Speaker 1: 0:31

When I started that was 18 clicks. A customer had to go through Drop down menus pick your product. We have a lot of products. That was confused and it would cause missed routes etc. Now we've got it down to technology where it's just a description box.

Speaker 2: 0:45

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. 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.

Speaker 2: 1:22

Hello and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. This is Alex Terkovich. So glad you're back this week and every week, as we talk about all things digital in CX, I have a phenomenal guest lined up for you today in Bernard Slaouowy, who has the distinction of being I think, the only person I know of. You can feel free to correct me here, but the only person that I know of that holds a VP level role that is titled Digital CS. Yeah, he's the VP of Digital CS at Salesforce. So we've talked to a lot of founders. We've talked to a lot of early stage folks. Now we get the opportunity to peek inside the digital program of a large organization such as Salesforce. If you look up Bernard in LinkedIn, you'll see he has quite the pedigree, spent some time in Microsoft AOL even and has written a lot of great things also on LinkedIn. One of the articles is Six Things I Learned at Microsoft. It's all about discomfort and it's okay to be scared and those kinds of things Really really great and insightful work. It's okay to be scared and those kinds of things Really really great and insightful work.

Speaker 2: 2:33

In this episode, we do talk about at length what digital CS looks like at Salesforce, how they're utilizing AI, the kinds of things that they're doing, which is super cool to get an insight to. So please enjoy this episode with Bernard Slowy of Salesforce, because I sure did, oh man. But hey, welcome to the show. It's so nice to have you. It's been a little while in the making and we've kind of been chatting back and forth a little bit, but I'm extremely pleased that you're here. I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you might be the only VP-level digital CS role I've heard of. Are there others among you?

Speaker 1: 3:18

You know it's interesting because I feel like it's really grown as a function over the last like kind of year or two. It's like I hear it everywhere now and I see it in so many places. You know, congratulations, you're doing a, a podcast on it. But I still don't know if, like, there's many leadership roles on it. Like if you read Gartner and how they recommend success organizations should be set up they're all saying it. Now, you know you should have someone who leads it and I think what tends to happen is it's it's buried down in companies.

Speaker 1: 3:49

You know it's part of people's day jobs is like, yeah, you're doing this, but you're also you should think about this digital thing, you know, and so you need to have like the right level of leadership and the right roles and function to be really serious about it. So I feel like maybe I am unique. I know there's not too many out there there's.

Speaker 2: 4:06

there are lots of directors, some senior directors, there's tons of of managers with a digital CS moniker, obviously a lot of individual contributors, and I feel like there's a lot of digital functions that are like buried under the ops umbrella as well.

Speaker 1: 4:22

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:22

Yeah, 100%, awesome. You're a unicorn, congratulations.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's a great thing. It's a great thing.

Speaker 2: 4:31

Yeah, so you run digital at Salesforce, so that's obviously fantastic. I know you spent a lot of time at Microsoft. You spent some time at AOL which is something you don't see every day and was that kind of like your first big boy job.

Speaker 1: 4:48

That was when I was in college. Actually, I went to college in Waterford in Ireland and AOL had a call center next door to the college and so I worked there in the evenings when I was in college and then when I finished college I had no idea what I wanted to do. So AOL offered me a kind of a full-time job then as a technical trainer, which, which was amazing, I actually got to spend a couple of months in India with them and but yeah, it was very interesting because they were obviously on their way down. You know, it was like it's very interesting to be working for a company that was just scrambling to stay alive. You know, the internet was happening around them.

Speaker 1: 5:21

Nobody wanted to be in this walled garden anymore, but I learned a lot from it.

Speaker 1: 5:25

I learned a lot from AOL and I always tell people I think like, having jobs where you're directly interacting with customers, you know like, is so good for your growth. When you're younger, you know, I worked in restaurants, you know, directly serving people, aol. I was talking to customers over a phone trying to describe how to do things when you can't see their screen and they can't see you. You know it's funny when I think back on it, but I just think that direct customer interaction still grounds me today, like I think back to that of like what it's like when you're a customer trying to do these things, you know I do and uh, I love that you brought up kind of the service industry because I feel like everybody should spend at least some time in hospitality, service, restaurants, whatever, because you see the best and the worst in people totally yeah, I got a little seven-year-old boy and when he's old enough I'll make sure he gets a job working in a restaurant, because you learn so much from it.

Speaker 1: 6:18

You learn so much from it, right yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:20

Was AOL still shipping out CDs at that?

Speaker 1: 6:23

time? Yeah, they used to be. I remember there was websites on what to do with AOL CDs.

Speaker 2: 6:27

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1: 6:29

It was like so many of them would be shipped out. But yeah, like, and it was. It was interesting because around the time they just partnered with bt, so we they were actually in the uk, I was supporting uk customers and british telecom were launching broadband, you know, and so like that was like aol with broadband, you know, it's like I think I'm dating myself here now, but like that was the time was helping people set up their modems and troubleshoot connection issues and all that sort of fun stuff. So it was hilarious.

Speaker 2: 6:54

Yeah, it's amazing. One of my kind of companies that I worked for a while BigCommerce, Steve Case was a big investor or whatever. He'd come around the office every once in a while and we would be like joking, like we'd give him back his CDs or something no-transcript well, in digital. Because, like we're still, you know, we're riding the front edge of this wave of, you know, digitizing the customer experience and whatnot. So, but I thought that was quite poignant. What was your, I guess, if you had to look back on your years at Microsoft, like what you know, had to write a few sentences about it, like what would be your main takeaways?

Speaker 1: 8:07

Yeah, I was very lucky. I think I was like 14 or 15 years at Microsoft, and so I feel like I grew up at microsoft from a career perspective definitely, and I was there when balmer took over, you know. So I was there for the balmer years, which was not the greatest time to be at microsoft and windows vista, if anyone can remember that, like I was in windows support, and so it wasn't the greatest os that was ever released I worked in sales.

Speaker 2: 8:30

I had to sell sales. I had to sell it. Yeah, I had to sell it.

Speaker 1: 8:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, but I was there when Satya Nadella took over, you know, so it was just amazing to be part of that and to watch him transform that company. You know, it was just incredible. It's incredible when you see how well they're doing now. I think everyone thought they were going to be the next IBM at one point in time, you know, and so he just transformed it. So I feel very lucky to have developed there as a leader, as a manager, as a you know, I just got this great training.

Speaker 1: 9:01

I feel like in everything I did and watching him and learning from him. Like he talks a lot about how Microsoft used to have this very fixed mindset. You know it was like we know it all, we know how to do these things. Fixed mindset, you know it's like we know it all, we know how to do these things. We don't talk to you and you really change it. I think that was the book behind me hit refresh with this growth mindset you know of like, hey, you know we don't have all the answers, we shouldn't be asking questions, we should be deeper with our customers, and so so I just took so much from microsoft and I just feel like I was really lucky, really lucky to be there at the time when he came in, and so I saw it go from the bad to like what he did. You know, it was incredible really incredible.

Speaker 2: 9:39

That's cool, that's cool. Well, and now you're, you know, at Salesforce. You've been there a little bit leading digital and you know one of the things that I do ask all of my guests on the show, because everybody invariably has a slightly different twist and definition on it is like.

Speaker 1: 9:54

You know what would be your definition of digital cs if you had to describe it to somebody who didn't I knew you were going to ask me this, so I actually took a little bit of time trying to write it down. I often find with people like they get too complex with things, you know, like they write things in a way that's very hard for people to understand. So, at the simplest, I think about it like this the digital customer success is the use of technology and data to enhance the digital experience for your customers to ensure they achieve their desired outcomes. That's how I think about it. That's what it is. It's using technology, it's using data and making sure your customers get what they want.

Speaker 2: 10:32

It's put very simply and beautifully. It's so true, and I think one of the keys there is the data element of it, which is monumental.

Speaker 1: 10:44

Yeah, 100%, that's a lot. I can talk about what we do at Salesforce there, but 100%. And if I just reflect back onto microsoft for a minute, like and how I'm doing what I'm doing today, but like I used to lead windows support for microsoft, it was, like you know, 3 000 support engineers, 132 markets, so multiple languages, etc. And we used to. I used to talk about like nobody wakes up in the morning and says I want to contact support, you know, and nobody wakes up in the morning says I want, I want to contact support. You know, and nobody wakes up in the morning and says I want to talk to a success manager. Right, that's just the reality of like they're going to go to Google, they're going to search, they're going to try and solve themselves and if they can't, then they're probably going to go to that human. And that's what digital customer success is all about.

Speaker 1: 11:26

Like we created a function in Microsoft I moved over from windows to run that for Microsoft was when people who's deja, wake up in the morning thinking about how do I improve that digital self-service experience? That's what it's all about, because then you're satisfying your customers because by the time they've gone online, they've tried something. By the time I get true to that human being, whoever it is, csm architect, support engineer you're already a little bit pissed off excuse my English because you've tried to do it and you haven't been able to do it. You know, and so that's what it's all about is, how do you make sure, in that moment of truth on digital, that you show up well and you solve their problem? That's what it's all about, and it mightn't be a problem like. I'll go through a framework, maybe with you later on, how we think about it at Salesforce.

Speaker 2: 12:11

Sometimes it's just they're trying to learn yeah, you know, they're trying to learn how to do something with your yeah, and I think that you kind of glanced on something that I think is super important when it comes to digital, which is, you know you're trying to offer the best kind of self-serve modalities and ways to help a customer kind of achieve what it is they want to do Get them the right content at the right time at the right place, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 12:38

You know you're trying to do that, and the better your data is and the better your emotions are and the better your insights about your customer are, the more you can serve that up. But the underpinning of that is that you know there does need to be a human presence, like on the back end of that. Like I feel, like any healthy digital motion at least that's the way I go about it like any healthy digital motion should always have a human on the back end, ready to either step in and interject or just to check in post interaction to see how things went. See, you know, to have the value conversations not actually, you know, try to get the right article at the right time, but to have those next level conversations that really drive value.

Speaker 1: 15:24

I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 1: 15:25

We have these tenants of how we think about our experience, and one of the tenants we talk about is slick handoff to a human, and what we mean by that is like there's nothing worse to your scenario of maybe you've done something in digital right, and then you go and whether it's you engage with chat or you go and the question you get asked is what's your problem?

Speaker 1: 15:44

It's so frustrating, right, because you've been probably on that company's portal, you've looked at a piece of content, maybe you're in app right, and so they should like have the telemetry to see what's going on, and the agent, or as far like starts with what's your problem? So our whole tenant around slick handoff is we make sure that when you go from digital to human, that we're giving context of Alex, who Alex is, what Alex has done, so that we can start the conversation with you know, oh, I see you're having this problem and you've done these things. Let me have, let me move on to the next step, not starting on steps you've done already yourself, you know, and so that's that tenant for us is really think about that handoff from digital to human man.

Speaker 2: 16:24

That's so important because there's nothing that tanks, you know, customer experience more than just like asking the basic question again yeah again and then trying to put you through steps you've already done.

Speaker 1: 16:39

Right. It's like have you tried this?

Speaker 2: 16:40

yes, I tried it.

Speaker 1: 16:40

I followed the article on your portal, like, like you should have that context, you know, and that's why, coming back to the definition on data, it's kind of data telemetry. Right, like you should have context of the experience of what's happening to your customers. You need that to improve it, whether it's handed into a human or improving that digital experience. You got to have the data, you got to have the telemetry.

Speaker 2: 17:02

Yeah, you really do okay, so, so, um, let's dive in, like what are you doing at salesforce, so? And maybe let's rewind the clock a little bit, like what was the scenario you jumped into when you joined salesforce, I don't know, three, three and a half years ago, something like that. And then how have you built the program over time?

Speaker 1: 17:22

we had different functions. We had customer success, we had customer support, we had training. We'd all of these different functions were separate, and so we've been bringing them functions together now under the umbrella of customer success. So we've support, we've success, we've training services like as in we offer to our customers all part of customer success. And so when I joined, that was all separate, and so how that showed up to our customers and this is the example I always like to give to people is you show your org scene. So we had a portal for customer success. So if you want to get success with our products, go here. We had a portal for support, our help portal. We had a portal for training services, trailhead Academy, trailhead We've all these separate portals, right, and it's like these different teams are tasked with this thing and they go build that thing and they're like look at our shiny, beautiful portal on its home screen and it's all like as a customer.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Then you go to Google and you search and you're like whoa, what do I do? Salesforce, like I've all of these different links, and so so I've been on part of our journey is like bringing all of them things together and into one unified experience. We're certainly not there. We've got rid of some things. We got rid of our success portal and brought the best that add into our help portal, and so we've been on a journey of how do we unify these experiences including in-app, by the way, so that's connected to it. So that's been a big part of my journey is like starting to kind of clean all that up. That's what I would say is to clean all that up, and so how we think about that. Actually, I'd love to share this with you, so I wrote about this on LinkedIn as well. But we spend a lot of time at Salesforce thinking about what's our framework like what's our strategy and what's our framework, and we can have this operating model that I won't go into too much detail.

Speaker 1: 19:05

But we have a third pillar in the operating model is what we call our easy and expert experiences, and this is where my team really plays, and what we have is at the center of that. We have our customer journeys, and we've done a lot of research, by the way, on our customer journeys. We use external agencies, et cetera, and we really came back at our level was there's two journeys that our customers are on. The first journey is education. Right, I want to learn about your products. Maybe you've just released a new feature and you want to learn about that feature. And sometimes people think about onboarding as a separate journey, but we actually think about that as part of education Sure, part of education. The second journey was resolution. I have a problem, I want to get it resolved, and usually the words we heard was quickly. So now two customer journeys are at the center of all of the work my team does. Right, education, resolution. They're at the center.

Speaker 1: 19:57

And then we have this kind of four quadrant model where over on the right hand side, we think about the assisted experience, right, so that's like the human tech support, that's the CSM. We think about that as reactive and proactive, right. The reactive is you go through to a support engineer, right, you have a problem, think about them journeys, go through to support engineer. On the other side is self-service, and this is where my team and we think about that in proactive. The example of reactive is you have a problem, you search on Google, you want to land on a piece of content that's going to solve that problem.

Speaker 1: 20:30

Proactive is we're alert in Alex that hey, alex, you're about to hit like a capacity level or something. So we're getting to you before that issue happens in digital, in app, whatever that might be. So all of our work comes back. Then customer journeys are at the center, education, resolution. And then we're over here thinking about how can we be proactive? So we want to move our volume up from that reactive to proactive so that we're getting ahead of you before you have any problems. And if we do that really well in digital, obviously that starts to drive down the volume over on the right-hand side because less people need to go through to it.

Speaker 2: 21:06

Yeah, which is huge, and I think the more you can be proactive like that and use the telemetry and the insights that you have about your customer to surface those kinds of hey you better look over here. You then become much more of a partner than you would have otherwise. You become part of really your customer's extended org or set of resources that really help them to operate efficiently, versus like being another thing that's in the way of them, like making progress and things like that, which is cool. And I loved what you said earlier about I'm paraphrasing but about not showing your customers your org charts because, like you know I mean we've all seen it you know you get communications from support that look way different than communications from marketing, than from you know product, than from whatever, and so like and and so not just communications, but the portal element of unifying all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 22:05

I see a lot of people moving that way and, yeah, instead of like your onboarding, emails shouldn't lead you to like 10 different things, it should be like one or one or two maybe right totally and we're also part of our journey is we've launched something that we call our customer success score, which is we actually share um a score with our customer, like, if we're very transparent on like, here's how you're doing on your implementation of Salesforce and that's available on our help portal so you can log in. If you're a signature customer, it's our highest tier of our success plans. We have signature, premier and standard. If you're a signature customer, you can log into our help portal and you'll see your success score and we think about that. It's made up in three elements. One of the things we're looking at signals related to technical health, so we're seeing how healthy is our implementation of Salesforce. The other thing is we're looking at something called expertise, where we're looking at, like, how much is your company using things like Trailhead, our learning platform? Like, are your teams learning about our products? Because the more you learn about our products, the more effective you're going to be and the more you're going to get out of it. And then the final one we have is adoption Right, and while we're looking at this is we're being very transparent with you.

Speaker 1: 23:15

Like, you've paid for licenses or you're paying for a consumption service. We want to show you how much you're using that, and we actually now have it at a feature level adoption. So we can say hey, alex, you know you bought Service Cloud and you have these AI features, but your team's not using them. And it was very interesting when we went through the cycle of implementing this, a lot of people got nervous on are we being too transparent? You know, like telling you you're not using these things you're paying for, but we're giving you this transparency, and what these scores and signals allow us to do is then we have telemetry that can drive our digital experiences, and I'll give you a simple example. Right, you've bought Service Cloud. You have these new AI GPT capabilities. We can chat about that a little bit. Later.

Speaker 1: 23:59

We can see you haven't used it. You're paying for it, you're not using it, and so it triggers an email to Alex to say hey, alex, there's this great feature here. You're the IT admin at the company. You haven't turned it on. But we also send a similar email to the business sponsor. Why do we do that? Because sometimes IT admins don't necessarily want to turn things on, because it can add more complexity to their job, and so we're telling the business sponsor, we're telling the IT admin and then we're bringing them to relevant content to enable these features, or for the business sponsor, it's the benefit of these features, right, because it's a different audience.

Speaker 1: 24:29

But then what we're able to see is did you actually turn it on so we're able to follow that journey through and see that, like through the signal from the CSS we're automating. We use something called Data Cloud which manages all of our signals and our telemetry. We're automating that email to you. It's a beautiful email written by our content team with our kind of clean call to action. Brings you to relevant content, depending on which kind of persona you are, and then we can see did you turn it on? And that's the power right of like. We can show the roi then, on these digital journeys, that alex is turning this feature on. We can see these emails we've sent. It's a simple example, but I think it's a really powerful example of using telemetry to drive a digital journey.

Speaker 2: 25:09

Yeah, it's an awesome example and one that aligns closely with a lot of things that I've been talking about recently with regards to measuring the efficacy of your program and really, when you think about it, it's campaign, it's essentially campaign metrics. You know, because you're looking at conversion rates of you know, we sent this to this cohort of customers and this cohort of customers increased adoption because of X, y, z.

Speaker 2: 25:34

I mean it's cause and effect, essentially which is really cool and, you know, I think a lot of times it's interesting that you're engaging different personas in different ways because to the example that you used different personas in different ways, because to the example that you used, I think a lot of executives don't necessarily know what's being purchased. You know, and so when it comes time to you know, renewal time or whatever, it's always an unpleasant surprise when you know you get to the renewal and there's like, well, you guys didn't really use this module and you didn't really use this, but use the crap out of this. It's like, well, why didn't we use that?

Speaker 2: 26:15

Like what you know it always leads to a really negative conversation, and so I love that you are being proactive about engaging the customer in a transparent way about the things that they're not using, because, ultimately, that's what you know, that's what drives expansion and upsell and but just also protects the renewal.

Speaker 1: 26:38

Yeah, totally. Alex is like, by the time the renewal comes, there's no surprises, right, and it should be easy for you to renew, you know. And the amazing thing about the customer success score as well, as we also give you think about it like a credit score, right, we're giving you kind of a number back on how you're doing with salesforce. We also give how peers like similar kind of you know size as you, etc. How they're doing. So that allows you as a customer to kind of look at it and go like, okay, you know, let's say it's a six out of ten or whatever it might be, and other customers are eight or nine, but what are they doing and do? And then we give recommendations. We have an AI model based off the score that actually gives recommendations on our help portal to say, hey, you know customers like you are doing this thing here and we'll link them to whatever that might be a trail on Trailhead or a video, and so it's just allowing them.

Speaker 1: 27:22

Because we often get asked that question, like when we speak to business sponsors. It's like how do I know I'm getting value out of Salesforce? Like how do I know I'm getting the best out of it? And that's just this transparency on the customer success score. It's available, they can go see it. Our CSMs when they do, you know, their monthly business reviews et cetera, they bring it in, they use it and so it just drives this full transparency with the customer. That's so cool.

Speaker 2: 27:45

Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about this 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? 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: 28:24

Now back to the show. I mean, salesforce is not new to doing this kind of stuff. I'm thinking about the partner network, because I spent some time as a leading professional services you know, a Salesforce partner, and we lived and died by the scorecard in our partner portal, like it was, like you know, okay, how many certified? You know how many certifications do we have among the team and how many you know reviews have we gotten from our customers and things like that. And so it always was. I felt like you know one of the an amazing way to drive accountability among the partner network.

Speaker 2: 29:04

And I almost feel like this does the same kind of thing like driving accountability without, like you know, the partner network can be a little bit more like you know, pushy about stuff and and making sure that you know partners are held accountable, or whatever, but, like on the customer facing side, it's like look, here's how you're doing. If you want to improve, here's the path to get there, you know, and and we'll hold your hand as much as possible so a lot of times you're right, different companies kind of have you know models, framework scores.

Speaker 1: 29:36

But what we've pushed really hard on is it's not internal metrics like of course we care about things like adoption and stuff we've worked really hard on like what metrics do our customers want to see, to know are they getting the best out of sales force, you know, and so. So that's why that transparency again is like we've worked really hard not to be like these are the metrics we care about.

Speaker 2: 29:58

It's like these are the metrics you should care about to make sure you're getting the best out of your investment so we, you know, I think ai is a huge part of that, as you've pointed out a couple times, and artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, and there's any number of interesting, amazing solutions that are popping up out there. I'd love to get a sense from you how Salesforce is approaching AI, maybe on two fronts. One is the customer-facing element, like all the things that are being surfaced with your product, but then also I'd love to hear how your team is using it.

Speaker 1: 30:34

Yeah, yeah. So I guess, like I don't know how long I think I'm 25, 30 years in this industry and I do feel like we're at a moment in time and that technology is going to really transform what we do, really transform what we do. But what I will say is I think some companies rushed in too fast without really understanding some of the risks et cetera related to it, like hallucinations, et cetera, from some of these things back. So we've been, I would say we've been making sure we feel really good about it when we're going customer facing, and so I'm lucky.

Speaker 1: 31:07

I work at Salesforce and I'm actually a customer of Salesforce. It's kind of a weird thing to say, but I use our Salesforce products. We often talk about being customer zero, like our help portal is on, you know, experience cloud. We're using Einstein service age and we're getting ready to launch that. I'll talk about that in a minute. So I get to use our own products and so I spend a lot of time me and my team do with our product and engineering teams, giving them direct feedback and because they want to use us as the example for other companies and look how we're doing it ourselves.

Speaker 1: 31:38

So, from a customer-facing perspective, there's two things I get excited about.

Speaker 1: 31:46

We have something called search answers, which is, when you log onto our portal and you search for things, rather than just giving a traditional list of URLs, which we still do we're giving you a generated response.

Speaker 1: 31:55

If we get enough in the keywords that you put in, we're generating the response back to you and so that, like, you can still go into the article if you wanted, but we're just bringing the relevant piece to you and saying, alex, this is what you were looking for, and that's cool. But where I get really excited is Einstein Service Agent, and so we're working to launch this. We just announced it, actually in the last week or two, and we're working to launch it ourselves over the next probably I would say maybe a month or two, maybe a little bit longer on our portal. And why this is so powerful is like I've been involved with bots before, right, and I think most of the time they're useless. Yeah, like I think you've been on someone's portal where you try and engage with the bot and it's like, oh my god, this is so frustrating. Coming back to your point of getting through to the human, it's like just let me get past you.

Speaker 1: 32:41

You know, and so I'm not a yeah agent. It's like when you used to hold down the buttons on the to get through ivrs. But what was the problem with them? They're predefined, right? Someone has to sit down and write a script, basically, If this, then that, If this, then that, and if you asked it something that was outside of that predefined list of topics, blah, it just fails. They're incredibly frustrating. So it's very hard to try and get a bot to a level where you feel confident that it's going to solve a lot of why your customers are coming to you.

Speaker 1: 33:15

So Einstein service agent.

Speaker 1: 33:17

So there's two things I really love about it.

Speaker 1: 33:18

So the first thing is it's powered by something called our knowledge object, so it has an out-of-box LLM and what we're able to do is we're able to feed all of our content so all of our content that exists on our external facing portals knowledge articles, product documentation into this LLM.

Speaker 1: 33:35

And then what it's doing is it's using OpenAI, the latest model they have, but we go through something called a trust layer, right? So Salesforce has built this trust layer so that we're not sending information across to OpenAI that we don't want to send, et cetera. It also looks at things like toxicity excuse my English and hallucinations, et cetera, and so we feel really good then on the response that's coming back because it's trained on our compass of content right and it's going to our trust layer and so we feel really confident and so we're testing it right now. And so we're testing it right now and how we're testing it was we took I think it's over 650 support topics that our customers directly type in our case submission page. We're taking the exact language that they put in and then we're putting that into the model.

Speaker 1: 34:25

And we have our support engineers and CSMs actually looking at the response and validating it. And I think we're seeing, without even tweaking the model, we're seeing about a 70 75 percent accuracy. That's great and that's pretty. That's really good right, because we know we need to tweak the model and do some things and it's identified some content gaps for us but, like we, we feel so confident.

Speaker 1: 34:41

What we'll do then is like imagine, when you land on our portal, there'll always be a little icon for einstein so you can still like read a document you've've searched on Google. It's brought you to that page, but you'll be able to engage an Einstein service agent in conversation. And then what we're also building as part of that it has this thing called custom actions, where you can build your own actions is the ability coming back to our conversation earlier on to easily go to the human. So you engage with Einstein service agent. Maybe it's not giving you what you want to need. You say I want to create a case and then it will automatically create the case for you. It will feed you into chat. So the chat agent, if you want chat, just comes into that flow with you and starts chatting with you, or it just creates the case and someone will contact you back and whatever that sla is, that's cool that's amazing.

Speaker 2: 35:27

Yeah, um, really cool stuff. And yeah, I hear you on the hallucinations front. I mean, if I had a dollar for every time ChatGPT lied to me, I'd be in Hawaii.

Speaker 1: 35:39

Yeah, what happened was a lot of companies went live and like this is amazing, let's use it and go live and it's trained on the internet.

Speaker 1: 35:47

So you're getting things from Reddit or whatever it might be, and it's amazing. Don't get me wrong. The technology is incredible, but the key is making sure for an LLM, it's what's it trained on and where we get even more excited, that's structured data, all of that content et cetera. But we're going to use. We have this incredible product called Data Cloud that allows us to take unstructured data product called Data Cloud that allows us to take unstructured data. So think about things like chat transcripts in our community, right, community posts, et cetera, and feed it into Data Cloud. And then we'll attach that probably better technology language than that into Einstein Service Agent. So it'll start to use not just content, but it starts to use unstructured content as well, on how it solves your answer and what's also very powerful there.

Speaker 1: 36:31

It's connected to everything we know about Alex, right? So we could start that bot conversation with hey, alex, thank you for being an MVP at Salesforce. You know what I mean. So it becomes personal. It's not just this like me engaging with a bot, it's a personal. It knows stuff about me. It knows what you've been doing in the product, not in a creepy way yeah, you know it's like it's stuff that we should know about you to make it more personalized experience.

Speaker 1: 36:56

So that's where I think it's going to be a game changer for us. I really do that's huge.

Speaker 2: 37:01

Yeah, I love it. Um, and I would imagine that also has huge implications for internal team members too, because if you're engaged with the customer and you know if you're on the phone with the customer, there's no reason why you couldn't use that same, that same thing or that same technology to, like, help you, you know, serve up answers to questions that you may not know, right totally.

Speaker 1: 37:26

We're already using some of our ai capabilities in our human, the human interactions. Like know, a lot of our cases come through our case submission portal. It's kind of it's kind of like a web to email. It comes in as a, as an email to our support engineer, and so we're already using like our first response. We're able to use this recommended response where it's able to say to the agent you know, hey, here's what you should write back and the agent can change that, they can add different information into it, but it starts the job for them. You know the same with chat right, we're coming back to the agent saying this is the response. The agent can literally just hit enter and respond, or they can edit it. You know these are features that we're offering now in Service Cloud for our customers and again, we're customer zero. We're using these things, we're testing them, we're giving feedback to our engineering teams on how to improve. So it's pretty amazing when you watch some of these features.

Speaker 2: 38:17

Totally Obviously, you don't have to give away, like any proprietary information here or anything. But I'm curious what the back end of all this looks like. Like, is this homegrown, or is this an amalgam of? I mean, openai? Obviously is the GPT portion of it, but is this amalgam of a couple of different vendors that you're using to stitch together or you know? Just give me a sense of that.

Speaker 1: 38:39

No, all homegrown. Again, the advantage I have, you know, salesforce has this amazing product called Service Cloud. All of our support engineers, et cetera, live in Service Cloud. These AI capabilities are being lit up by our service cloud product team and so I have this.

Speaker 1: 38:54

You know I'm lucky, yeah, um, when I always I I challenge my team. It's not that we don't use like. We have this exchange. You know lots of partners etc. Have lots of applications upon that like. For example, when you search on our portal that's powered by a company called caveo. They're an app exchange partner. So I'm always happy to use, you know, app exchange partners where it makes sense in our experience. But I always challenge my team of like. You know we should use salesforce wherever we can, because then we're going to help improve our products and it helps our sales team. Right, look how we're doing it ourselves. You know, look how salesforce does it. We have this massive ecosystem customers, partners and we're able to support them through salesforce product. It's it's win, you know. But I'll always use the best that's out there. You know, if ours isn't good enough, then we'll look at what's out there in inside app exchange yeah, yeah, exactly, that's cool.

Speaker 2: 39:44

This may be kind of a two-parter, but I'm curious as to what I mean. Obviously you're on the cusp of the launch with einstein, which is massively exciting, really cool stuff. But what does two or three years from now look like? And and are you thinking that far ahead in terms of of cx and then also kind of related to that? Are there like digital motions you've seen like out in the wild, where you're like, oh, that's cool, we got to go do that I'll land the boat with him in time.

Speaker 1: 40:18

So where do I see it going? So I'm going to kind of rewind a little bit and then tell you where we'll go in the future. So we have I think about 87 to 90% of our support volume comes to our case submission process on our health portal. When I started, that was 18 clicks. A customer had to go through Drop down menus, pick your product we have a lot of products. That was confused and it would cause misroutes etc. Now we've got it down through technology where it's just a description box, right. You type in your problem. We use an AI classification model looking at data cloud and you can see Alex uses these products based on what we typed in. We think this is your problem. So we give you three recommendations and you know we got I think we're like 96% accuracy on the first one. So eventually we'll get it down to just one. So you select that and within three or four clicks you submitted your case, and that's really important to us.

Speaker 1: 41:09

Coming back to what I said about that easy and expert experience, we want to make it easy for you to go from digital to a human, and case submission is a perfect example of that, like I get so frustrated sometimes when I go through companies, when I'm trying to submit a case. Why am I telling you this? Because I believe what will happen is we're going to move into this world where it's just all going to be conversational, right, I imagine that you land on our portal and our portal, basically, is Einstein. So it's just going to start with the question, alex, why are you here? And then it's going to be a conversation that you're going to have. If you want to create a case, it will create the case for you. We'll have no more case submission page in the future.

Speaker 1: 41:45

If you want to get great onboarding documentation and it will also be within that's I should have said this earlier on. The same experience will be within app, right, so I can engage with Einstein service agent when I'm in the application. I can engage with it when I'm in the portal. It knows who I am. So everything becomes conversational through technology and, again, seamless handoff to a human when you get there. But that's the's like that google experience. It's that white box why are you here? What do you want? And then we'll figure out everything that we need for you based on our data, using them, data cloud and make sure it's a personalized experience for you. Yeah I.

Speaker 2: 42:21

I think the the implications of that are massive because you're no longer having to direct customers or users let's call it indie like the classic example of somebody just joined the company, they're a brand new Salesforce user, they don't know what's going on and so you're having to direct them to Trailhead or you're having to direct them to whatever the onboarding experience is.

Speaker 2: 42:43

And if you flip the script and make all that stuff conversational, then all of a sudden well, guess what it knows? You're a new user. You know it's likely to just start having a conversation with you on. You know what you do, what your job function is and what are the. You know what are the most important things that you need to like understand as you onboard on this new company and those kinds of things. But I think the conversation element of that kind of flips the script where you're no longer having to curate stuff and you're no longer having to provide that direction. You know, I mean we think back to, you know the 90s and the early 2000s where everything you know we're going back to AI, yeah, like links and clicks were the thing.

Speaker 1: 43:25

It won't just be text, it will be voice. It won't just be text, it will be voice. You know, and that's where you could imagine the power of just like me and you are having a conversation right. That you know. I can, because you've seen, like you saw, you know, openai one of their last presentations they did it was very impressive where they showed the voice capability. And so you know, you'll have the choice text or voice. But again, it'll all be powered by this, you know, but again it'll all be powered by this. You know, models in the back end with the LLM, your data, etc.

Speaker 2: 43:54

And so I just think a lot of the complexity goes away. I've been using the crap out of that, Like walks are my way to like clear my head, think about a problem that I'm facing or like some kind of thing at work in a very deep way, and it used to be that nine times out of 10, I would stop every few minutes and just like take a note in my notepad or whatever and then come back and try to decipher what I wrote with my sweaty hands. But now I've just been using chat GPT and literally talking to it through my headphones as I'm walking and it helps me like talk through. It's almost like a therapist in a way, but it's helping me like talk through these problems and give me suggestions. And then when I get back to my desk I just look back at the transcript of the chat and it was like oh my god, it's so cool it.

Speaker 2: 44:38

It has changed the way I work, like fundamentally changed the way I work. And you know, yeah, it's interesting, it's odd, I I find it odd to say this, but I'm I'm grateful for it. Like I can't remember the last time I could say I was truly, like, grateful for a piece of technology, you know yeah, it was funny.

Speaker 1: 44:58

I was having this conversation with a friend recently. I guess, like there's moments in time where you kind of go well, like I remember you know steve jobs standing up on stage with an iphone and you kind of went well, this is going to change what was it?

Speaker 2: 45:09

it was, and I think it's one of the phone, a new ipod, an internet communications device, yeah all in one.

Speaker 1: 45:17

You know, I mean just remember going. Well, you know, and I think we're at one of them moments in time. You know where, you know, you see some of the other. It's not just open ai anymore, but like the technology and what that's going to open up. That's what makes me so excited about the space I work in, by the way, because, like, if anyone should be leveraging these capabilities, it's folks that are in digital customer success, totally, because this is the way and it comes back to what I said at the very start nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to go talk to the human.

Speaker 1: 45:46

They want to try solve it themselves, they want to teach themselves, they want to learn, etc. Right, and so you now have this amazing functionality that's going to make that so much easier for these people. And, of course, it's really important that the great human experience is there as well. We have amazing success managers at Salesforce, amazing support engineers. They're always going to continue to have them, but maybe they got to deal with the more gnarly technical problems because a lot of the how-to, education, etc.

Speaker 2: 46:13

Technology should start to take that away we had team offsites last week or this week I don't know what week it is uh-huh where you know, and, and we brought the teams together and we had a couple breakouts with just the digital team and a lot of what we talked about was the fact that, you know, it's kind of like the Khan Academy model of digital, where we want to serve you know really meaningful experiences in a digital way and solve the problem digitally and reserve the human interaction for you know, that next level of delivering value. I think there's real power in reaching out to the customer after they've had this you know interaction and just doing a check-in saying, hey, did that work for you? Is there anything else you need, like what's you know, what's your next biggest hurdle that you're tackling and how can we help you? Because it, you know it removes that kind of level of transactional interaction and turns it into more of a relationship.

Speaker 2: 47:15

thanks to the digital, taking the transactional off the table, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 47:20

And then digital, like we said, can be more personal. You know it knows who Alex is and it thanks Alex and it says well done on completing that last trailhead module. You know it just becomes a little bit more human, like in its interaction.

Speaker 2: 47:33

It just gets so much more stronger, that's super cool, amazing stuff, what I guess the other part of that question was have you seen some digital stuff out there that you've engaged with yourself? Like?

Speaker 1: 47:43

I see tons of stuff in b2c, like b2c is just rich with like really cool digital motions, uh that I've run across recently yeah, I always tell, I always like it's, like it's always interesting in b2b, because I think b2c leads, because you know, when you're in b2b there's a lot more regulation etc. Probably and some things that you have to do. But I always look to, I always look to consumer on my own like learnings of okay, what are they doing, how can I learn about it. And then B2B just tends to be that little bit further behind. It's like the conversation we're having. It's why it's so important we have the trust layer in what we do, because if we hallucinate back to a customer, it's a lot worse as a B2B than that will be in a B2C scenario, you know. And so we've got to be, we got to make sure that experience is great, that it's really great and we feel really good about it. But yeah, I always like.

Speaker 1: 48:37

It's funny because I, when I microsoft and I moved over to lead digital there, I had an amazing leader that came from amazon gee, if you're listening, thank you. And I always looked like, even back then, like I just think amazon were so far ahead in their consumer experiences. Like it was like whenever I needed a refund I didn't have to talk to anyone, right, because amazon used the data to say bernard's got value out as a customer. That's just, it's ten dollars. Let's just issue, that's right.

Speaker 1: 49:00

Other companies that have to engage with them and blah, blah, blah, and so like I feel like amazon is always like they're always do such a great job in their experiences. Even now they're using ai so I can see the recommendation on the product. It's looking at all the comments and giving a summary of the comments, you know, and so I I just think they they make it effortless. You know, I very rarely have to engage with a human being on the amazon side and if I do, it's usually amazing experience because they know who I am, they know what I I've done, they know why I'm there. You know it's very personalized.

Speaker 2: 49:32

Yeah, that's a good, that's a definitely good shout out. They've been leading the charge on that I feel like forever, but you know the interesting thing just before you finish.

Speaker 1: 49:40

But why did I do that? Right, it's because Bezos was obsessed with customer obsession. You know they're not doing it Like a lot of companies. Like I hate the word deflection, by the way, I'm on a, like a, I'm on a mission to remove deflection from people's vocabulary. I hate it. Like I think we brought a customer in a room and said we deflected you, they'd feel great about that. With Bezos, it was like. With Bezos, it was about customer obsession. He knows that customers didn't want to go engage with that human. They wanted it to just happen easily within the product. And so everything Amazon did it's all about customer obsession and that's what's so important in these digital experiences. You have to obsess about the experience for your customer, to make it be great, to make it be world class, and that's what Amazon have done over the years.

Speaker 2: 50:25

Yeah, and I remember when Amazon, I think they used to get a lot of flack about that stuff like you're, you know how can you be profitable if you know really hyper focus on, like, making customers happy at all costs and all this kind of stuff yeah looking back on it's like well, you know, you're making your customers happy they're gonna keep coming back and they're gonna keep coming back and they're gonna keep coming back.

Speaker 1: 50:51

They're gonna keep on coming back.

Speaker 2: 50:52

That's what it's all about. Yeah, exactly, maybe at the cost of, you know, mom and pop shops all around the world, but we won't go there we won't go into that. The negative of yeah, we're gonna get into that, get into that look, I always like to ask a couple of kind of finishing questions. The first first is like I want to know what's in your content diet? What are you paying attention to to keep yourself in the know?

Speaker 1: 51:14

Speaking of Amazon, I am I'm addicted to a podcast called Acquired. Acquired is in a world where everything seems to be short attention spans and 150 characters. Acquired do three to four hours deep dive on companies. There's two guys, one, there's two guys, one's in seattle, one's in san francisco, and they do speaking of amazon. They two or three on amazon. They just released one on microsoft that was four hours long, and so it's like they go deep.

Speaker 1: 51:42

They do a ton of research. It's usually only one a month comes out because they do so much research and it's the story of the company and you just it's like I feel like you get an mba every time you listen to it on, like, like you know, they talk a lot about bezos. They, you know they give the example where he's in the room and he dials the customer service number because he's looking at a scorecard and they're showing their wait times is green and he's hearing other things and so he rings the number with the you know support leader sitting there and he looks at his watch and finds it and how quick they answer and you can imagine the sweat coming out of support leader in that room. But I learned that from that podcast. So Acquired. I'm the biggest fan boy there is of the Acquired podcast. I've obviously listened to yours too, alex, so make sure you want to shout out with that one. But if I could recommend one thing, it's Acquired. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2: 52:26

Are there any shout outs you would want to give?

Speaker 1: 52:29

I would just give a shout out to my team. Actually, you kind of we didn't really get into like the functions because we were talking so much about I have in my team, but like all of what we do at Salesforce, I have an incredible team and you know, when you asked me, when I started, like I think I had four or five. We now have about 200 people that are 100% focused on digital customer success. We've engineers, we've product managers, digital program managers, we have UX designers all waking up every single day thinking how do I improve the digital experience for our customers. So just a massive shout out to my team and everything they do every day. Yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 2: 53:06

I appreciate that very much and also appreciate you know the content that you've put out there. I mean you've written about this stuff and it's awesome. I appreciate that very much and also appreciate you know the content that you've put out there. I mean you've written about this stuff and it's there if people want to go write about it. And I always appreciate people that kind of show their work, if you will, which is super cool. So where can people find you and engage with you?

Speaker 1: 53:25

LinkedIn tends to be where I am. I find I've spent less and less time on X AKA Twitter these days I don't know, it seems to be. I find myself going down terrible rabbit holes sometimes, so I find LinkedIn is a little bit safer. So, linkedin, yeah, please reach out. You know I'm happy to connect on LinkedIn and, as you said, I've wrote a few things. I wish I wrote more, to be honest. I need to find more time for it because I enjoy it and but they're all up on linkedin, so linkedin, you will find me, yeah cool.

Speaker 2: 53:53

Well, hey, thank you for um giving us a glimpse into the life of the only vp of digital cs that we know of.

Speaker 1: 54:02

And now, hopefully create more roles for other people in the future. That's right.

Speaker 2: 54:06

Yeah, exactly, but really appreciate your insights and sharing what you're doing at Salesforce. I mean, salesforce has been ahead of the game for a long time when it comes to SaaS, because they were the first SaaS, and it's cool to see how you guys are just tackling things like AI and implementing it in a responsible and meaningful way, which is cool.

Speaker 1: 54:27

You know the other thing, just before we finish with Salesforce, which why one of the reasons I came here and I was excited to come here is, you know, if you talk to Mark Benioff, he will say I was the first customer success manager in the industry. Because, you're right, they were the first SaaS company. Suddenly it became really important on why are your customers successful in your product? Because before it was all on-prem right, we would do a massive deal like microsoft or whatever, and then they might come back a couple years later when that renewal was up and that doesn't work anymore in the sas world. So, like, that's what I love is salesforce invented customer success, you know, and so no one knows it better. Can we be better? Of course we can. We're working every day to be better and there's lots we can prove on. But that was one of the big draws for me. I was like, wow, this is the company that created it you know, yeah absolutely the mothership we used to.

Speaker 2: 55:16

Actually, when I worked for that partner, we used to call it the mothership because it's like yeah let's go salesforce yeah cool. Well, hey, thanks again for the time. I appreciate it. I know you're a busy individual and can't wait to share this convo with everybody.

Speaker 1: 55:32

Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on the show. Thank you so much. I love that. You know you're leading the way. You're a unicorn when it comes to the digital customer experience podcast, so thank you so much for doing that. It's great. I love listening in to what other people are doing, so thank you people are doing so.

Speaker 2: 55:48

Thank you, absolutely my pleasure. 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.

Speaker 2: 56:15

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 Terkovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.