Munish Gandhi’s Post

In Episode 15 of our CSM Chronicles series, Anna Caruso, Senior CSM at Mimecast, shares actionable advice on how to drive higher impact and customer value. “Maintaining regular contact with customers is key. This could be through adoption conversations, or more value-driven discussions like, ‘Look at what we've achieved for you in the past quarter,’ or ‘Here's what you could be doing that you're not currently leveraging.’ These are great ways to highlight your expertise as a CSM and build trust with the customer.” Thanks Becca Rawson for MCing the conversation. https://lnkd.in/gR4NZz52

"I remember the first Webcam. So the first streaming video was a coffee pot and it was literally a coffee pot. A guy had rigged up a camera, with a coffee pot down the hall in a CS department somewhere. So that he can see when the coffee pot was empty - to go refill it. It was pure utility for him.  And then he put the coffee pot online - it was the first webcam. So we all just sat for a week and watched the coffee pot. " - Marc Andreessen on "Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser" So many fun stories on the development of the early Internet from a16z “The Ben & Marc Show” podcast. https://lnkd.in/gX6uphGR Goes on to prove that early technology adopters are as much driven by utility as by the coolness factor. For any CS leaders and CSMs exploring how to leverage GenAI today to improve efficiency and effectiveness, explore Statisfy (www.statisfy.com) or DM me - I would love to show you what we are building.

CS leaders based out of the SF Bay Area: Join us in Menlo Park this Friday (7/12) for our monthly "Application of AI in CS" monthly luncheon with featured guest Neelu Shaikh, former SVP of Global Customer Success at ZoomInfo. Neelu will be the keynote speaker at Customer Success Collective's upcoming CCO Summit in SF. She will kick us off with her thoughts on “Delighting customers with Gen-AI: The future of hyper-personalized customer experience”. And then we will have a roundtable discussion. Great opportunity to learn, network and share your POV. Join us!

A rose by any other name  … Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it hired founders and ~80% employees from well-funded enterprise AI startup Adept to boost the tech giant’s ‘AGI’ team, somewhat mirroring Microsoft’s recent hiring of Mustafa Suleyman and many employees of Inflection AI. My take: 1. This is the new normal for large tech companies acquiring AI startups to avoid antitrust 2. Adept had raised $400M+ over the past 2 years with no commercialization. Probably needed a lot more money - which necessitated the move 3. On a positive note, it is great to see AWS investing in Agentic technologies At Statisfy, we see a massive opportunity in building the world’s first Customer AI Agent, helping enterprises delight their customers. This is a big validation for our strategy. https://lnkd.in/gTp52E-K

In Episode 14 of our CSM Chronicles series, Melissa Jeyaraj, Principal CSM at LinkedIn, shares her advice on growing your career in #CustomerSuccess . “Build trust in every customer success relationship. It's one of the core tenets I prioritize. Sometimes products break or things don't work as well as they should. If you have established trust with the customer, the engagement and communication is much easier to manage during those times.” As someone on the forefront of technology, she has some actionable tips on how she is using GenAI today: 1️⃣ Improve customer engagement i.e. Change management recommendations (input customer details and ask ChatGPT for suggestions on what might work or to help create ideas for a communication campaign 2️⃣ Automate administrative tasks so she can focus more on consulting with customers i.e. draft emails, write notes, follow-ups, and summaries Thanks Becca Rawson for MCing the conversation. https://lnkd.in/gtgfTaSN

Encouraging to see continued acceleration in Adoption of AI across the enterprise in Bain's Quarterly Executive Survey on AI. Not surprisingly, the top use cases are: - Software code development - Marketing - Customer Service Full report here: https://lnkd.in/g8767bV8

Agents Vs RPA: With the advent of new AI Agentic architectures, will agents replace RPA? Or are these agents fundamentally different? RPA is good for repetitive high volume tasks - it requires more deterministic data and process steps - what robots do on factory floors like pick stuff at Amazon warehouses. The thinking and process has already been done i.e. this is how you process a standard insurance claim. The downside is that because it is deterministic, It is likely unable to handle exceptions smartly i.e. how to tackle incorrectly filled insurance forms? If you add a new field to the Insurance form, you have to rebuild the Robot. Agent’s on the other hand are not deterministic - you give it a goal, an agent observes what humans do, learn, and figure out what data and process steps might be needed to achieve the goal. Hence, they are much better at figuring out how to handle exceptions, how to adapt as things change. My take: We are far from AGI. Agents will start with a narrow set of relatively simple tasks tied to specific systems. That’s how we are building at Statisfy. Incrementally, as models and agentic systems improve, we layer on complexity across data, process and decisions. What do you think? Credit to David Luan (Adept)’s for the inspiration behind this post. Listen to the full 20 minute VC podcast with David here. https://lnkd.in/gWsAMiMt

“I see two key aspects of where AI fits into Customer Success.  First, AI allows us to accelerate client success by simplifying interactions, easing the burden on clients when inputting data.  The second crucial aspect is AI’s ability to process customer data effectively - leveraging AI to analyze that data for actionable insights and reminders.” Ashu Avasthi, who leads customer success, client implementation, process improvement, and business operations teams at Certa.ai, shares his perspective on the impact of AI on Customer Success. In Episode 14 of our Debunking Myths blog series, Ashu dispels a CS myth (“Customer success equals customer satisfaction”), and shares actionable advice for CS professionals. Read on! https://lnkd.in/gk7ehmQu

We had an insightful discussion at our inaugural monthly "AI in CS Virtual Meetup today". Thanks again Ashvin Vaidyanathan for sharing the framework for how AI is acting as a catalyst to drive key business priorities for your team at LinkedIn Key takeaways from our round table discussion: • AI is being used to automate and personalize customer interactions, significantly improving efficiency and customer engagement. • The potential of AI to streamline administrative tasks and enhance data-driven decision-making in customer success is substantial. • AI's role in real-time translation and personalized communication is proving to be a game-changer in customer relations. • There is a strong focus on using AI to not only support existing processes but also to innovate new ways of customer interaction and service. With Amir Younes Thiru Subramaniam Manjit T. Jimmy Caplan Ravi Desai Max Jacob Jan Young, MBA, CSPO, CSM Sarita Agrawal Salil Jain Carl Timm Navin Agarwal Becca Rawson

It was great to bring together this amazing group of #CS leaders for our first #AI in CS luncheon. With Ashvin Vaidyanathan Atashi Jain Charlyn Everett Michael Edelstein Harshita Banka Kshama Swamy Leanna Castello Michael Liu Nadav Shem-Tov Rigo Rodriguez Rod Cherkas Sandra Bustos Sarita Agrawal UVL (Narayana) Uppuluri Navin Agarwal Ashvin kicked us off by laying out a clear framework for how AI is acting as a catalyst to drive key business priorities for his team at LinkedIn: 1️⃣ Accelerate value delivery 2️⃣ Improve customer experience by reducing friction 3️⃣ Increase productivity and operational efficiencies And shared specific examples of solutions they have implemented and outcomes it is driving. We had an insightful discussion on how the #CSM role will evolve with #AI - if you decompose CSM responsibilities into a 2X2 across “Opportunities for Automation” and “Critical for Value Delivery”, it is easier to identify the low hanging fruit with AI. And we had a fun discussion on how folks are using ChatGPT today: ✅ What do I need to know about this person? (LinkedIn profile)? ✅ What did company X share in their last earnings release about these topics …? ✅ Help me understand more about this industry around these topics ✅ For an executive-level escalation, can you help me write an email to summarize support case notes, engineering team input, customer notes etc? ✅ Help me prepare for this customer meeting (Bring together insights from last meeting, who are the people in the meeting, major news about customers)? ✅ (Fun fun) If you don’t like ChatGPTs response, tell it “You can do better than this. Otherwise I have to go to Claude” The consensus view emerged that trust and accuracy are hurdles for wider team adoption, but this group is definitely leveraging ChatGPT for everyday use cases. We will be hosting the next lunch on July 12. Meanwhile, Ashvin Vaidyanathan will kick us off this Friday for our Virtual Meetup this Friday, 6/21 Noon PST if CS Leaders wants to register: https://lu.ma/a93gbyr1