The Customer Success Playbook
Welcome to “The Customer Success Playbook,” a fresh podcast initiative spearheaded by Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon. Immerse yourself with us in the dynamic realm of customer success, where we unravel the latest insights, inspirations, and wisdom from recognized leaders in the Customer Success domain.
Our journey began with a simple yet profound belief: that meaningful conversations can significantly impact our professional trajectory. With this ethos, we’ve embarked on a mission to bring to you the voices of seasoned and revered professionals in the field. Our episodes have seen the likes of Sue Nabeth Moore, Greg Daines, Jeff Heclker, James Scott, David Ellin, and David Jackson, who have generously shared their expertise on a variety of pertinent topics.
We’ve delved into the intricacies of Profit and Loss Statements in Customer Success with Dave Jacksson, explored the potential of Customer Success Platforms with Dave Ellin, and unravelled the role of AI in Customer Success with all guests. With Sue, we navigated the waters of Organizational Alignment, while Greg brought to light strategies for Reducing Churn. Not to be missed is James insightful discourse on the Current Trends in Customer Success and Jeff’s thoughts on Service Delivery in CS.
Each episode is crafted with the intention to ignite curiosity and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement among customer success professionals. Our discussions transcend the conventional, probing into the proactive approach, and the evolving landscape of customer success.
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the industry, our goal is to propel your customer success prowess to greater heights. The rich tapestry of topics we cover ensures there’s something for everyone, from the fundamentals to the advanced strategies that shape the modern customer success playbook.
Our upcoming episodes promise a wealth of knowledge with topics like CS Math, Training, AI, Getting hired in CS, and CS Tool reviews, ensuring our listeners stay ahead of the curve in this fast-evolving field. The roadmap ahead is laden with engaging dialogues with yet more industry mavens, aimed at equipping you with the acumen to excel in your customer success journey.
At “The Customer Success Playbook,” our zeal for aiding others and disseminating our expertise to the community fuels our endeavor. Embark on this enlightening voyage with us, and escalate your customer success game to unparalleled levels.
Join us on this quest for knowledge, engage with a community of like-minded professionals, and elevate your customer success game to the next level. Your journey towards mastering customer success begins here, at “The Customer Success Playbook.” Keep On Playing!!
The Customer Success Playbook
Customer Success Playbook S3 E21 - Terinee Pooler - AI Friday - Churn Risk
In this compelling finale of a three-part series, Terinee Pooler explores the transformative potential of AI in Net Promoter Score (NPS) management and customer success strategies. The discussion delves into how AI tools are streamlining customer feedback analysis, automating risk assessment, and enhancing the overall efficiency of customer success teams. From leveraging platforms like Gainsight and Churn Zero to utilizing AI for creating QBR presentations, the episode offers practical insights into the future of customer success management.
Detailed Analysis
The episode provides a comprehensive examination of AI's impact on customer success management, particularly focusing on NPS implementation and analysis. Terinee Pooler, drawing from her extensive experience, highlights several key applications of AI in customer success:
Risk Assessment and Early Warning Systems: AI's capability to analyze customer behavior patterns and NPS responses enables early detection of churn risks. The technology can process detractor feedback and predict potential churn risks based on historical patterns and lack of improvement over time.
Automated Feedback Analysis: The discussion contrasts traditional manual methods of analyzing customer feedback using extensive Excel sheets with modern AI-powered solutions. AI can now automatically categorize feedback, identify themes, and generate comprehensive reports, significantly reducing the time and effort required for analysis.
Integration with Customer Success Platforms: The episode explores how platforms like Gainsight and Churn Zero are incorporating AI functionality to enhance their customer success management capabilities. These tools provide integrated dashboards and automated risk mitigation features.
QBR Enhancement: The conversation touches on AI's potential to automate the creation of quarterly business review presentations, allowing customer success managers to focus more on strategic discussions and value-added activities rather than manual presentation preparation.
Communication Analysis: Tools like Gong and Talk Desk are highlighted for their ability to analyze customer interactions and provide insights into value drivers and areas for improvement in customer communications.
The discussion also includes personal perspectives on AI adoption, with Terinee sharing her experience using tools like ChatGPT for both personal and professional applications. This practical insight provides listeners with a realistic view of AI integration into daily customer success operations.
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Customer success.
Roman Trebon:Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Roman Trevon. Here with me always is my co-host Kevin Metzger, Kevin's Friday. We've gotten to the end of the week and we're wrapping up our three part series with the ever insightful tyranny Pooler. Kev, you ready to go for this AI Friday? Oh
Kevin Metzger:yeah. I love AI Friday, Friday. AI Fridays are my favorite. I love talking about ai. Tarini, thank you for joining us all week. And so this week we've been talking about NPS, right? And so with AI coming in, how do you see it playing a role in automating and enhancing the process?
Terinee Pooler:Wow. AI is going to be a very, very helpful tool in the future in regards to customer success. I think one, being able to get alerts and also be able to, um, find different, uh, touch points, uh, in regards to customer health and also being, um, churn risk for accounts. So for example, one of those could be if. As we go back to kind of the net promoter score, if we're receiving detractors, uh, being able to gather that data to say like, Hey, if we don't see any improvement in the next like five to six months, um, then this can be a potential turn risk. So I think AI is going to be very, very helpful in that sense of customer success, uh, strategies, and also being able to, um, really manage, um, a good, healthy book of business.
Roman Trebon:Yeah, I love that churn, that churn, like kind of helping me decide who's a churn risk, who's maybe, uh, like we talked about promoter, like who, you know, who's going to give us a recommendation. I know for, for back in the old school, Tierney, like we would do all these surveys and I, we, my team would have this huge Excel, right? So we'd have all this verbatim comments and we would say, you know, this is a product issue. This is a service issue. This is, and we do all this manual tagging and it would like the Excel sheet would be like. 900 columns and then you'd have to try to like summarize it. And, but nowadays I'm like, wow, imagine if I can take those same comments. Run them through, uh, chat GPT or copilot or whatever and have that do the summary for me, right? Give me maybe have them identify the tags, have them identify where the feedback should go and then give me a summarized report. And then to your point, then based off that. You know, there are there certain customers or certain areas that there may be higher churn risk or maybe low, low churn risk because of what those comments are saying. So I missed out on it by like, 10 years, but still I know would have been great back in the day. How else do you see AI
Kevin Metzger:playing a role in NPS? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of ways and, you know, I think there's a couple of different, well, I think there's a lot of ways let's, let's start there and maybe we can talk about some of the ways AI might play. And so, Roman, I think what you just said is, is great, right? Especially if you are a smaller company and running manually through collecting the data, but that's one of the other things I was just going to say is another way is through the collection process, I think, in coming up with the types of questions in how. Planning and executing the distribution of the surveys. If you're going through a survey process, um, I think you can really utilize AI to help drive some of that. And I do think that a lot of the tools that are out there now, um. Are are are integrating AI to to help facilitate, uh, MPS and and whatnot. Um, attorney, you had mentioned using gainsight. Do you have you seen what's coming with gainsight and, uh, in the AI process and where it might facilitate for MPS specifically.
Terinee Pooler:Yeah, I think game site is great, especially for the customer success or because it's able to kind of put, um, that data into dashboards to be able to see in a very succinct way. Um, I would also give a shout out to turn zero because that's what their platform is actually built around is being able to mitigate risk in a very in a I functionality. So, um, I believe those two CRM are great to implement whether you're using them currently. Or something to think about. Um, as AI begins to take over the world, I think it'll be a helpful tool. Yeah.
Roman Trebon:Yeah. And you also talked about like QBRs, like, right. Cause you, you want to go back in front of the client. You want to present this and, and can we've had some guests on that have talked about AI's ability to take data and turn, like actually produce. PowerPoint slides right where you can actually take all this and and I'm sure you spent a lot of time journey building those actual slides. Imagine like an AI tool where you can take all this feedback. The health score that you click a button and then AI comes up with a slide for you. That's it's it's an amazing world. We're moving into where a lot of that manual low value work is now being. Replaced with AI. And then you could really focus on the high value conversations, the additional use cases, how the client can, can really maximize that solution. Tierney, anything else in terms of it? Let me, let me ask this. I've been asking our guests this. Are you using a lot of AI yourself? We have, we talk a lot about AI, so I'm always curious from our guests. Everyone's on a different sort of maturity level with it. Some people are, are dabbling with it. So give me a new movie recommendation all the way to using it for every email they, they do, or, you know, and plugging it into every browser they have. I'm curious where you are with your personal AI use.
Terinee Pooler:Yeah, um, so I definitely use, uh, chat GPT every since I kind of launched, um, in personal life, whether that's to ask the questions, like, you know, how many miles to North Carolina
Roman Trebon:or
Terinee Pooler:what, what stock currently is trending or something like that. So I definitely use, um, it's a chat GPT, um, even in like the customer success. As a CSM, how I see AI, um, as far as tools, we've talked about game side. We've talked about churn zero, also another big AI tool as far as being able to speak would be, um, talk desk and gong. So those are fabulous tools to be able to capture your meetings, uh, whether that's a QBR call and be able to pick out. Um, certain things within your conversation that were valued drivers or certain things that maybe you can improve on. So I definitely see the implementation of AI really taking over and being able to be, um, something that customer success will thrive on.
Roman Trebon:Yeah, no, I love it. Those are real tactical examples and you do a ton of speaking tyranny as well. And, and, and, you know, as you're speaking, I'm like, I, I, we record the podcast and I get a, I get speaker tips from co pilot. Right? And so they'll say, you know, tyranny did a great job. Kevin did a great job. Roman, you're speaking too fast. You didn't pause enough. You used too many ums. And I'm like, that's even great feedback as well. Right. So, and that's all AI, like it's like real time coaching that, you know, you don't get if you, if you don't have that enabled, right. So, Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us this week. We're glad that you, you came back again. You, we, we have our, our hidden episode from last year that we never got to publish, but you came back, you joined us. I hope our audience, you found our conversation throughout the entire week useful on NetPromoter, right? So now you know what NetPromoter is, you know how to launch a NetPromoter program, you know how to take action on a NetPromoter program, right? What to do with all that customer insight. And Terri is giving the insight on where how AI may be fueling, fueling this in the future. So, Terri, thanks for all. Thanks for joining us. Uh, we really appreciate your insights. Where can our audience find more about you and what you have gone on?
Terinee Pooler:Yes, I would say the best way to reach out to me would be on LinkedIn. Um, just type my name in the search bar and I'll pop right up.
Roman Trebon:Well, you find Terri on LinkedIn. She's speaking all over. You may see her at the Gaineside conference out in San Francisco. So if you're out there, keep an eye on, she may be on your agenda. I would not be surprised if that's the case. You can also find Kevin and myself on LinkedIn at Kevin Metzger, right? He's on there. Kevin, you're posing all the time. You're putting me to the shame with all your posts. You're doing a great job there. I'm also on LinkedIn at RomanTriaBot. I'm the one reposting Kevin's posts. So you can, you can get a copy of Kevin's posts through me, right? But we're on there. Our customer success playbook page is on there. Make sure you follow that on LinkedIn. You'll get all of our promotional videos, upcoming guests. Uh, you actually get to see some of the, we do snippets of our video, etc. So again, check us out there. As always, like, subscribe to the podcast. We really appreciate it. As always, Kevin, keep on playing.
