general tends to have this kind of bias towards B2C and somehow like a hesitancy to operate more like B2C does in a lot of ways. So like, for instance, you know, if I were to engage with I don't know a retailer, for instance and they have this, you know, sms chat, like okay, I was texting, I needed to do a return at the Home Depot, which is a hardware store in the States I went to the website and it kicked me into a chat conversation. It was like an iMessage conversation that it created for me based on the fact that it knew I was an iPhone user and we just had a text conversation with their bot and then eventually that turned into an agent.

Speaker 2: 30:00

But those kinds of experiences, I think, are things that we're afraid of in B2B, when really I mean, I think everybody has a cell phone in their hands. You know it's easy to understand what kind of cell phone or what kind of technology they have. And so to me it's like a no-brainer that we would have executive conversations, executive buyer updates on cell phone, because they live in their cell phone, for instance, as an example. But I loved what you brought up just in terms of like really going outside of B2B and really embracing some of the B2C things and, by association, like exposing ourselves to you know different ways of working than just what we're all used to.

Speaker 1: 30:47

Yeah, yeah, and honestly, it just sort of happened organically, you know, we didn't go about looking for it. I think these people had a pain point. They found us, we found them.

Speaker 2: 30:56

um, so cool a lot of uh yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:59

So actually, you know I don't know whether we're going to talk about it you, you bought it, like these bots and sort of the ai stuff. I think that's also a very important part of the, the overall sort of like ecosystem. Now that's also something we are. We are investing in because we can touch base yeah, bots are, bots are.

Speaker 2: 31:15

I mean me personally, I would much rather engage a bot that was well trained and knew what it was doing than a human.

Speaker 2: 31:25

That's just me like. Sure, have a human as backup when I can't get what I need out of the bot. Um, but you know, I think there's some interesting things there that are fascinating to me, because I think the initial like reaction to bots is like, oh, you know, bots are here to take my job and bots are here to, you know, replace me and all that kind of stuff, and I think, sure, there's probably some of that. But my argument with bots is that, hey, they're actually here to make you more effective, like, as you know, as a human stepping in, you're not bogged down by the minutia of all of the same password reset requests and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all this kind of stuff that we used to have to do in a very transactional environment, that we used to have to do in a very transactional environment. Now we're actually having deeper conversations with customers that do need a little deeper layer of help, or we are freeing up our teams to do human engagement after the bot is done.

Speaker 1: 32:26

Yeah, I would just add that we have a bot of our own and we are ourselves using our own bot. So a bit of a dog pudding there, and so are many of our customers. It's not easy to displace a human. I think, of course, you brought up some examples of resetting passwords and things like that. So, yes, there are areas which are very repetitive and you can obviously bring a very high degree of automation to those. But if you go a little bit into product support, which is a little bit non-standard, so you're not dealing with Windows or Apple and so on, you're dealing with something a little bit more niche than those Our bot. Actually, first and foremost, we use it to help ourselves. It has two modes. One of the modes is what we call an agent assistant mode. When we get a conversation or a request from a customer, it just pops up as an assistant and says look, here's some things I can find for you.

Speaker 1: 33:29

You asked a few minutes back about what we had learned, and I think AI has been also very fascinating. Unfortunately, we could probably spend the whole podcast talking about what we've learned in AI, but let me just take a quick digression here. One of the things I've learned is, while the data is out there, documentation is out there, chat GPT is out there and so on but it's not easy to go there. You're sort of chatting with a customer, you're sort of talking or you're in a context For you to switch context, go somewhere, pull the data out, feed it in, create a prompt. It's a lot of work, right? So one of my core learnings with AI is that AI really needs to be embedded where you work and that pattern is going to be. Obviously, in a few years I think it's going to be everywhere. Obviously, in a few years I think it's going to be everywhere. We've already seen that be very successful for developer tools, like with the co-pilot stuff, and that's the same feeling I have about the software that we are building and the kind of job we do. It's not just about our software, it's that AI needs to be embedded.

Speaker 1: 34:27

If it's embedded in my workflow as a support agent or as a customer success person, where it has access to all the data it has, you know it understands the customer's history. It knows the configuration right. So you know in almost all b2b contexts customers have different configurations. You know they're using the software for different purposes. They have it configured differently, they're on different pricing tiers, they're in different geographies. The software software understands the customer context. It obviously understands basic stuff like product documentation and the essential knowledge basis and so on. It understands the chat history. So there's some context that has already happened. You've had some chats with the customer over the last month, two months, whatever, and as in when you're chatting, you know it just uses all of that to just help you. Right, and it's not displacing anybody, it's just like me. It is just such a amazing life savior, right, you know, it just makes you so much more effective. Yeah, uh, I think it is. There's no brainer. I think we're gonna see it everywhere yeah, I totally agree.

Speaker 2: 35:31

Just that little thing thing you mentioned about like previous chat history and things like that. Okay, so last year I was dealing with like this massive health insurance kind of thing where I had like all these claims that I had to submit and I had to track them myself in like a spreadsheet and it was this whole project. It turned into a whole project. And you know, invariably with health insurance in the United States you have to work through, like you know, appeals process. It's like court almost. You have to go through the appeals process if they get rejected and all this kind of stuff, right. So it's this whole thing.

Speaker 2: 36:17

And, um, I remember thinking, you know, at the time, like you know, as I did my weekly call to them, I was like, okay, I'm going to get a new agent, I'm going to carve out about 10 minutes to make sure that I could explain the context of the last year of work that I've been through. I'm going to share that. You know, especially in highly complex environments like that, where there's a highly complex thing that the customer has to navigate and then you know the product or the service is highly complex and the history is complex, like that's where the power of this stuff really comes in and makes those agents Like I don't know how. These, in those environments specifically where you know they're getting yelled at every other call you know it's like, can you just?

Speaker 2: 37:07

make my life easier, please, you know.

Speaker 1: 37:10

Yeah, you know, honestly, I hate to say this but this, but you know, I don't know how much of the friction is intention oh well, I was gonna say that, yeah, absolutely, I mean in us health insurance. It is absolutely intentional so I don't know if technology can really save us when the incentives are so misaligned. But, yes, I think it should be able to help, but it's up to humans to use that help.

Speaker 2: 37:41

Yeah, I need to come up with an AI tool that helps you negotiate a car, that's what I need. That's the other industry where it's like, oh my God, the thought of going. That's the other. That's the other industry where, like you know, it's like oh my god, like the thought of going into a car dealership to purchase a vehicle gives me anxiety, probably but probably on purpose.

Speaker 1: 38:03

You know, I'm both a CS person as well as I, obviously, I'm a product person. I sort of spend most of my time building a product. You know, I also feel that non-natural language interfaces. So all of us, we build products and we build these user interfaces, and every user interface is different. Actually, that's one of the nice things about Slack it's a very predictable user interface. But if you go outside of that, you think of any software you use, whether it's your HR software or your recruiting software or your financial software every one of them looks different, right, and it's always a learning curve to learn it. Yeah, okay, so if I have to do this and I have to go here, I have to press this, I have to do this right, I think we're going to see a lot of natural language interfaces.

Speaker 1: 38:52

Yeah, you know, help me do like. I'll just tell you what to do, right? Why do you want me to learn? Are in which menu, you know this, click, that click, sure, four clicks, and then I get to the thing that I want to do. I'll just give you an instruction. Right, you figure it out? Yeah, right, so I think there's also ways of reducing um product complexity by offering natural language interfaces. I don't think we've seen as much of that yet, but I hope and think we will. Um, yeah, I think. Unfortunately, you know it takes time to build these things, you know like. So I think even I'm struggling to roll some of this out, but I would love to.

Speaker 2: 39:25

Well, there's a middle ground that I think that I use on an almost daily basis or maybe whatever, but like, for instance, in Google Slides or Google Sheets or whatever, if there's a specific functionality that I don't use on a daily basis, I don't go menu hunting anymore for that thing. I just go to the help thing and I type in what I want and it shows me what menu it's in.

Speaker 2: 39:47

I was like great, perfect, you know but it's like that kind of thing where you know in the future, if you want to, it's kind of already happening, like if you want to create a document instead of going and formatting and you know building the table and doing all that kind of stuff, you're just talking to the thing you know, and it, and it does it so I think not enough has happened.

Speaker 1: 40:11

I think more, more needs to happen in this sort of direction.

Speaker 2: 40:14

Yeah, yeah we're unfortunately running a little bit short on time because I think we could keep going on this conversation, but I would love to get a sense from you, a couple of things. The first one is as a product person yourself and as you're building this company and continuing to grow and those kinds of things, how do you expect your product teams to work with the post-sale teams on things like product feedback and iteration and rollouts and those kinds of things In your experience? Is that a natural thing for you or is it kind of strained, as it seems to be in a lot of places?

Speaker 1: 41:02

It gets strained very quickly. So you know, I've had, like I mentioned, you know I've been through a startup journey before this as well, and that company grew to about 400 odd people. It's a very mid-sized company, yeah. So I've definitely faced a lot of complexity, yeah, and then in exactly the situation you've described. So I think, first of all, let me just summarize quickly. So I think one cannot have a one-size-fits-all. So, at a smaller scale, when you are at a very small scale, I think the patterns you would like to use to solve these problems are very different. So, for example, at my scale, what I would really like to see is almost everybody in the example. At my scale, what I would really like to see is almost everybody in the company, but, very importantly, product managers to interact a lot with customers, right. That doesn't mean, of course, that you know they can't be part of every customer conversation Sure, obviously right. But I think what I'm trying to highlight here is that there's a lot of value to sort of chatting with customers on an everyday basis in terms of understanding the use cases, having very strong user empathy and feeding that back into the development side. Separate from that, there is this whole issue of trackability, which I would say is tracking feature requests and bugs and so on. So I would try to separate these two dimensions. I think every part team should spend a part of their cycles in a customer-facing role Separately. They should also worry about the process. They should, whether they are small or big, set up robust processes to capture user feedback. So we use, of course, aside from the engineering tools, we use a tool called Canny to log all the product features and customers really like that. So I think one of the other things I've learned is that when customers feel like they're influencing your roadmap, they feel really happy, really, really happy. They really do. We've seen that giving customers access to these kind of roadmap tracking tools and allowing them to create entries or voting on them. Of course you have to follow up, you have to deliver on the stuff, but I think at least you start on a good footing. They feel like they're part of the process.

Speaker 1: 43:20

One of the huge challenges I faced in my previous company when we grew big was actually trying to get things scheduled. I think that was a big, big challenge, because there are never enough people for all the things that customers are asking you and of course, you want to make everybody happy and there are different people invested in different customers. So, you know, some people are invested in customer A, somebody is invested in customer B, there are obviously abroad managers who are on different sort of features right, and so there's a lot of stakeholders, you know, who all want to see their things get done. And that is a very, very tough problem. My, that is a very, very tough problem. My only two cents there.

Speaker 1: 44:06

As a small company I don't face as much of that yet, but at a large scale, the only thing I felt sort of really helped us was to sort of divide and conquer, was to say that, look, if you have 100 units of bandwidth available in terms of building something, let's give you some quotas.

Speaker 1: 44:25

So I would go and give the support team a little bit of my bandwidth. I would say, look, you get 10 units and you can find the five problems that are really causing a lot of grief to you in customer support and we'll try to turn them around in this, let's say, the coming release. Similarly, I'd go to the solutions architects or the pre-sales people, I'll go to the customer success people and of course, you know, then there are strategy holders. Right, there would be the product team itself and the executive team. So I think I found that you know that kind of approach towards managing the available bandwidth in a very transparent manner where everybody knew that they had some things they could ask for but, not everything, because there just wasn't enough bandwidth to go around.

Speaker 1: 45:16

That took us a while to sort of formalize that and to perfect that, but it was really good. People liked being heard, just like customers, you know internal stakeholders also like being heard. Sure, and then if you could deliver something to everybody you know, at least they felt like, yes, we were all yeah, getting taken care of.

Speaker 2: 45:35

I think that's super valuable. I mean, as, as you can imagine, you know, the majority of listeners are, you know, very much in the cs, cs, cx space, and I think a lot of them tend to struggle sometimes with how to really effectively engage with, you know, an R&D organization, and so I think those little insights are very valuable just in terms of giving somebody in a, let's say, a CS leadership position you know, the, the talk track and the, the talking points, so they can speak the same language, so to speak, which is cool. Yeah, look, you know it's been, it's been an absolute pleasure. And, as we kind of round down, I would love to know if there's anything kind of in your content diet that you, you know, or things you pay attention to podcasts, books, anything like that that you think would be, you know, great for the audience.

Speaker 1: 46:31

and then also if you have any shout outs that you want to give yeah, I, my diet is probably a junk diet, but uh, you know I spend a um spend, not the ideal diet. So yeah, unfortunately I'm pretty spread out. As an engineer, I tend to have to keep up a little bit with all this AI stuff. I'm building a lot of stuff. Honestly, twitter has become sort of my newsfeed.

Speaker 1: 47:01

So that's where I spend a lot of my time and you know I get sort of my daily diet of whether it's AI or like CS or like you know VCs spouting wisdom or like other founders sort of talking about stuff. You know I get a lot of my diet from there. There's obviously, you know, great handles to follow there. There's obviously great handles to follow there. But I think there are some amazing people talking about how to run companies. So I think, for example, there's a Sorry, I'm not going to get the name correct, but a gentleman by the last name Girdley, I think G-I-R-D-L-E-Y.

Speaker 1: 47:39

He's pretty famous. He has obviously a huge number of followers, so I'm sure you can find him. He talks about building small businesses, mid-sized businesses and how he's built dozens of them. He talks about accounting you talked about accounting. He talks about just maintaining cash flows and all kinds of stuff, and I really find that useful because it takes a lot of time to read books. But if you read through somebody who spent 20, 30 years of their life building a dozen businesses and they can distill their wisdom down into a few hundred words or maybe a few thousand here, I find that really, really useful. So I really like following those kind of folks on Twitter.

Speaker 1: 48:23

I'm actually not a huge Reddit person, but I'm sometimes taken aback by how much you can learn on Reddit. So I find that when I wanted to product research, I often just go to Reddit and just sort of do some searches and I just read what people are chatting about and I learned so much. You know, I learned about other companies, I learned about my competitors. I learned about just people like just talking about the problems they have. So you know, I'm I'm a huge fan uh, I think of those forums as well, um, but yeah, I mean, unfortunately all of my diet actually content diet is very, very sort of biased towards social sort of what you might call a little bit of the junk diet perhaps reddit is a good one though because like literally like anything that you would ever be interested in.

Speaker 2: 49:14

There's something on reddit about it.

Speaker 1: 49:18

Like anything yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I you know I'm not very big on, like I said, you know I'm actually not on the reddits myself sort of responding in real time and stuff, but I I often use it for like more like research kind of stuff and I find it very useful in that mode there's an amazing podcast called endless thread.

Speaker 2: 49:38

I don't know if you know it, but but basically they pick a Reddit thread to just go deep on and then they go do research on it and really talk through it and all that kind of stuff. It's really fascinating. So it's just and it's, you know, it's kind of like I love random things and it's the epitome of that, Like just random things on Reddit. It's great.

Speaker 1: 49:59

Yeah, sorry, and I think you had a second part. I don't know if I answered your question.

Speaker 2: 50:03

Yeah, any shout-outs that you want to give or anybody that you want to In terms of products.

Speaker 1: 50:11

Like I said, in terms of software, there's a ton of stuff we use ourselves, but yeah, we like Gany a lot and it's a great tool for generating product feedback. Honestly, some of the tools are well tool for generating product feedback.

Speaker 1: 50:23

Honestly, you know some of the tools are like well-known so I don't know if it makes sense, but you know, like simple things like Hotjar, you know watching user recordings, those things help us a lot and we have a very traditional stack. You know, like we obviously are big users of really helped us sort of consolidate all of our customer information into one place and so on.

Speaker 2: 50:48

Well, that'll be interesting if they do get swallowed up by Google at some point.

Speaker 1: 50:53

Yeah, actually, one of the things that is sort of maybe slightly newer that I would give a shout out to is Clearbit, right, I mean I think they got bought out by hopspot, so that whole class of software, you know where uh, you get some visibility into who's coming to your website. Yeah, you know there's a little bit of gray area there, you know, in terms of intrusion of privacy and things like that. But I mean, in general, you know like, obviously, it doesn't track people at the individual level, it just sort of of like tells you which companies visiting your website. That's really been very useful for me, you know. It's just.

Speaker 1: 51:27

You know the problem, you know, with running a business that's sort of, you know like open for business on the web and sort of getting visitors and then getting a few leads, is like it's the people who sign up. You see them, but you know, for every sign up there's a hundred people who don't sign up and you don't get to see them right. So, yeah, just just having that little bit of visibility that, look, you know these are the kinds of people that are coming to my site checking me out at a very coarse level. You know, it's just, uh, honestly, like it's. It's really hard to now think of a life without that. Uh, from a marketing perspective, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 52:00

I mean the demographic information alone is is crazy valuable.

Speaker 1: 52:03

So yeah, yeah, just just basic stuff. You know the company x is checking it out.

Speaker 2: 52:07

You know that's, that's really awesome, yeah look, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. I love what you and the team are building and I can't wait to you know, keep track of you guys and see. You see where everything goes. But yeah, huge fan. So thanks, thanks a ton for the time.

Speaker 1: 52:24

Thank you so much. Wonderful being on the show and that was a great chat. Actually I didn't feel like I was, you know, it was very informal exchange of thoughts. I really love the format.

Speaker 2: 52:35

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. 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.