The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook Podcast Season 2 Episode 37 - Meredith Mann - AI in CS at LinkedIn

• Kevin Metzger • Season 2 • Episode 37

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Summary

In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger engage in an insightful conversation with Meredith Mann, Director of Global Consulting Services at LinkedIn. The discussion revolves around the integration of AI in customer success, its potential benefits, challenges, and ethical considerations. Mann shares her experiences and strategies for leveraging AI to enhance customer engagement and drive better outcomes while maintaining the crucial human element in customer relationships.

Detailed Analysis

AI Integration in Customer Success

Mann introduces a framework for customer success, emphasizing that it's a combination of customer experience and customer outcomes. She proposes that AI can enhance this equation by improving efficiency in three key areas:

  1. Productivity: Streamlining tasks to allow more time for meaningful customer interactions.
  2. Customer Experiences: Leveraging AI to analyze macro and micro trends, enabling more informed decision-making.
  3. Improved Outcomes: Balancing AI-driven insights with human touch to deliver better products and services.

Practical Applications of AI

The discussion highlights several practical applications of AI in customer success:

  • Automating administrative tasks like meeting summaries and CRM updates
  • Creating personalized learning paths for customers
  • Enhancing data analysis for more informed customer interactions

Ethical Considerations and Responsible AI Use

Mann emphasizes the importance of establishing clear, responsible AI principles within organizations. LinkedIn's approach includes:

  • Aligning AI use with the company's mission
  • Promoting fairness and inclusion
  • Upholding trust through privacy and security measures
  • Maintaining transparency about AI usage
  • Ensuring accountability and human oversight

Challenges and Pitfalls

The conversation acknowledges potential downsides of AI implementation, particularly the fear and anxiety it may generate among employees and customers regarding job security. Mann suggests that addressing these concerns through open communication and responsible implementation is crucial.

Future Outlook

The podcast concludes with a perspective on the future of customer success in the age of AI. Mann quotes economist Niche Raman, suggesting that while jobs of the past were about muscles and current jobs are about brains, future jobs will be about heart. This underscores the continued importance of human-centric values in customer success, with AI serving as a tool to enhance, rather than replace, human interactions.

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Roman Trebon:

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. I'm Roman Trebon, and as always, I'm joined with my co host, Kevin Metzger. We would really appreciate if you could rate, subscribe, and share our show to help us reach even more listeners. Kevin, today's customer success landscape, AI is being touted as the next big thing. I think I know your answer, but how do you feel about AI's potential in helping drive customer success outcomes?

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, I'm super excited about AI's potential. Surprise, surprise. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a huge opportunity to scale outcomes. I think it's a huge opportunity to scale how we how we interact with our customers. I think today's guest is going to shed more light on how organizations can use AI responsibly and strategically in the customer success arena.

Roman Trebon:

we are thrilled to have Meredith Mann on the show Meredith is the Director of Global Consulting Services at LinkedIn, where she leads efforts to enhance customer engagement and success. Meredith oversees teams of customer success specialists ranging from technical to data consultants, integrating AI into the customer success space, ensuring that maximum benefits are achieved while balancing the essential human component of customer relationships. in this episode, we'll explore AI's growing role in customer success, and Meredith will walk us through her key insights on how organizations can deploy AI effectively, from defining success across various services to ensuring ethical AI usage. We'll also dive into how companies can balance technological advancements with human touch. That's so vital in customer success. Meredith, welcome to the show.

Meredith Mann:

Hey, it's awesome to be here, Roman and Kevin. Thanks for having me.

Roman Trebon:

Meredith, AI is revolutionizing a lot of industries. How are you thinking about integrating AI in the space of customer success?

Meredith Mann:

Yes, it's a great question. And definitely one that's very top of mind, probably for all of our listeners and more broadly. And I think to kind of frame this up I'll start with just a personal anecdote. So I decided after a very long hiatus to sign up to do an Olympic distance triathlon this summer. And in a lot of time training, some parts of it were fun. Some parts were really not very fun. but, AI was on my mind a lot as I was preparing for this race. I had this analogy where I ride an old bike that I got in college from the one bike shop in my small college town, it's not a very fast bike and I'm not a very fast rider, but as we got closer to the race, I brought the bike, into the bike shop and I'd already become friends with all the guys and gals that work there. And they looked at my tires and they're like, do you realize that your tires are Way low on air. you had to pump those things up. And sure enough, I pump up the tires and suddenly with the same rider, with the same amount of effort, I'm able to ride so much faster and so much more efficiently. And that's sort of like analogy works for me with AI. This idea of Pumping up the tires you still need the human rider even with the same amount of power and the same systems, if we're able to make these tweaks to get a better machine and stronger tires were able to operate more quickly. So that's sort of a framework of how it relates to me and an analogy that works for me.

Roman Trebon:

I love that analogy and I love to steal it, but I would use that same analogy about the triathlon and it'd be like, Roman, no, you didn't. I'd be like, ah, no.

Meredith Mann:

I mean, do not recommend, by the way. There are much funner ways to spend the summer, but glad it's over. I think it really is a revolution, how we approach AI and whether we approach it from a point of fear and intimidation or from a point of positivity and seeing how this can work within our lives, within our work to help drive better customer outcomes is really in our benefit. I did want to share with you a. formula that I like to work with as a framework for customer success. And you know, our leader of customer success at LinkedIn you know, worked on a book called the customer success handbook, which fits a nicely and kind of the framework and offered kind of this, this formula, is that customer success. is a combination and the output of customer experience plus customer outcomes. Which I think remains today just a foundational concept and conceptualization of CS. even in this time of AI and transformation The core principle that customer success is the combination of customer experience plus customer outcomes. But as we think about that over the amount of effort that we're delivering, this becomes an equation of customer success. Efficiency and how we are approaching those experiences, how we are driving and arriving at those outcomes. So I'd say number one is this idea of productivity. Kevin, you touched upon that as you opened it, which is What are ways that we can streamline and create efficiency in the tasks we're doing every day so that we have more time to spend with customers in those opportunities that matter most. So really, this pumping the tire analogy coming in. We're starting to experiment with this idea of how do we take the efforts that we were doing in tracking notes in CRM in drafting email summaries of meetings? And how are we moving all of that into an AI space to save time and focus on things that are more useful for us? secondly, I think a lot about that CX part of the equation. how are we creating better customer experiences through the power of AI? I think there's a whole range of possibilities here, but really from. Ingesting data on the macro environment. So what are trends happening across our broader governments, industries, companies, all the way down to the micro. how are we understanding trends in product utilization and engagement in ingestion configuration to help make us make more informed decisions of what our next steps are. Next best action is as customer success professionals. I think that's kind of the second bucket. And then finally, improved outcomes. how do we think about, combining the experiences we're creating and investing our time and human touch where it matters most? While also creating and delivering better products. Products to accompany those services and that go to market. So I'd say those three things, productivity, better customer experiences through more informed signals and engagements to ultimately better outcomes is really the universe of possibility here.

Kevin Metzger:

So how are you deciding where to prioritize the efforts related to AI on your team? You've got the three categories, what makes the most sense to drive that CS efficiency equation up quickly?

Meredith Mann:

Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, this could even be, I think this formulas of sort of like the input, you know, the effort to drive something versus the outcomes is an easy model, a two by two of how we think about moving forward with implementing any change or operational change. Efficiency. using that framework to understand, you know, what are the potential benefits? What are the potential risks, which I know we'll spend more time talking about and then to, understand. All right, based on those decisions, you know, how are we thinking about prioritizing tasks? You know, really based on I'd say those key dimensions.

Roman Trebon:

You reminded me of a quote, from Isidore Sharp from the Four Seasons, Systemize the predictable so you can humanize the exceptional, I love this idea of how AI can help us with experimentation, how do you see, or how is, you know, how do you seeing AI play a role in everything from, you know, drafting emails to summarizing meetings, but even maybe even creating. Personalized learning paths, or even when it comes to innovation.

Meredith Mann:

I think where you started is a great place that all of our listeners, like everybody on this call, has likely started to dip a toe in this space, but thinking about your own personal productivity and thinking about that yourself as your own experience. experiment of, you know, where can you find more efficiencies in your day? it has been pretty remarkable. we work for Microsoft. So we have the benefit of access to co pilot for example. I've seen over the past year, behavior across my team, across markets really shift in terms of how they're incorporating co pilot into their workflow. Workflows, but also getting smarter about how to work alongside copilot. So for example, you know, co pilot is this great system that's built into the tour that will, listen to our podcast recording and spit out a summary of key highlights We're actually getting smarter about how we even prompt the co pilot. So for example, how we log into the meetings, having my name listed helps. The A. I know that I am the speaker when my voice is being shared so that will produce, clear results. So this is when Meredith was talking, and that was when Roman was talking. That was when Kevin was talking. Also, we oftentimes at the end of meeting will do a verbal recap to make it easier for the A. I to capture the salient points. So Even ways that we are adapting are prompting of the A. I has evolved a lot. And I can say with confidence that it's saving our team hundreds of hours and sort of this administrative tasks. The other thing I mentioned was around how we're thinking about, tracking notes. It's in the CRM, the dreaded experience of CRM tracking. there's some really cool experimentation we're doing looking at AI agents that can help autofill CRM notes. So to initiate prompts based on different hashtags that we're inputting, that gets us 70 percent of the way there. saving time on some of that upfront load, but still requiring human involvement and adaptation to help get it really right.

Roman Trebon:

I just, because of Kevin and guests like you Meredith, I've now, built my first like GPT, like my own little personalized assistant. It's the great, it's like literally having a, yeah, it is, seriously, it is unbelievable. You can train it. Right. Like you said, the, the, the prompting, it is having an executive assistant sitting next to me all day. It's unbelievable what it can do. And now the same thing you can do in Microsoft. I just watched a YouTube on how to do it and co pilot as well. it's that kind of innovation that can happen so rapidly You know, to get a group of us in a room and whiteboard, it's still great. We could do that. But man, with a I, it just really can streamline. That's so right. So, you know,

Meredith Mann:

for a success plan for a value review, what's the opportunity to aggregate in a standardized way. Not the entire thing, but to get you 50 percent of the way there to save you the overhead of manually pulling data from multiple sources. So just a huge, exciting opportunity. And I think you're exactly right. It starts with the Roman GPT, the Meredith GPT, like each of us getting a level of comfort of where this works within our day to day to then start to build bigger and more systematically.

Kevin Metzger:

we use them for the show and we have some custom GPTs that we put together around, okay, we need a show description after the show, we need a guest LinkedIn post. We need a LinkedIn post and here's kind of the format for what we want and put all of that into some GPTs. We actually. Played with them on both GPT and in projects on Claude and have developed'em further and further over time. Used you know, multi-shot prompting and some of that for, formatting. it's really neat how far you can push some of the tools. That said, one of the things that gets concerning is, okay, what information can you share with the, with an ai, what information, you know, what. What's ethical to do? What's not ethical to do? What customer information is it? Are you comfortable putting in? So what's the framework that you recommend using to try and make sure you're keeping sensitive data set sensitive and you're using using AI in a in a ethical way?

Meredith Mann:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is just a key critical questions that organizations need to be partnering across the organization up and down to be very, very thoughtful in how you incorporate a I into your strategy. You know, this idea of With great power comes great responsibility. You know, I'm not sure if either of you, you know the, the great historian Yuval Noah Harari had published the book sapiens years ago and just came out with a new book called Nexus. a brief history of information networks from the stone age to AI. And he makes this argument about, there's a naive notion that. The more information available in society, the better the outcomes that truth and wisdom get disseminated. But in reality, from historical context and even from some of our learnings today It's often not the case information creates this idea of power, and that power can be harnessed for good outcomes. But also, you know, there's a real opportunity for some really scary and negative outcomes to come from that too. Yeah. And so I think again, just underscores the importance of treating this a I and this technology with the level of sobriety and seriousness it deserves. I'll offer one perspective. But of course we'll disclose and share that. This is how you approach AI something that should be thoughtfully considered with legal stakeholders heads of technology, et cetera. one example of how our company is thinking about this is by establishing clear, responsible AI principles. these are shared across our organization, from our legal teams to our. Sales team, every customer success manager, our support partners and beyond. those include number one, that we are leveraging AI in the spirit of advancing our mission, which at LinkedIn is to advance economic opportunity for every member of the workforce related to that the AI that we embrace. should be in service to promoting fairness and inclusion. any AI can benefit all members fairly without causing or amplifying unfair bias. The idea of upholding trust for our company and really for everyone. Every company and platform and individual on this planet. are built on trust. We operate on trust. So our commitment to privacy to security to having strong principles in place to guard data is essential. An idea of transparency. So being open about where a I is being leveraged and how I think is again related to trust, but really essential. And then finally, this idea of accountability. So leveraging, you know, as we embrace and deploy a I and a I governance ensuring that we are always Considering what are potential negative outcomes from this technology to ensure there's human oversight over these technologies and accountability for that. And again, you know, there are a lot of headlines now. Another another book on my bookshelf these days is the anxious generation which talks about the impacts of social media on Gen Z and how. Some algorithms have had detrimental outcomes on mental health, especially among adolescents coming of age with this technology. So this idea and principle of accountability is, I think, really critical and essential.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. I think what you're doing is terrific is defining it and sharing and communicating it goes so far. Right. I think just having it down and getting it out to the organization is such a great first step. There's so many folks that Kevin and I talked to in the community and it's like the wild west of AI. there's no guardrails. No one's defining how it should be used and in what direction. I think that just having it down on paper and then getting it out to the broader team is a great way to go about it if you're listening and your company's not doing that, or your team's not doing it, something you definitely should be thinking about. So,

Kevin Metzger:

yeah,

Roman Trebon:

just a

Kevin Metzger:

quick point on what you're making. I think there's an article by McKesson in 2022 A lot of the larger companies used to build these frameworks, and it sounds like LinkedIn falls in that same. I know when I was at Dell, Dell promoted it and talked about it, and actually as part of their implementation strategies, they were doing it too. It sounds very similar, but it's a good article. I'll try to find it and link it when we publish this.

Roman Trebon:

So Meredith, we've waxed poetic here on the benefits of AI, right? Talking about efficiencies innovation and all that. But are you hearing or seeing any pitfalls where companies maybe are relying too heavy on AI with customer interactions? Any downside to this tool we're talking about?

Meredith Mann:

Yeah, I mean, I think no doubt, like we've talked about being mindful of the risks associated is really critical and essential. In my experience from what I've seen today is one of the biggest detriments that's coming out of the rise of AI, I think, is this fear across individuals, customers about, you know, what is the threat of AI to my job, to my livelihood and well being? And that fear that feeling of fear and nervousness about that is a challenge in and of itself. I think that creates that anxiety. So I think this notion of again how we approach a I will largely help shift the paradigm. And in many ways, we'll write the future of how this kind of, does this become a force for good and for productivity and for equity and for positive outcomes, or does the opposite become true? Yeah.

Roman Trebon:

It's like the ancient generation, you got a sequel, the ancient generation with AI, even going above and beyond that, Cause it does have a lot of fear.

Meredith Mann:

absolutely.

Roman Trebon:

So, Kev, any last questions for Meredith before we get into the hard hitting questions with her?

Kevin Metzger:

I'm going to go with one more question, Meredith. Is there one thing that you guys have done or implemented with AI that you're just like, this was a killer. Implementation that was really, really cool. I

Meredith Mann:

mean, I think we're still in the experimentation phase. from the way that we think about our day to day productivity, which I do think is a quick win, you know, for for everyone involved to start to think about that two ways that we're starting to experiment with a I within Our service model. So how we can be smarter about creating learning paths for customers based on their learning goals and their learning history and to be able to do that, not in a manual way, but in an intelligent way, combining our ability to aggregate data and leverage a I as well as our ability to. Our brilliant consultants on the other end to help make sure that these are the right courses of action and the right implementation that will benefit customers and companies. I wanted to end on this idea of the human component, we talked about these human centric values being central to customer success. And You know, a niche ramen who's you know, a economist that linked in had published an article and op ed in the New York Times. And he talks about, you know, in the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they're about brains. But in the future, they'll be about heart. I think that summarizes how critical it is to deploy AI, to help make us more efficient, help deliver better customer outcomes. But ultimately it is the customer success manager, themselves and our specialists and consultants that come together to really create. Those positive experiences, positive outcomes. So how can we really maximize those moments of heart and centricity? the AI, that the operations and the system around that is really in service to that.

Roman Trebon:

All right, Mary, is he ready for the hard questions now? this

Meredith Mann:

is the challenging part of the podcast.

Roman Trebon:

One place you'd like to travel to that you've never been.

Meredith Mann:

The list is very long, but I would love to visit Tokyo and to visit Japan. I love the food and the culture. I'm dying for an opportunity to go to Tokyo.

Kevin Metzger:

that's definitely a place on my list as well. are you a cook at all?

Meredith Mann:

I do like to cook. Yes.

Kevin Metzger:

So what's your favorite thing to cook?

Meredith Mann:

I mean, I make a pretty mean spaghetti and meatball dish. I would say I can whip that up pretty quickly. The whole family likes it. Get some garlic bread going and definitely pleases them.

Roman Trebon:

You got to start with the sauce. You can't burn the sauce. So yeah.

Meredith Mann:

Oh yeah.

Roman Trebon:

So Meredith, you're in Chicago. Is that right?

Meredith Mann:

I am. Yep.

Roman Trebon:

All right. So if Kevin and I come to visit Chicago, where's the one place we need to visit in the one place we need to go eat?

Meredith Mann:

Ooh, what if it's the same place, I grew up in the heart of Chicago, just a few blocks from Wrigley field. So definitely born a Cubs fan. Although, you know, RIP to the Cubs season this year. Although I'll appreciate not having the traffic in the neighborhood. So we do celebrate in that regard. if you continue down Clark street, you'll hit a place called the wiener circle. And that is a great spot to visit, you know, after a ball game for a great Chicago dog That's also entertaining. Very

Kevin Metzger:

good. Very good. Well you've mentioned a couple of books already, but is there any other books or movie that you would recommend or TV show I'll take any of the three.

Meredith Mann:

Oh, man. Well, I would say this. The anxious generation is definitely one. My sister recommended to me. I think I was like avoiding reading it because, you know, I have kids that are kind of coming of age and asking about social media now. So I was like, kind of like dreading going into it. But it's been very insightful read. And I think with some actionable suggestions of how we as Parents as individuals, school communities, governments can start thinking about taking actions to reverse and negate some of these harmful effects of the rise of social media.

Roman Trebon:

I'm adding it to my Kindle wishlist as soon as we wrap this. so normally I would say, where can we find more about LinkedIn? But I think everyone knows LinkedIn. So where else can we, where can our audience find more about you, Meredith? what's your LinkedIn profile? Where can they find more about the work you're doing?

Meredith Mann:

Check me out and please connect with me on LinkedIn. An amazing team of consultants around the globe. We're implementing Some wonderful technologies supporting our customers and how they can drive better efficiencies for their business through integration optimization So yeah, definitely go on LinkedIn, LinkedIn talent solutions, a great place to learn about our learning and recruiter systems, and also how we can optimize with integrations.

Roman Trebon:

Awesome. Well, Meredith, thank you so much for joining us today. We love the conversation on AI and how the value LinkedIn is getting out of it and where AI is heading for customer success in the future. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe, leave a rating, share the podcast with your network. You can find us on LinkedIn at Roman Trebon, Kevin Metzger. We also have a customer success playbook page on LinkedIn. So check us out. We'll let you know when our shows are releasing. thanks again for listening and as always keep on playing.

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Kevin Metzger

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Roman Trebon

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