CSP S3 E3 - Roman Trebon - AI as a Customer Success Assistant

In this compelling conclusion to our three-part series, Roman Trebon explores the transformative potential of AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, in enhancing customer success team planning and meeting effectiveness. The discussion delves into practical applications of AI for the "Keep, Kill, Start" exercise and meeting optimization, offering tangible strategies for CS leaders preparing their teams for 2025.

Detailed Analysis

The episode provides a deep dive into the practical implementation of AI tools within customer success operations. Roman shares his expertise on using ChatGPT as an AI customer success assistant, highlighting innovative approaches to strategic planning and team optimization. A key insight emerges around the iterative nature of AI interaction – using the tool to refine ideas through targeted questioning and continuous feedback.

The discussion covers several critical areas:

1. Strategic Planning Enhancement: Roman demonstrates how AI can be used to expand initial concepts into fully-formed strategies, particularly valuable for restructuring service offerings and team initiatives.
2. Meeting Optimization: The conversation explores how AI can transform meeting documentation through automated transcription and intelligent summarization, with emphasis on customizing output to match personal communication styles.
3. Voice and Personalization: The episode reveals advanced techniques for training AI to adapt to individual communication styles, including cross-platform strategies using both ChatGPT and Claude.
4. Implementation Framework: Practical guidance is provided on using AI for developing 30-60 day action plans, ensuring strategic initiatives move from conception to execution efficiently.

The discussion emphasizes that AI serves as an enhancement tool rather than a replacement, helping leaders articulate and refine their existing expertise rather than generating entirely new concepts.

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Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Transcript

Kevin Metzger: Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. I'm Kevin, and this is our Friday episode where we discuss the impacts of AI on this [00:17:00] week's topic. We've been talking with Roman about pairing your team, preparing your team for success in 2025. On Monday, he highlighted the Keep, Kill, Start exercise.

And on Wednesday, we explored how to make meetings more valuable. Today, we'll look at how AI, specifically, tools like ChatGPT, can act as a customer success assistant to help with evaluation and planning. Roman, it's great to have you back for part three. Actually, it's always great to have you here, which we like to always have you here.

How are you doing today? 

Roman Trebon: I'm good. We made it to Friday Kev the new format. So I liked that the Friday episodes are going to be the impact that AI can have on that week's theme. I it's, it's so prevalent. I think there's our audience is going to get so much out of it tactically because it's, you know, it's, it's the new wave of how people work.

So, yeah, I'm excited to talk about this today. 

Kevin Metzger: Me too. So let's, let's dive in. So today we wanted to talk about how AA can enhance what you've been discussing all week, right? For instance, how do you see a tool like ChatGPT helping, helping [00:18:00] teams run the keep kill start exercise? Or how do you make, how do you make teams more effective in meetings with, with a tool like ChatGPT?

Roman Trebon: Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll use chat GPT, right? I know there's a ton of AI tools out there, but I think this is one that everyone is familiar with has probably given it a shot. And if you haven't, you should definitely give it a shot. Go in there and try it out. But in terms of how it relates to the topics this week, just preparing your teams for 2025 and beyond hitting the ground running, you know, let's start with the key kill start.

You know, I love using ChatGPT as a AI customer success Right, so I like having it asked me a lot of questions about, you know, what I'm my goals are in some of the challenges I'm having going into the year. Right? And so by giving those prompts and I like prompting, I think, have you may have been the one that told me this.

is giving the AI assistant a [00:19:00] profile. So like I say, you are a, an expert customer success leader, you know, help me with this keep, kill, start meeting framework that I want to introduce to my team, or I want to, you know, talk to my team about this quarter. As I do that, I ask it to feed me questions, right?

So, you know, ask me questions that can help to get me, my mind rolling on that. And, you know, so example, I'll say, you know, this is one you know, chat GPT helped me with things I should be, I should start to think about for my team in 2025. It'll come up with a, you know, a list of 10 or 15 things. Like, Hey, you do this, do a, B, C, D.

And, and, you know, a lot of that's my first start. I'll say, Oh, we're already doing a, B and C, but you've got me intrigued by D. Tell me more about what you're thinking in terms of D. And then I can really start to shape that. Okay. With some back and forth questioning. And it's like, Oh, okay. That's a great idea.

My team's a little unique because of, you know, the way we're aligned, our customer base, you name it, Chachibi takes that, it updates it. And I say, you know what? Now we have an idea that I [00:20:00] really want to start right now. I can rule forward with this idea. It's not completely new, Kevin. A lot of these ideas I get from ChatGPT aren't completely new.

They're high level thoughts that I've had, where I can just put these high level thoughts into ChatGPT. They're not super flushed out. You know, we have a, here's a good example. We have a professional service services engagement. You know, you buy a block of hours each month, right? It's a service that we offer.

I really want to restructure it. It's very resource heavy. I want to make sure that it's delivering value to our clients and delivering value to us as well. Right? And so it's a concept, right? I didn't have an ideas around how we should change it. How should we restructure? What does this mean? I just started with that.

Here's what I'm thinking. Right. And then through that back and forth prompting and questioning and refinement, then an actual idea start to emerge. Oh, those are some really good ideas. I think we could take this forward. I didn't think of this as a downstream impact. I really start to think about this.

Right. And so when I and the other thing I'd like to do is once I meet with my [00:21:00] team individually, I have a bunch of starts. A bunch of keeps and a bunch of kills, right? And so I kind of put it in there. I don't put names on it. Just say, Hey, here's what people were talking about, right? Here's what my team's talking about.

High level, right? Help me come out with. You know, what should my 30 and 60 days look like to really get these off the ground, right? That's such an accelerator, right? I love the idea that it can come back and really tell me, say, Roman, in the next 30 days, if you really want to start these, you really want to kill these, or you really want to keep these.

Here's what you need to do. Here's who may need to be assigned tasks and action. So, I That's a real game changer. The other one Kev is around meetings. We talked about meetings on Wednesdays, which means should you you know, how do you get value out of meetings? You talked about it already. You are, you know, you can transcribe the meetings, you know, you can set, I know on teams, you can set to have all your meetings recorded, right, which the transcription comes with it.

Just do, you know, you can take that either in copilot or in chat GPT and say, hey, give me a quick summary. Gimme a quick next steps. [00:22:00] What I like about AI Kev is, you know, you may do it one time and say, ah, I don't like that AI summary. It's way too, it sounds like ai, it's too long. The next steps aren't clear.

Well, you can refine it, right? You tr keep training the ai, right? I mean, it, it gets better based off your input and your feedback. Just because you did it one way doesn't mean that's how it always has to be, right? And it's like, hey, I want this, I want this more concise, right? I don't need, you know, I don't want it more than one paragraph.

On the next steps, make sure you have an action order. Make sure you have a due date. And then at that point, I get 90 percent there. And then, like you said, then I can easily copy, refine it, tweak it. The other thing I've noticed, Kev, is it starts to put it in my, my own voice more and more. Which is super helpful, right?

And I know you want, you know, all about that. 

Kevin Metzger: Yeah, yeah, no, and I think Roman, that's some great tips. Really on getting it to use your voice. There's really a lot of changes that have been made to the product. That really are making it much better at sounding like you. Especially if you use some of the, if you're a subscriber [00:23:00] and you use some of the advanced features.

I think even if you're not a subscriber, I think that some of that's now available in helping to create your voice and make it sound, sound like you. And there's some tricks between using, you know Claude Claude actually has a voice. A program that will generate a description of your voice as part of its settings features.

Now you can use Claude to do that. Copy the description of the your voice and then bring that into chat GPT. There's really some, some incredible stuff and getting into thinking speak in your voice. But the biggest key to it is driving your thought process or, and I think that's really the biggest point you're making is, okay, I've got a thought process that I know I want to develop and dive deep into this thought process and how do I dive deep into this thought process and whereas previously, you'd have to go do lots of research and you'd have to kind of, you know, Really pull on all of your your things.

Come up with the questions to ask yourself to think about it. You know, kind of drive an outline and then think through how you respond to the outline. [00:24:00] Well, now that process becomes much more dynamic and much faster. To drive your thoughts out because you can ask a partner to to walk with you to drive your thoughts out.

By saying, hey, this is the topic I'm thinking about and I need, I want to drive into developing a strategy. And when I drive into developing a strategy, what are the things that What are the questions I should be answering to drive into the strategy and get a list of questions. And now I like, okay, this is what I think about this.

And this is what I think about that. And it's an iterative process that really drives down to building out your own thought process, not taking thoughts from. The tool, but driving your own thought process and allowing it to help you drive into your thought process and then taking that and using the tool to help refine it and make it better and express it better because it's, it's faster at taking what you put in and re expressing it in the voice that you want to express it in.

If you've worked, if you've taken the time to work with it and train it on your voice, and if you've taken the time to write down all of your thoughts, it can actually [00:25:00] really capture your thoughts. Voice by looking at your thoughts as you've taken the time to capture them. So Roman, another excellent episode.

I'm excited about this new format. Thank you for bringing these insights. If you're listening, you can want to experiment with AI for your planning or meeting agendas. Now's the time. Let's get started with it. That wraps up our episode, our third part of the three part series with Roman. If you found this mini episode format helpful, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with your team, share it with your friends, share it with your network.

We'll be back next week with more customer success tips and strategies. Roman's going to be turning the tables on me and interviewing me. And as always keep on playing.