The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook S3 E32 - Gilad Shriki - FunnelStory Customer Interview Big Question

• Kevin Metzger • Season 3 • Episode 32

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In this engaging episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, host Kevin Metzger sits down with Gilad Shriki from The Scope to explore how FunnelStory is transforming customer success operations. With seamless integration capabilities and a robust automation-first approach, FunnelStory is setting a new standard for customer success platforms.

Gilad shares insights into how his team successfully integrated FunnelStory with BigQuery, HubSpot, and Segment, all while maintaining strict data privacy protocols. He also discusses how AI-driven automation is enhancing customer sentiment analysis and churn prediction, giving CS teams an edge in proactive engagement.

Is Funnel Story truly a one-stop shop for customer success? Can businesses of all sizes leverage its automation without sacrificing human interaction? Listen in as Gilad provides a firsthand account of his experience and why he believes FunnelStory is reshaping the future of customer success management.

Detailed Episode Insights:

  • Seamless Integration: How The Scope connected FunnelStory with their existing data stack while maintaining PII privacy.
  • Automation at the Core: Why starting with automation before layering in human interaction changes the game for CS teams.
  • AI-Powered Efficiency: How FunnelStory is accelerating time-to-value and making predictive insights more accessible.
  • Scalability & Growth: Can FunnelStory support businesses up to $500M in revenue? Gilad shares his perspective.
  • The Future of CS Tech: What’s next for AI-powered customer success platforms?

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You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Kevin Metzger:

Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Metzker, my co-host today, Roman is unable to. Join us. So we're continuing with the sponsored series on Funnel Story with Galaad from the Scope and discussing their integration of Funnel Story. Galaad, before we get started on today's episode, we'd like to ask a few questions to kind of get to know you. Let's start with, uh, what's one place you'd like to visit where you haven't been yet?

Gilad Shriki:

Ooh. So I am I'm have I'll have to say one area that I really want to go. Um, or one place that I really want to go and still haven't is Japan. I'm hearing a lot of things. Some of my colleagues went there and came back with. Amazing stories. I also hear good things about skiing in Japan, so if I can combine that, that would be even better.

Kevin Metzger:

You're a skier. I am a skier. I love skiing. When I was in high school, I was a ski instructor.

Gilad Shriki:

Oh, nice. In the

Kevin Metzger:

north, Northeast Pennsylvania. So it was a small mountain. It's not like, uh, skiing out west, but still it was, it was fun.

Gilad Shriki:

Any skiing is fun.

Kevin Metzger:

Yes. What city are you located in? I'm in the Bay Area. Uh, currently our headquarters in is in Los Altos. So, if we were to, uh, visit you there, where would you recommend we, we go eat? What would be the best place to go eat?

Gilad Shriki:

To go eat? Oh, we have, uh, we are in downtown Los Altos. There's some nice restaurants here, uh, depending on what you like. We have, uh, Greek, we have Indian, we have Japanese, so good places around here. Nothing too fancy, but, uh, this is why we wanted to work in a downtown area. We can walk out there and just, you know, grab some lunch, which is very nice.

Kevin Metzger:

Very nice. And final question, uh, before we get into the big question, uh, do you have a favorite book, TV show, or movie that you would like to recommend? Oh, so

Gilad Shriki:

I like humor. And we keep referencing here the Silicon Valley show, which is, some say it's, it's comedy. Some say it's documentary about the life and I'm on the documentary, but yeah, we have a lot of references from that show. So

Kevin Metzger:

let's get into, uh, the one big question, what's the application stack that you integrated funnel story

Gilad Shriki:

with. So as an authentication platform, one of the things that we needed to make sure. Is that privacy matter, meaning I don't have, I cannot share actual customer P. I. I. Data across different vendors. So what we've implemented here is actually a very, uh, a very robust anonymized station platform where we extract. Anonymize data from our main service and put everything in BigQuery. And from there, once it's anonymized, there's no way to identify a customer or a name of a user or any PII. Then we connect it directly to Funderstory in the different models. That they use. So we use BigQuery. The actual process of anonymizing is done internally, which set of processes that we've created. And once it's in BigQuery, the cool thing is that you can now decide how you analyze the data, how you expose the data and how you actually serve the data to other systems. Funnel story is, of course, one of them and final story is the main. So the main source of data is their final story also connected to our CRM, which is HubSpot. And we also have segment for data analytics and all the plumbing of data. So final story plays a very integral part between all these, uh, all these components.

Kevin Metzger:

Very interesting. And so I'm assuming you had big data in there prior to funnel story coming in, or was that part of the project of bringing it in?

Gilad Shriki:

No, we we had that, uh, analytics and crunching of data before final story on it. It actually made our life integrating final story much easier because the data was already there in a in a different world where I can hook up final story directly to my product database. It's even easier specifically here because of privacy. We couldn't, but, uh Either or it works very nice because it's really fine. So we gave us a very simple connector to be query, grab the data and did all the analysis itself. That was very easy.

Kevin Metzger:

Very cool. Was it as easy as it appears to be in the, like, I mean, when I walked through the demo setup, it seems like it's plug and play, get your IDs and passwords in and link up and that's, it's pretty much done. Is it really that easy or is it a little bit more difficult

Gilad Shriki:

than that? Look, uh, I always say to my customers, the devil is in the details. Yeah, but really funnest story surprised me because once you hook up your different data models and you know, you, you have companies which are customers, you have users, which are the users in those companies and you have activities. So only three data models, only three, you can say tables. In the BigQuery database, and they start plotting out you so the time to value with final story. I was very surprised, right? And and yes, I mean, obviously, you then start tweaking and then start to go. You know what? I'm missing this data or I want to add this data. You can continue iterating, but the time to value was surprisingly short. And especially when, you know, everything was really ready made from final story to BigQuery and to HubSpot. Yes, it's, it's, it's not, it's just like they did in the demo. I felt that.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, that's amazing. And as Roman and I went through the demo, we had that conversation. You know, a lot of times the devil's in the details. Sometimes things are more. So we were excited to kind of get, get into that question with you. I think we're entering a different world for integrations and how, how products work going forward with what's happening with AI and the way, um, the product, productization of AI is creating easier integrations, but really this is one of the first tools that I saw as like this, this different level, this next level integration.

Gilad Shriki:

Yes. Yes. I think the, um, the technology. is amazing, but I will say, uh, the team itself is, is, uh, is just, you know, delighted to work with them. So, you know, anything you need and like working with the team itself has also been, um, you know, very, very positive experience for us.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, and, and I, I've heard the same thing from actually a couple of customers that I've talked with a funnel star, uh, they very responsive, they work on an, you know, if you need a different integration or something, they're very quick to get it done and have it, have it working. Um, so last question for this episode, is there anything about the tool that varies from what your expectations were when you came in?

Gilad Shriki:

So, yeah, so I think when we started, I looked at, you know, just visibility. And as we continue the investment, continue the deployment, continue the, you know, engagement, um, we started to see that, okay, that's great visibility, but we want the customer experience team to be able to interact and to, you know, provide feedback, provide updates to the product and, and actually, It's something we are working very closely with the final story team to integrate and to improve. So I think, um, and I have some experience with other products, you know, and other customer success products. And, you know, my vision is. The product needs to be first automated, then allow user interaction, while the rest of the product out there are first relying on the person and add some automation on the side. And what I like about Final Story is that they switched it. So first it's all automated. Now let's talk about where people interact with it. And that's where We started much early with 100 percent automation, and as we go, they are adding the human interaction mode for the, you know, the tier one companies, the CSM that needs to update something, uh, and all these things, and our ops that keep interacting with the tool, and I think this is something that they keep improving. On investing and making the product more complete, right? Because only automation is good, but it's not taking you all the way through when you look on a full customer base, and

Kevin Metzger:

that's what they're doing now. And I'm sure we'll get there very good, very good. And it's a young product, so that makes sense. Yeah, and it to me, by the way, to me, and you know, people look at

Gilad Shriki:

final story differently. I would assume, uh, to me, final story is the only CS platform I want to use right both for automation. And for the CS team interaction, when they need to look at sentiment of a customer, when they need to look at risk of churn of renewal of all the things I don't want to have funded story for visibility and other product to manage the customers. No, I want to have a single place where my my CX team goes consume data. That thing is actually doing all the automation you need to do, but also the team can interact with for me. I am not planning to add anything to the stack on top of final story. That's the vision.

Kevin Metzger:

Would you say it's there? It's so I know they've integrated with a gain site and I know there's some other integrations and I know that a low is trying to be able to make the product such that it, it can be a one stop shop, but. I mean, I guess it depends on the size of the business that you're operating, but would you say that that is, it's operationally there today that you can use it as a one stop shop and how big of a business could I run? Like what size can I run it all the way up to, you know, 500 million business running single application. That's, that's a big.

Gilad Shriki:

So I think it's getting there. I think, I think the plan is, at least for me, like I said, not to include anything else. Definitely, uh, not other products, uh, like, uh, customer management, like Ainsight. I do want, I, I do, uh, like the agility and I do see it's coming there. To me, it's there today because I don't use anything else. And here we are here and operating, uh, of course, for a 500 million business with, you know, 200 CSMs and, and CSAs. You might need some additional capabilities like granular permissions and granular visibility modes and, you know, more interactions. But I think it's definitely on the right path to me. It's definitely there. I think any startup or companies that have that desire of a CS team, you know, with 10 20 people and, you know, hundreds, maybe thousands of customers and even more. We have 20, 000. I think it's definitely there and we're happy with it. And I think as time goes, they will be able to service even the bigger

Kevin Metzger:

ones. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing and the insights there. Friday is AI Friday and Funnel Story is stacked with AI. So we're looking forward to talking with Galaad about how they use AI, the AI functions in Funnel Story. And don't miss that episode. Remember to like, subscribe, share this podcast with your network. And until next time, keep on playing.

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Kevin Metzger

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Roman Trebon

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