Customer Success Playbook S3 E27- David Singer - AI and The Customer Experience Artwork

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The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook S3 E27- David Singer - AI and The Customer Experience

March 07, 2025 • Kevin Metzger • Season 3 • Episode 27

0:00 | 8:39

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Summary: Get ready for an electrifying AI Friday as hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger wrap up their three-part series with AI expert David Singer. In this episode, the trio dives deep into how AI is reshaping customer experience, employee satisfaction, and business outcomes. From real-world success stories to a visionary look into the future of AI in contact centers, this conversation is packed with actionable insights. Discover how organizations are leveraging AI to improve NPS scores, reduce employee attrition, and enhance customer interactions. If you're looking to harness AI for tangible business results, this episode is a must-listen.

Detailed Analysis: In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, Kevin and Roman sit down with David Singer to uncover the true impact of AI on customer success. David breaks down the essential AI strategy: start with the outcome first, then apply AI to optimize processes and workflows.

Listeners will hear real-world examples of companies that have successfully used AI-driven dashboards to boost customer experience and employee engagement, leading to a 17% increase in NPS and a 25% reduction in employee attrition. David also paints a compelling picture of the future, where AI deployment will become more cost-effective and widespread, allowing for real-time interventions in customer and employee interactions.

The conversation also touches on the evolution of AI in the contact center industry and the shift toward AI-driven numerical modeling. With AI's cost decreasing and accessibility increasing, businesses have more opportunities than ever to implement micro-assists and intelligent automation that enhance both customer and employee experiences.

If you’re eager to understand how AI can drive measurable ROI and transform customer success, don’t miss this episode.

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Roman Trebon 0:10

Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Roman Reon, here with my co-host Kevin Metzker. Kev. We made it to the end of the week. It's Friday, and we're wrapping up our three part series with Dave Singer. Kev, are you excited for AI Friday? Am I ever

Kevin Metzger 0:27

not excited for AI I'm always excited for AI

Roman Trebon 0:30

Friday.

Kevin Metzger 0:30

Always excited for AI Friday. Dave, excited to dive in a little bit deeper, talk about the AI implications. There's a lot of process involved in defining how everything works. I'm wondering, how does AI play into that? And like, when you're defining the processes for where. Customer interactions are happening and where to jump in is AI playing a space in that role. You got an hour for me to talk?

David Singer 0:59

That's a big topic. let me talk a little bit about AI and outcomes in general, then we'll focus in on, customer experience and emotional intelligence GPT models and generative AI really hit the public in a big way back at the end of, 2022, right? And since then, there's been, roughly 100 billion experiments with gen AI, Every company I know is, doing something. I stopped doing it because I'm going to get the wrong answer at some point. But I'd ask the conferences, okay, every, everyone whose company is doing an experiment with AI, raise your hand. Every hand goes up. Everyone who's received real demonstrable ROI, keep your hand up. All the hands go down and people sigh, look at the floor and shuffle about. And that's because it's, AI is fun to play with, but it needs to be focused on outcomes. So what I always recommend. Start with the outcome first. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to raise, CX? Are you trying to lower cost? Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to reduce retention, reduce attrition or churn, right? You're trying to do something great. Step two. What are the workflows and processes you have in place today that contribute to, to those outcomes? Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's surveys, offering retention plans, whatever it is, you got, you got some set of processes in place that do that. And then you look at how do you apply AI to that workflow to drive that outcome. And if you start from the end, what you want to accomplish, it tells you where to apply, AI better to start out. If you start, Hey, I got this cool model. What can I do? You'll probably end up exactly where you expect. Dave, I'd love to hear a broader approach. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. Oh, no, go ahead, Dave. does that make sense in terms of an overall approach? Not really, you know, specific to what we're talking about here, but overall, I think it's the way you look at it.

Roman Trebon 2:51

Absolutely. It's like if I had Legos, right? Like if I, I start with a picture of what I wanna build. I have the Legos, I have instructions. I get to, I don't just start with a bunch of random Legos and start trying to build and, and try to, I've done that with my kids and I don't build anything, right? Yeah. But start with the outcome. What am I trying to get to and work backwards. It makes complete sense. I, I'd love to hear Dave again, just some real world examples. We don't need names or anything, but just Sure. How organizations have used ai kind of that same way, focused on outcomes. And what efficiency, what's that real ROI? How do you keep your hand up the next time they get that question on, you know, are you getting, gains from AI?

David Singer 3:26

I'll give you two examples. And then if I think of more, I'll throw more, but two that I think are kind of fun. One, I spoke, you guys, oh God, it's all a blur. It's been so much fun this week. Monday, I think we're talking about, you know, how, how we have very, we have some, some tech that measures, use the ad to measure customer experience and employee experience. In real time, so you can intervene on behalf of the customer when that's going the wrong direction, and you can intervene on behalf of the agent when that's going the wrong direction, give them a break or help them help recover. I have a customer who deployed this AI, they used our dashboards for their supervisors and said, look, what you want to focus on is make sure the experiences are trending the right direction. And we all know the number one, driver of customer experience is employee experience. So by looking at both at the same time, they drove their NPS score up by 17 percent in less than three months. That, that's pretty good, not bad, not too shabby. I have another company who used a different class of AI to give their agents flexibility in their schedule, managing the work life balance, because when I'm not worried about missing my kid's soccer game or being home when, I need to be home for whatever reason, then you can be more present and engage. In a more emotional way with your customers, because you're there, you're not thinking about something else. So by giving them the freedom to manage their work life balance, so they could be present when they need to be present, they drove their employee attrition down by 25%, which is any contact center knows is that's, that's worth full of money, right? And, they drove their CSAT scores up by double digit percentages. Right. So just a couple of examples where one focus on look at the measurement and taking the right interventions. Second is, you know, we talked about humans are uniquely good at being present and empathetic and forming connections, giving them some different AI, the freed up other things from their task and gave flexibility to the schedules. So they had time to be present and empathetic and connected, which drove these amazing outcomes. Those are significant

Kevin Metzger 5:21

results. I mean, that's just incredible.

Roman Trebon 5:24

Let me ask you this, Dave. I'm curious in the contact center space. I know variance, a huge player in that space. And every client that I talk to is like AI, AI, AI. where do you see it going? Because I feel like we're still on the front edge, of this. It's still so early. And I feel like contact center is a great place for AI because there's the employee experience, the customer experience, plus there's so many measurables. I'm curious, where do you see it? And perhaps if you had your crystal ball, if you waxed your shield a little bit and you had to look into the future, right, where do you see it? Maybe just again, I know we're not gonna hold you to this, but where do you kind of see AI kind of emerging in that space?

David Singer 6:04

Oh, I love it. I love it. as you see, the cost of AI goes down every week, right? Like the deep seek announcement a couple weeks ago, like, hey, one 10th, the cost of GPT. And they got some ethical and security and privacy questions to answer, but they'll get there. So I think as the costs continue to drop, it'll get easier and easier to deploy AI anywhere you need it without that cost concern. So you can have these micro assists everywhere you need them from AI. So I think there's going to be a spread of where it's applied. Second dimension is LLMs are, you know, you may have heard of them. they're kind of the hottest thing everybody talks about.

Roman Trebon 6:39

Yeah.

David Singer 6:40

Right. And at a, you know, someone asked me, about a year ago. So, you know, Dave, you work for a veteran, your guys are good at workforce management. when are you going to add LLMs to your workforce management product? we're not. Workforce management is about math, not language, right? So, we haven't had that same breakthrough in math or numbers oriented AI the way we have with LLMs. I think, you know, it's starting to see some stuff come out, but I think over the next Relatively short period of time, there'll be that same breakthrough where it's as easy to do numerical modeling and that kind of problem as it is to solve linguistic problems with LLMs. Once we do that, you put those two things together, then the sky's the limit. so there's gonna be a broadening of language based, AI with a reduction of cost, and there's going to be an explosion of numerical analysis, kind of AI outside of just, some of the. Minimal models we have today. It's going to be easy to build your own model. Easy to ask the questions of the data.

Roman Trebon 7:38

Excellent insights, Kev. We want to let him go for the week.

Kevin Metzger 7:40

No, I think we'll let him go. I, I love it on a Friday, but apparently, uh, I'm, I'm worn out for the day.

Roman Trebon 7:48

ready for a margarita Saturday. I can tell. All right. Well, Dave, thanks so much for doing the show. we really appreciate you joining us all week. This has been amazing. Dave, where can our audience find more about you and Vera? Sure. So

David Singer 8:00

find us both on LinkedIn. search guard is right there. And I'm, LinkedIn. com Dusty singer. Easy to find the shield.

Roman Trebon 8:07

Definitely follow Dave. Dave, you put out great content. I mean it. He's a must follow. You gotta go see The Shield, guys. If you're not, if you're not following Dave, make sure you follow him. To our audience, we really appreciate you listening. Make sure you subscribe, like, give us a review. That's how you know when new episodes are being released. We'll be back with more amazing guests coming up. We got a great lineup, Kev. I'm really excited for who we have, upcoming on the show. For our audience, thanks again for listening, and as always, Kevin, Keep on playing.