Customer Success Playbook S3 E33 - Gilad Shriki - FunnelStory Customer Interview AI Friday

Let’s demystify the magic behind streamlined customer success operations. In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast, Kevin Metzger sits down with Gilad Shriki from Scope to unpack their strategic integration of FunnelStory. They dive into privacy-first data management, lightning-fast time-to-value, and how AI is reshaping how teams interact with data. Plus, find out why Gilad believes FunnelStory might just be the one platform to rule them all.

Detailed Description with Business Insights: In this engaging episode of the Customer Success Playbook, Kevin Metzger interviews Gilad Shriki, Head of Customer Experience at Scope, who offers a real-world case study of successfully implementing FunnelStory. With Roman Trebon off this week, Kevin navigates a thoughtful conversation that brings valuable technical and strategic takeaways to customer success leaders.

Gilad breaks down how Scope maintains data privacy by leveraging a custom anonymization layer before syncing anonymized data into BigQuery. From there, FunnelStory becomes the centerpiece of their CS tech stack, tightly integrated with HubSpot and Segment. The result? A seamless, compliant, and highly performant system that delivers actionable insights with minimal setup.

The discussion peels back the curtain on modern data stack integrations, emphasizing the importance of time-to-value and the benefits of designing for automation-first customer success platforms. Gilad candidly explains how FunnelStory outperformed expectations by offering an intuitive plug-and-play experience and how its engineering team’s responsiveness created a frictionless implementation.

Most notably, Gilad envisions FunnelStory not just as a visibility tool but as a centralized hub for both automation and human interaction. His goal? A single pane of glass where CSMs manage sentiment, risk, and engagement—without needing to bolt on other platforms like Gainsight.

If you're scaling a CS org or rethinking your tech stack, this episode is your playbook for staying lean without sacrificing power. Tune in and learn how a privacy-first, AI-powered, integrated system can revolutionize how you scale customer success.

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Transcript

Kevin Metzger: 0:09

Welcome back to the customer success playbook podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Metzger, Roman again, unable to join today. It's Friday and we're wrapping up our sponsored series on Funnel Story. We're here again with Galad and excited to celebrate AI Friday. With some talk on the AI functions and Funnel Story. Glad, like I said, Funnel Story is packed with AI. They use AI in the setup, onboarding, integration of the tool. They use AI predictive analysis to build, build out the customer journeys and funnels, and to make recommendations for your customers. What can you share about how the usage of AI in the tool played into your decision making process? And we'll go from there,

Gilad Shriki: 0:53

of course. So I will say very transparently, we chose funnest story even without AI, right? We didn't look at the I back then we started using it and we started to deploy. I think. Uh, what really, um, you know, hit the nail for me is the ability to use AI in understanding data, right? So when we integrate all of our data sources, that is a lot of data, a lot of models with a very robust and high volume, um, you know, flexibility of the data, right? The variety of the data. I think the use of a I now gives Funnel story and us, the ability to look at it in a more practical approach, approach and have the AI suggest the journey and the different phases of the funnel based on the success rate, based on the actual customer data. I think this is something that a lot of companies struggle with. Uh, and having a I at your side and the amazing capabilities that they bring today is is very powerful, right? So no more. I have, you know, 20, 000 customers. Some of them did the some of the do that. How do I know what is success? What is success look like? And what is the path to success? And if I can bring you some level of dates. That is definitely powerful. And that's what I, I think I, I think this is the most critical part of the deployment of funnel story. Uh, the, there are other parts, right? You mentioned like, we, we use it for sentiment analysis, right? So customer interactions, you wanna know where the customer is in their terms of, you know, the success plan. Are they happy? Are they're, you know, they're seeing the value, what's the sentiment when they open tickets, when they talk with you. So we implemented that. Piece both on ticketing and on our slack channels. So it actually looks on our community. It's very powerful. And then the last piece you mentioned is the prediction, right? So this is something we're actually doing now looking at, okay, based on that, both the journey that I mentioned in the beginning and the sentiment and where the customer is, can we predict who are the customers that will struggle to renew? And I can invest resources in them or go approach them. Ahead of time, right? So in my view, you need at least three months to turn that thing around. So we are looking ahead three months, sometimes six in a bigger companies to say, okay, if they're if they're red or even orange. Uh, from a risk perspective, three to six months before this is where we say, okay, we're going to engage them and that's what we do. And that's based on the final story analysis.

Kevin Metzger: 3:43

And so that analysis, that funnel story is doing, have you found that it's accurate just based off of its analysis of the data and the way they've got the got

Gilad Shriki: 3:54

it set up? So it actually learns as we go. Uh, it started somewhere and then we improved it. I think we are, today we're in a very good place. Today when funny story color something that's red, we, we engage immediately and we do see the value there. At the beginning it had a little bit false positives, which is fine, which is fine. But, uh, over time, when, when, when it actually, uh, tunes itself and based on the data based on the analysis of the actual customers today, I can say, yes, it's pretty much raising the flags for us, uh, in that perspective, and it's very helpful for the team.

Kevin Metzger: 4:32

And was the tuning process something that you had to participate in? Or was it just a matter of getting data over time? A little bit.

Gilad Shriki: 4:39

A little bit. We did. We did. We worked with them. Now we have a ops team that was doing that analysis with the team and a lot of it was just fixing the right data that we sent to final story, right? I mean, if we look at the customer and final story tells it's orange, but for us, it's green. Why is it green for us? And why is it orange for fine? So we did an analysis and most of the time it was data that we didn't send. And then when we send it, that corrected itself, right? So there is some level of tuning you need to do. Uh, because like, like I said before, in the previous episodes, Each customer sometimes is, at the end of the day, work with people. And, but you're trying to have a model to say, okay, where is the activity? Where is the, the day, the actions that they do in the product? And how does it reflect to their sentiment or the risk? And then if you see differences, it's usually based on the data that you did send or you did not send. And that's where we invest the time in.

Kevin Metzger: 5:40

That makes sense. That makes sense. So you, you over time added some additional data feeds to get the data in there. Exactly. Oh, for Felix, which is kind of the new AI chat bot in, uh, in, in Funnel Story. Is that, um, is it something you use much? Have you found any creative uses for it?

Gilad Shriki: 6:03

So I think our ops team is using it more. I, um, I not, I'm not, uh, an avid user of, of that specifically. To be honest, personally, I like working with SQL commands rather than chatbots, but I do know that our, our ops team is, is using that. And, and then we still, we're still looking into the ways to implement it into the day, the day in the life of a CS team member. So we're not yet there. It's, it's, it's relatively, you know, newer for our deployment. Uh, but yeah, so I know the ops team is using it. I specifically, uh, not too much engagement with

Kevin Metzger: 6:41

it. One of the things that we found interesting while testing with it was that we asked it to build out a more Uh, story for us was able to kind of gather some, it didn't work consistently. It was the problem, but it was able to gather information and give us a couple of charts and, you know, kind of gave us the opportunity to, um, really look, look into how it might work if we had it structured properly within an organization. I thought that that was kind of a cool, cool thing that could do.

Gilad Shriki: 7:15

It's a cool, it's a cool capabilities. Just need to understand the persona that will use it. Um, and then and I had that conversation with with the final story team. Is it the CS member? Is it the leader? Is it maybe even a sales guy that doesn't know how to look at from the story charts and and you I and just want to ask, Hey, how's my customer doing, right? And where is this or that? So I think I think we still are trying here internally to figure out the tech stack for the rest of the organization and how we'll Salespeople engage with final story, and that's still a good question for us specifically. But I think in general, you know, whether the CS Person that is in charge of 500 accounts that can highlight them very easily if they chat, but is this the right approach is are they going into a chat bot that says what what should I do today or Does it need to be a ui element? That's a good question But for sales for sure or any other teams that are less Funnel story users. I think that's a very powerful capability to have and exposing the company.

Kevin Metzger: 8:22

Yeah, very good. Glad. Thank you so much for joining us. Do you have anything? Any other insights you'd like to share before we wrap up?

Gilad Shriki: 8:30

No, I think I think you know, just to to close that I think. AI is getting there, and I think seeing Funnel Story, which is the central place for us for customer journey, and to see that coming along, this is like, I think, really, it's going to be very powerful, it's going to get more powerful, and the sky is really the limit, and I'm looking forward to see what else this team is bringing on.

Kevin Metzger: 8:55

Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Incredible insights. Thank you for getting into the details of your experience with Funnel Story with us and our audience. That concludes our series with Galad on Funnel Story. You can find Galad on LinkedIn at linkedin. com slash ins slash G S H. R I K I, and learn more about Funnel Story at funnelstory. ai. If these episodes provide value, please subscribe and share them with your colleagues. We'll be back next week with more insights for your customer success playbook. Until then, keep on playing.