Speaker 1: 0:33

if you over automate the like automated messages that are being sent on behalf of the csm, at that point you kind of lose control of the narrative. Thing that I preach over and over again is you have to insert yourself into your customer's journey on a regular basis as a leader. The more automation you put in place without checks and balances, the more likely you're just confusing your customer with stuff coming at them all over the place. 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. Hello and welcome back to the Digital CX podcast, the show where we talk about all things digital in CX. I kind of mash those words together, but you get what I mean.

Speaker 1: 1:41

This is episode 89. 89 for you today, so I'm creeping on towards 100 episodes, which I'm super excited about, and have a couple surprises in store for you for that episode. Regardless, today is going to be a little bit unconventional, I guess, and we've done this once before where we've kind of had two shows recorded at the same time. But my guest today is Michael Forney, who's a local Austinite. He's a CS leader and he's starting his own show that is really focused on AI and CS. So he was kind enough to invite me for his inaugural episode. So we recorded that not long ago, I think last week at some point, and so I figured he's released it on his stream. I figured I would release it as well on mine, because it's a really cool conversation just about our thoughts on current state of AI in CS and, yeah, I figured you'd get a kick out of the conversation as well.

Speaker 1: 2:43

So today, a shared episode with myself and Michael Forney. Just a quick housekeeping note before we get into the episode. I will be speaking at the customer success summit event in Austin February I think it's the 10th and the 11th, 11th, 12th, something like that. I'll link the event details in the show notes so that you can go and have a look and if you want to attend, I'd love to see you there. Without further ado, here's the episode with Michael Forney.

Speaker 2: 3:17

Alex, thank you so much for being on the first episode of Monday I CS, where we talk all things AI and CS.

Speaker 1: 3:26

I was very curious to hear you pronounce Monday. I.

Speaker 2: 3:32

I was curious too. That was the first time I had vocalized it inside of a microphone felt okay. I think I can do better monday. I think there's a. There's an important pause between the end of the d and the a, or you just call it monday I was thinking that too. Yeah, but then I don't know. Let's see what happens in the wild, let's see what other people say.

Speaker 1: 3:55

I can't wait to see where this journey takes you, but it's great to be here.

Speaker 2: 3:58

Thanks, thank you, dude. Well, you've been very generous, you know, with your time and you were just showing me a really interesting example. Yeah, you leveraging Is it AI or is it robotics, or is it both Bit of both?

Speaker 1: 4:10

I guess All right.

Speaker 2: 4:11

So tell me about this, or do you? Do you not want to reveal?

Speaker 1: 4:14

No, no, no no, yeah, that's fine. Um, so I just uh, you know, joined a new company uh what? Three months ago, november, something like that and uh, one of the things we decided to do this year was to send out, um holiday cards, um, but wanted to do it handwritten. So we actually used this awesome service called Handwritten with V-R-Y-T-T-E-N.

Speaker 2: 4:41

So go look them up.

Speaker 1: 4:43

I think it's just handwrittencom, where basically all you do is you upload an address list and the message that you want to send and they have a bunch of robots in the background that do the handwriting. So I'll show you the, I'll block my address out, but this is kind of what it looks like on the envelope, so it looks like it's handwritten, and then you basically design your card. You can do it on the platform and then you upload it and they put a little handwritten message in there. You can even like insert, you know, booleans or tokens for, like first name and all that kind of stuff wow in the message and they send it and so like we're integrating that into our tech stack too, to like send handwritten notes to our customers when they graduate on boarding and all that kind of stuff. I think the ai part would would be using some of the ai kind of signals that we get to trigger some of those handwritten notes and whatnot. But super cool, super cool stuff because it combines that human element with the machine element.

Speaker 2: 5:40

Yeah, completely, and you get to stand out in the paper mail, which is actually kind of a good way to market and advertise these days, right, and it doesn't look like shit.

Speaker 1: 5:51

Sorry, can I cuss on this show? You can? Do whatever you want Great Clothes are coming off. No, it doesn't look like crap. You know how you get those obviously fake handwritten. It actually looks like somebody put pen to paper, which is bizarre. This isn't a handwritten commercial, by the way. I promise you that, but there's a list of 100 different writing styles that you can choose from, so you can choose, like really sloppy ones or really neat ones. So it's cool.

Speaker 2: 6:19

I think the fascinating part about that is that it actually it's actually written. I mean, I've seen this kind of thing before but it's printed and then when you receive it it totally takes away from it. When you see the fact that the the what should be handwriting is is printed and it's like, at that point I just kind of tune out.

Speaker 1: 6:36

So that's cool.

Speaker 2: 6:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I like that, yeah, I like that you're thinking about doing this on the heels of, say, onboarding, and so what I was actually going to do to open this show up is just to say you know, hey, alex, when someone says AI, what is coming to your mind? Like, when you think about AI, what is on your mind?

Speaker 1: 6:57

Chaos and confusion.

Speaker 2: 6:58

Chaos and confusion. So you think we're still in, like the thrash of AI? Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1: 7:03

I mean, look, you know, I think there's a lot of just confusion about how to use it and I think, even a little bit of guilt there's like professional guilt involved.

Speaker 1: 7:14

If people, like, are using it less than others, you know, and it's like you know I should be using ai more than I am, or you know they start shitting themselves about it.

Speaker 1: 7:23

But, like, I think one of the things that I am finding is we have because the cost of development is plummeting and we now have all these you know, kind of startup companies that are in the CS niche, that are kind of you know, developing some use case centered technology.

Speaker 1: 7:45

We have this kind of wide swath of different startups. And then you know larger companies, like your Gainsights and your Tatangos and whatnot, that are all tackling AI and integrating AI in some form or fashion, some as a kind of a direct product and some as kind of like add-on to their direct product, and so it's just the market is just so wide and desperate with like different things, and so I think what we're going to start seeing is like a pretty rapid consolidation of use cases and companies, you know, and a swallowing up of different vendors that are doing different things, and hopefully that'll add some clarity into, like, you know, what platform should you look for? What technology should you look for? What vendor do you need to you know target? Because you know I think right now it's just it's the wild, wild west and it can get confusing very, very fast and I know a lot of people when they get kind of overwhelmed and confused with it they just kind of shut their laptop and walk away.

Speaker 2: 8:46

So I want to pick up on what you said about the guilt. Yeah, this is interesting, yeah. So in many ways I look at AI and I sometimes I do have a little bit of that sense of guilt, but then I try to remind myself. You know, if you use a calculator today, nobody has guilt about using a calculator, knowing that the actual math behind everything would take you forever to do and if you're like me, you probably just couldn't even do it.

Speaker 1: 9:14

Anyway, anyway, even if it's regular.

Speaker 2: 9:17

It takes me an embarrassingly amount, a long amount of time to do even just simple addition and subtraction so I I would I would be nowhere without a calculator or excel so so tell me more about what you mean by guilt with ai. What's?

Speaker 1: 9:30

yeah, I think we might be thinking about it in slightly different ways, because, correct, no, it's fine. This is important because I think you're thinking about people who have guilt using AI instead of doing it the hard way or whatever. I'm thinking that there's a lot of people out there who feel guilty for not having adopted it yet, or they're not actively using chat GPT as part of their daily life, or Gemini or whatever you know you know flavor you're, you're plugged into or whatever, because there are a lot of people who just aren't you know,

Speaker 1: 10:01

aren't using it on a regular basis and I mean, um, you know, I think that's okay. Yeah, I think it's okay. Are you going to be better off, in the long run, knowing how to prompt versus not knowing how to prompt? I don't really think so, because I think prompting is a short. There's a finite window of time that we're in right now where prompting is the skill that you need to have to effectively use artificial intelligence. But that prompting stuff is all going to go behind, you know, behind the wall, so to speak. Like I don't know. I don't think 10, 15 years from now, you're going to need to be real, real good at prompting, because, guess what? Artificial intelligence will be sentient and we'll all be out of a job anyway. So whatever.

Speaker 2: 10:54

True, true, true, true, true. I think about I mean, as excited as I am about ai, there's like at least a part of me and anyone who grew up watching the likes of terminator 2. It just feels like an inevitable future that we all kind of put outside or at least me, I put it outside my mind, my mind, enjoying the roller coaster until that happens, or hopefully doesn't happen.

Speaker 1: 11:18

Well, look, I mean, here's the deal. We're all human and we're talking about customer success, right, and in customer success, humans are always going to want to talk to other humans, yeah, right. So if you're, you know, we're in SAS, right? So if we're speaking with a customer or we're engaging with a customer, exchanging actual what I like to call mouth words with the customer is a very, very important thing, and I don't think that's going anywhere. Helping you prep for those conversations, helping you have those conversations, helping you look up information in real time while you're having those conversations so you can have more productive ones and be more efficient with your time, and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's what we're starting to see, right, with the chatbots and live agents and co-pilots and all that kind of stuff that helps us have those conversations.

Speaker 1: 12:12

But also, like to our point earlier, I don't think we've quite gotten there yet, like we haven't quite arrived at that point yet. It's still just like this thing we have open chat, gpt or whatever, and we ask it to do some things for us, but it's not like this live agent helper situation so much to put to pull on there.

Speaker 2: 12:33

I think one, though one of the first things you had said was about people maybe feeling guilty not using it. So, in the spirit of giving you know, give the cs world. Let's give the cs world one practical takeaway of like, what is something, if people say want to get in on the fun, what's something that they can do or use to their advantage to help them out that can be easily adopted.

Speaker 1: 12:58

Yeah, for sure, Well, I mean. So there's a couple things and I did record an episode about that specifically that you can go check out. I'll give you the link to it.

Speaker 1: 13:08

It's basically an AI primer for CSMs and it gives you some practical kind of use cases of AI, also gives you a nice like prompting framework that you can use to kind of make your prompts a little bit better and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 13:24

But I think, look, there's some super simple things that I think a lot of tools are doing for us now, like call transcripts and things like that that I think are pretty easy to get at, whether the tool that you're using to record your calls does it or not, or whether you basically feed a transcript into ChatGPT to create a summary for you.

Speaker 1: 13:44

I think that's a massive time saver. One little slight tweak to that that I would add is using a tool like Gamma to create a quick PowerPoint deck as a summary for your calls. Like, I've thrown my AI call summaries into Gamma, had it create like a three or four slide deck for me and sent the deck out as a call recap, which is kind of a cool thing because it's a visual thing. So I think there's all kinds of little things that you can do to you as a csm, you know, just help you operate more efficiently, more smoothly with the stuff. I mean, I always tell people think of the stuff that you spend at least 20 minutes typing. Like, yeah, if you're spending 15, 20 minutes typing something up, I guarantee you you can help yourself reduce that amount of time by at least 80% by using chat, gpt or Gemini or whatever.

Speaker 2: 14:38

I completely agree and I think, the ground game, the ground game, I think, where I felt the alleviation for me, like my little bandaid, my skin is starting to crack with this dry Austin weather Totally.

Speaker 1: 14:49

We're all complaining. It's like 30 degrees, it's so cold.

Speaker 2: 14:53

Yeah, especially for those of us who moved from California. I'm one of those, yeah, and so, yeah, I'm like you know it's cold.

Speaker 2: 15:00

So um anyhow, I'm losing my train of thought. What was I talking about? Oh, the, the short unlock in CS, I mean the. I think the email is is is the lowest, the lowest hanging fruit on on how to help. Now I will say that, rather than just hey, draft this email for me, where I have found help with things like GPT is and I'm a terrible prompter, In fact just the other day I had GPT write me a prompt for another AI and that was kind of a cool hack that I had never tried before. But I was like duh, that makes a ton of sense. Why don't you tell me what I should tell you? Totally yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:42

That's a good thing to do, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:44

So that was actually a little bit of a a little bit of a help. But on, on, say the emails. You know, in CS we're we're trying to sell value, we're trying to convince folks to believe in us. We need their buy-in for certain workflows or workarounds, like there is one, one part of what we do in CS as kind of instructing and telling and advising.

Speaker 2: 16:05

but it has made so much better when you can tap into the things that are important for your customer, when you can tap into the I'll say the the lessons from say that, how to influence and influence people book right that that book changed my life Right, and when I'm writing certain emails that I know are going to be difficult to receive as a customer, because I can't give them what they want or I have to introduce them to something else that they weren't expecting, I use GPT in that way and I, when I ask it to help, I ask it to leverage that book as an example of how to how to write the content such that it's not just well-written in good grammar but that it's tapping into thinking in the other person's shoes.

Speaker 2: 16:53

I also have the benefit of having a corporate GPT account, so I don't have to mask any sort of customer names or anything else like that. So that's super helpful. But if you don't have a corporate account, you can just double click and mask out the names, make it something else.

Speaker 1: 17:09

I think that's an important call out, though, because I don't I don't think a lot of people realize that, and that being, unless you've set up your gpt account a specific way or like you are a part of your corporate entities chat gpt instance unless you've done those things, you're training the algorithm and you do not want to train your algorithm on your company's sensitive information, which is interesting because you can actually use that to your favor as well. In fact, at my previous gig, the marketing department did this whole campaign of prompting using some of the marketing material and some of the kind of feature benefits and those kinds of things, because they wanted to train OpenAI's algorithms on the benefits and features of the platform right, so they kind of on purpose did that.

Speaker 1: 18:00

But yeah, if you're using like you know, if you're prompting and you're not kind of on lockdown a little bit, that can be tricky. But you know to your point. I think what you bring up is interesting because one of the things that AI can help unlock for us is what we would otherwise spend hours and hours searching our internal systems for, which is to say, like you know historical conversation context, you know what the purchase history of a customer is, what their product usage is, and I think organizations that are using artificial intelligence in a really effective way are doing it in a way that really all the primary mission for artificial intelligence is the aggregation of that information so that you, the CSM, or you, the support person, or you, the whoever, can quickly get answers to or or or a historical kind of summary of the account that you're kind of working with Now, you know vendors like Gainsight are actively trying to do this in platform right.

Speaker 1: 20:24

There's others who have done it in a homebrew kind of way by using Zapier and all kinds of other integration fun stuff. But I think that's ultimately another huge aspect of artificial intelligence that most of our industry or, I guess, practice, the practice of CS isn't really plugged into is the just availability of data and insights and information about our customers.

Speaker 2: 20:49

It is incredibly helpful, I'll be honest. So we are a gain size shop at Responsive and they had AI already plugged into NPS and before they we were starting to use their co-pilot thing now, which is kind of interesting, but it's still early but the NPS data they were able to illuminate the some clustering. I think that's actually one of the coolest things that ai does, which the funny thing is like with how fast ai moves, something that was so revolutionary even just a few months ago and now seems like almost like old news or table stakes to the people who are paying attention to it. And I fully appreciate the fact that, like, some people are deep in it and some people are, like, like you said, not at all using it. So there's a wide variety of folks with different comfort levels and knowledge of what exists.

Speaker 2: 21:50

But clustering analysis with AI has been a huge unlock, just in terms of like aggregating our NPS feedback, for example, with thousands of data points and the comments that people were leaving. They were able to group those into different clusters, which you know a data scientist could do anyway. But I feel like it did something different and in a unique way that allowed us to identify a very like, clear and present part of our platform that we needed to work on. That just hadn't gotten kind of the proper light shined on it before, so it was very helpful. And you know we use that in our strategic decision making for what we're working on next, so that was very helpful. The Gainsight co pilot like I said, it's still early, but it is reading the Gainsight timeline so it is interesting and so there's definitely I mean folks also say that they use in fact I think it was you who told me about perplexity for researching companies that are your customer, it can be super helpful.

Speaker 2: 22:56

There's certain let's say like if I'm super helpful, there's certain let's say like if I'm researching, you know, let's say amazon is my customer or some something like that, a large company, and if I'm asking perplexity to do some research on it, I may be deployed in one tiny business unit of amazon so yeah, it can have its own limitations, but certainly, certainly also can illuminate things that you just didn't see before Totally yeah, I mean, that's part of the magic is like it'll tell you the obvious stuff, but then it'll also illuminate some things that you didn't think about.

Speaker 1: 23:30

Like, the clustering analysis that you were talking about is prime for that, where, yeah, you can look at your NPS responses for that, you know to use that example on a spreadsheet and you can read through them all and all that kind of stuff. But you're likely to miss some commonalities here and there, you know, unless you're like spending tons of time in the data and reading every single verb and noun right, whereas AI can spit that stuff out for you in like a second. So even you know again that quick hack type situation, even if you want to download all of your CSAT responses into a CSV and put that into chat GPT and ask it to do some pretty pointed analysis on, you know, on the language and things like that I mean that's like.

Speaker 1: 24:16

You don't need know $200,000 CSP to do that for you. You can just use chat GPT if you're on lockdown.

Speaker 2: 24:23

No, it's smart. In fact, I haven't. I haven't even done that yet. I have so many plans for what I want to do with unlocking the black box of support in general, because there's so many conversations that happen inside of there that I think can be very informative to the business in terms of what else needs to be, it needs to be worked on. That can help you bring that the data. So analyzing the the comments from Zendesk tickets is actually a really good idea that I didn't think of that. I'm going to try and go do now, as I appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 24:52

Thank you, sure, um, the other thing is so there's all sorts of little, little tactical things. The other thing is is the strategy. So you, you mentioned that people want to talk to another human. Now I'm going to, I'm going to steel man that for a second, because, number one, I believe in what you're saying, like, I believe that people want to talk. I believe people want to build relationships with other humans. When it comes to talking, though, I have actually started to use that conversational model with GPT, and the only thing I mind about it is that I take long pauses and it thinks that I'm done talking, so I should tell it. You can adjust that.

Speaker 1: 25:34

Oh, really, dude? Yeah, absolutely, because I use it on my walks a lot and I'll just have a conversation with chat GPT on my, you know, when I'm walking around the neighborhood or whatever. And uh, I it kept like thinking I was done and you can ask it to basically adjust the pace.

Speaker 2: 25:50

So just top tip, anyway, not to. I love that. I do that each time I'm about to talk to it. Is that what you mean, or is there like some setting?

Speaker 1: 25:59

Yeah, no, it's like, but you can commit it to memory, I believe.

Speaker 2: 26:03

Okay.

Speaker 1: 26:03

You can like literally ask it to commit it to memory.

Speaker 2: 26:07

Okay. So this is another reason why having a corporate account, for example, is a very good idea, one I mean the IT team of your company should embrace it with full. Should embrace it mostly because, if you don't, you're depending on people to scrub things out and not put stuff into places where they shouldn't, which people are error prone. You know we make mistakes, and so I'd rather have a place where you know people can put everything, absolutely everything, and then store, like you said, the memory that actually comes in really handy. I asked, asked GPT the other day. You know what, what were some of the moments? You know what were some of the big accomplishments that we made in 2024? That's all I asked it, and it remembered everything that I had told it over the last several months, and it was very good at remembering, you know, people we hired and decisions we made and different directions that we went, the impact that we had. So I think that it makes the case for not just using it for tactical items, but the more you have conversations in a protected environment like a corporate account, the more you have conversations on the strategy level.

Speaker 2: 28:46

Two things actually come out of that.

Speaker 2: 28:48

One is that it's as if you're talking to a coach and anything's on the table, which is actually very helpful, especially in a leadership position where you know so much of your time actually does need to be spent working on your business instead of in your business.

Speaker 2: 29:05

Right, you have to be zooming out, because it's so easy to get into a groove, you know, into a way of a way of working in a pattern, and so I I recently used it. You know, I I had, we made some changes inside of the leadership team, we brought in some new people from the outside and we kind of we made a couple of new director positions, and I asked it to help me out with the operational cadence of, like, how do I? You know, it used to be a much smaller team, but now we have a larger team with these different remits. So I wanted it to help me think through, like, what is the best use of everyone's time here, and how do I, how do we do the things that we do, to make the most out of everyone's time and to make sure that that we're being both strategic and tactical in the right ways.

Speaker 2: 29:55

And a lot of times, my, my prompts were kind of like that, like very, very rough in the beginning and just kind of work through it, and that has been. That has been a huge help. And that's just me talking to you know in air quotes somebody that doesn't exist, but it's given me a lot of help.

Speaker 1: 30:16

I've done like probably things you shouldn't do with chat GPT conversational mode.

Speaker 1: 30:22

Okay, one of them.

Speaker 1: 30:24

So you know, let's see, I got my first kind of sponsors for the podcast mid last year, something like that, and in preparation for that, basically I had chat GPT with some guidelines that I gave it on a walk draft, a sponsorship contract, and now you know, I did not go straight to the vendor with that.

Speaker 1: 30:48

Like I went, I did send that to my lawyer and just had him look over it and he gave me a couple of notes. But again, you know, there were like four or five contracts that I wanted to put in place for you know, sponsorship agreements and some other things too that I basically had ChatGPT create for me, because you know, I'm not launching rockets over here, I'm just publishing weekly podcasts. It's not a big deal, but I guess the point is it saved me A, a ton of time and probably a substantial amount of my lawyer's time as well, just having it be redlined instead of created from scratch. So I think there's all kinds of stuff that people, when OpenAI launched the conversational kind of feature of ChatGPT, a lot of people were like comparing it to Her, like the movie Her or whatever.

Speaker 2: 31:37

Oh, completely.

Speaker 1: 31:38

And I mean I will say that it has become a bit of a companion for me, but really more of a work companion, somebody that I can you know when I'm not doing anything else can like help me talk through some things that I'm stuck on as a leader, where I don't necessarily want to go to my CEO and talk through and I don't necessarily want to go to my management team and talk through this stuff. I just want to like workshop this stuff on my own. And so having that conversation with ChatGPT is an amazing way to do that and not only kind of brain dump and get some stuff off of your mind and into the model, but then also it'll come back with a few suggestions that are quite good that you wouldn't have come up with otherwise, nor would your team, because they're all stuck in the day to day and they're not thinking about things from an outsider's kind of neutral perspective. So I'm with you a thousand percent on using it as a leader to help you unlock some strategery.

Speaker 2: 32:40

So I'm curious why Matic didn't nominate ChatGPT as one of the most influential CS leaders of 2024.

Speaker 1: 32:46

ChatGPT is one of the most influential CS leaders of 2024.

Speaker 2: 32:50

Everyone was posting all their stuff recently and I was like I actually think I've gotten well, maybe not more help, but I've certainly gotten a lot of help from GPT on the strategy behind things.

Speaker 1: 33:06

It goes back to that whole thing of people are fundamentally afraid that ai is going to replace them in their roles. I maybe I'm being a dinosaur. I'm totally open to the idea or the potential of me like being like, yeah, compute, you know, typewriter is never going to be phased out by a computer, but at the same time, I do. We're all human. I think we all crave human interaction and we all rely on human interaction. And when it comes to you, you know things like.

Speaker 1: 33:48

You know leadership and coaching and life and customer-vendor relationships and coaching. You know coaching, basketball and like whatever those things are that we do as humans, that we enjoy doing. That's not going anywhere, anywhere. And so you know, if you're a leader trying to figure out the agenda for your two-day off-site, if you're not using ChatGPT to help you with that kind of stuff, you know, I think you might be left behind a little bit, like it's not so much that AI is going to replace us, but I think you might be replaced by somebody who's using AI more effectively than you are, right, I think that's sometimes the things that go without saying need to be said, and that's one of them, which is that AI won't likely there are things that it will replace for the better.

Speaker 1: 34:42

Sure, like data analysis and like all that kind of stuff, sure.

Speaker 2: 34:45

Yes, or even driving at some point.

Speaker 1: 34:49

God, I like driving man.

Speaker 2: 34:50

I do too. But you know what I like more Not having cars crash on the road, and there's just no question that those things are way better than us at driving En masse.

Speaker 1: 35:02

Not me, of course. I'm a way better driver than the. Ai. No, no, I'm not.

Speaker 2: 35:06

But I think that's a huge benefit. But, yeah, true so to your point. Yes, I'm not, but I think that that's a huge benefit. But true, so to your point. Yes, it's not likely that we'll all just lose our jobs to it, but if it's like a, it's like a wrench, you know, if you're a plumber and and there's no shame In using it, just like if you, if you would, if you would willingly use a calculator or excel to do your math and formulas for you, you, you should also be using a, even as just like a sounding board. Hey, here's my two-day plan for an off-site. This is the goal that I have. Do you think this is gonna help me get there? What worst case scenario. It says you thought of everything right. I can't think of a single thing to help you. Best case scenario it's saying, like, actually, here are some different things to think instead so yeah, yeah, totally, and it's a great, you know it's.

Speaker 1: 36:10

It's fun to have it give you ideas for stuff like yes, you know, yes it's just fun, all right.

Speaker 2: 36:19

You mentioned earlier in the in the beginning, around incorporating ai into your d, into your digital strategy, say, for triggering out a letter after onboarding. What else, like what else is on your mind in terms of how AI and the digital strategy come together? Like what even if it's not something you're doing yet, like what are some of your ideas on how those things could exist?

Speaker 1: 36:41

Yeah, I'm in a playground right now where that's a very real thing right, because I joined Belfry in November and we are in the midst of just rapid growth and trying to scale stuff, and so a big part of my daily brain activity is around like how can we make things more efficient and smooth? We are actively interviewing chatbot vendors, you know, to do some of the deflection for us and even just some of the frontline stuff we have. We have a customer base who is very in tune to their uh or or very kind of tied to their mobile device and so looking at ways that even incorporating that into an sms strategy and getting some ai answers that way, like and I and I'm thinking about it in a in a brandy kind of way- you know, you know there's not brandy, the drink or the person, but literally creating an avatar around our artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1: 37:41

You know like? Like you know there's, there's. It's not a new idea, right. Belly yeah, Belly yeah yeah, yeah, exactly, or like Bell or something like that.

Speaker 2: 37:50

I don't know We'll figure it out.

Speaker 1: 37:52

But yeah, I mean, and then incorporating Bell into like everything you know, like having it be kind of a brand.

Speaker 1: 38:00

That said, we're very much going to launch that stuff internally before we ever go customer facing with it, and so I want to launch it internally as a team, as a um, a team, you know tool, rather than it's just to, you know, kick the tires a little bit more. Um, yeah, that makes sense. You know, the team has chat GPT, so they all have access to it. They all use it on a regular basis. We're we're using gong very, very heavily and so, um, you know things that it's doing for us.

Speaker 1: 38:29

So an example would be if we have there's a, if there's a customer meeting, it's recorded in Gong, and then what it actually does because Gong has a very tight integration with Vitally is a few minutes after the call ends, vitally will actually give you some suggestions for follow-up tasks that you can schedule for yourself in the CSP, just based on the conversation that it picked up. So it does. You know, there's cool and like helper things that we're doing, and I have to say the one thing that I want to be very careful of as we continue to launch this kind of stuff is I don't want to over-rotate on those things to where it becomes a nuisance and it becomes something that the team ends up hating.

Speaker 2: 39:13

And like we don't?

Speaker 1: 39:15

you know, I don't want to, I don't want to create burden with any of this stuff, right? So, um, I think one of the things that's key for me as we, as we continue to implement AI strategies and tools and those kinds of things, is just being eyes wide open in terms of, you know, are we actually helping or are we hurting the situation?

Speaker 2: 39:35

And by hurting do you mean like you're creating, like too many?

Speaker 1: 39:38

to-dos or yeah, too many tasks, too many things being auto-generated.

Speaker 1: 39:43

Like you know, I think there is there's this interesting kind of inflection point we're at where you could theoretically automate the entire customer journey and have it all be like trigger driven and all this kind of stuff, and I think those that have tried it have, more times than not, just failed having a completely like autonomous customer journey.

Speaker 1: 40:10

I think that extends into your let's take a csm like a typical enterprise, csm 2030 accounts kind of situation as well. If you over automate the like automated messages that are being sent on behalf of the csm, at that point you kind of lose control of the narrative a little bit too, and you're potentially inserting some dirt or some noise into an otherwise happy path customer right. So I think the thing that I preach over and over again is you have to insert yourself into your customer's journey on a regular basis as a leader, because if you're not doing that, you're not actively seeing what emails get triggered when and what notifications go out when and all that kind of stuff. Because the more stuff, the more automation you put in place without checks and balances, the more likely you're just confusing your customer with stuff coming at them all over the place.

Speaker 2: 41:05

Completely. Yeah, all right, that's going to be the mic drop intro of the episode. It's true. I mean, you know, the utopia scenario is that everything is everything is digital. You know exactly what your customer needs to do next. You know exactly what value they're getting, you communicate that in the platform, etc. Etc. That's the utopia that we're, I think, is appropriate to be driving towards at all times, but is unrealistic that you're going to get there and stay there.

Speaker 1: 41:34

And it's also, but you know not to interject. But I think it's also very important that you insert a human like stop button, like picture, a manufacturing. You know a lot, you know a production line or whatever. If somebody gets their hand jammed in a machine, you want a stop button. And same thing with a customer journey. That may be a little gross to think about, but you know the customer journey. If, if things are going off the rails and you're actively working the situation, one of the last things that you want to have happen is you're, like you know, your pre-renewal email flow going out like never, never been guilty of that.

Speaker 2: 42:10

No, it's never happened before.

Speaker 1: 42:12

But like it's stupid stuff like that, where you know it's worth just sitting down and thinking through at least some of the scenarios you know and building some fail-safes in there.

Speaker 2: 42:25

Yeah, and again, this is where I think the blend of using AI, especially, at least you know, look, it's today, and so today using AI is a mix of tactical and strategic, and so not only asking or having you know, having AI help you generate emails or generate outreaches or notifications in the product, you can also have it help you on exactly that kind of a strategy of you know, making sure that there's sufficient places where humans can get involved, because, let's be honest, it's pretty easy to sniff out, you know what has been AI generated, and not especially the longer it is, the easier it's. The easier it is to know that if it's, if it's AI generated, not to say that that's a bad thing and not to say that that's like anyone should really get a gold star. It's like, well, can you tell if that number was generated by a calculator, like what does it?

Speaker 1: 43:17

matter. You know what I mean. The number is the number.

Speaker 2: 43:18

You know, the communication is the communication, but and and this is why I think you know, people don't necessarily mind interacting with ai, because here we are doing it all day long, I mean you and me, not everybody but we're interacting with this thing, but people don't want to build a relationship with an AI.

Speaker 2: 43:42

That's the part where I think it gets to the her level. Interacting is completely different. If I have to interact with an AI all the time for a software that I'm using that I want to get more value out of, I don't necessarily mind that, because it's always on. It's going to be very relevant, the answers are going to be good quality, it's going to be thorough, but I'm not going to lunch with the AI, you know, and so yet the human yeah, the human part is knowing that there are other humans inside of that organization who know about you and who are going to advocate for you in a meeting or something like that, where you're talking about, or when that company is talking about, the roadmap or the strategy of what they're working on.

Speaker 1: 44:21

So maybe one day.

Speaker 2: 44:22

AI will get to that as well, but I think, at least for today, interactions, I think, are fine with AI, the relationship building, though, like no one, no one is ready to start dating their gpt. Actually, I should not say that I don't know anyone who is willing to, but there totally is. There are for sure. There's a cohort of people out there that are already oh, I'm sure, yeah, absolutely well, alex, this has been really fun. Thank you so much for spending the time with me on this episode uh, the first ever episode of monday I monday.

Speaker 2: 44:56

Monday cs. Monday a I cs.

Speaker 1: 44:58

I don't know, I'm gonna have to work on that one yeah, it's a work in progress, but it's a good work in progress, true, I appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 45:04

Thank you, and good chat.

Speaker 1: 45:06

Appreciate you having me. 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 and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. I'm Alex Tergovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.