151. Inside Pulse: How 7 CS Leaders Are Moving Their Biggest Boulders With AI

The Pulse Conference was in Las Vegas.We sat down with a couple of customers of Gainsight and found out what their biggest hurdles were in the world of CS and how they’re using AI and other tools to keep their companies running smoothly and their customers sticky.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:00:25]:
All right, let’s dive in.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:00:27]:
I’m very excited to be here with Angel Rogers. Angel was the head of Customer Customer success at Rockwell Automation. And she’s going to tell us some really cool time savings that her and her team get out of AI.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:00:39]:
Angel, it’s great to meet you.

Angel Rogers [00:00:41]:
Thank you for having me.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:00:42]:
Thank you so much. Yes, absolutely.

Angel Rogers [00:00:43]:
Wonderful to meet you.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:00:44]:
One of the biggest rocks, and we talked about this before, that’s no pun intended, but at Rockwell, what are your top rocks that you as a team are pushing up the hill right now?

Angel Rogers [00:00:52]:
So for us, it is pun intended. We actually created a program within my organization called the Big Rocks. And every quarter and every sort of fiscal year, we pick the biggest challenges ahead of us and we put all of our focus into those challenges. So if it is a new sort of program or a new initiative that’s starting, if it doesn’t connect with one of the big rocks, it really needs to either replace a rock or it needs to become secondary. So it’s 120-year-old company that started as a transaction based one time sort of engagement selling hardware. So we have a lot of big rocks and we’re transforming every day. But some of the things I’d say is one, we just are a really large customer base and a really complex customer base. So we have over 85 different recurring revenue offers that my CS team supports.

Angel Rogers [00:01:38]:
We did over 100,000 contract renewals last year, none of which were auto renew, by the way.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:01:45]:
I didn’t ask you about this, but like, what does your team look like? What’s the size and scale of your team?

Angel Rogers [00:01:49]:
So we have about 300 people globally doing customer success and renewals and it’s a real mix. So we have like our regional teams that are really executing for North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. We have a software team that’s really thinking about some of our software go to market that looks and feels a little bit different than some of our, like core services, which is, you know, the bulk of what we have. And then we have a few acquisitions that we’ve done that we have real SaaS businesses running like Plex, for example. So we have sort of a mix and we’re organized around the customer experience. We really try to be thoughtful of how does customer buy from us, how do they use from us? And that’s how we’ve really been purposeful in organizing to go to market for them.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:02:31]:
So 300 plus CS, 85 different types of recurring revenue to sell and then.

Angel Rogers [00:02:37]:
100,000 contracts, 100,000 renewed contracts last year.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:02:41]:
Okay, that’s a lot.

Angel Rogers [00:02:42]:
All of which require a touch at some point.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:02:44]:
Yeah.

Angel Rogers [00:02:44]:
So when I have not meant to evade your question.

Matt Krebsbach [00:02:47]:
No, no, no.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:02:47]:
I want to get back to the question because that seems.

Sean MacPherson [00:02:49]:
That’s a beast.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:02:50]:
That’s a boulder. That’s a Boulder.

Angel Rogers [00:02:51]:
Just to be clear, Boulder Rock is how do we get to all of those customers? We can’t drive customer success if we don’t secure the renewal at the end of the day because they’re not a customer anymore. Right. So we really had to find our way to how do we drive scale and how do we get to our renewals, how do we make sure that we are securing this business? And then it has been about as we gain hours back using technology, using things like AI, how do we reinvest that back into the customer’s experience and start to do the real proactive customer success type activities that we know are critical for the best in class customer experience. And so it’s really again been about how do we use scale and technology to help us cover our business and how do we really thoughtfully reinvest that time back into making sure our customers are happy and want to stay with us.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:03:38]:
So how are you actually creating these efficiencies Through AI and through the other tooling?

Angel Rogers [00:03:42]:
Yeah. So I think first and foremost it is being informed and being able to make decisions based on data. So what we’re doing is we’re using tools like Staircase, we’re using tools like Renewal center within Gainsight to make sure that our CSMs aren’t just trying to equally spread out their engagements. They’re not using time based like we did in the past. Right. Just because 30 days has passed doesn’t mean you have to call your customer. It really is. There are markers happening, there are changes in behavior, there are upticks in behavior.

Angel Rogers [00:04:12]:
That’s when we have to be really thoughtful and pointed and drive intelligent interactions based on that information that we have. So it’s empowering our CSMs with information. It’s helping drive them to where they should be and when. And that’s sort of how we are saving the time and then driving it.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:04:27]:
Back and any cool initial results that you can share with us.

Angel Rogers [00:04:30]:
Yeah. So I’ll tell you one thing. I saw that it wasn’t cool at first, but it’s cool now. I guess one of the first things I saw from a staircase, sort of bucketized, here’s where your people are spending their time, was that my CSMs were spending over 3,000 hours scheduling meetings with customers. As you can imagine, I was not.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:04:47]:
Per day, per week, per month.

Angel Rogers [00:04:49]:
That was actually looking at, I think it was a per quarter metric.

Sean MacPherson [00:04:53]:
That’s a lot of time.

Angel Rogers [00:04:54]:
It’s a lot of time and it’s a lot of wasted time, to be honest. Right. Like there are digital tools to use that. So that was a really great place to say now that I have this information and I’m armed with it because I never would have assumed that now I can go make sure that we have. If they’re doing that, then either they don’t have the right tools or they don’t know how to use them. And so we went and we drove a campaign to try to correct some of those things. Right. And again, our CSMs are thrilled because they want to be doing more value add activities with their customers as well.

Angel Rogers [00:05:20]:
So it’s kind of a win win across the board.

Tony Pante [00:05:22]:
Awesome.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:05:23]:
Well, congratulations on those successes and everything ahead. And thank you so much for joining me.

Angel Rogers [00:05:27]:
Thanks for having me.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:05:28]:
Next up we have Sean McPherson from Fleetio.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:05:32]:
Hey, Sean. Thanks so much for being on the show today.

Sean MacPherson [00:05:34]:
Thanks for having me.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:05:35]:
Tell us about Fleetio. Let’s start there.

Sean MacPherson [00:05:37]:
Yeah. So Fleetio is a platform for fleet companies. So essentially anyone that has a vehicle that’s out in the field and needs to do maintenance, that could be one of our customers. From if you have 50,000 assets to two assets in the field. So we help those customers maintain the life cycle of their vehicles, of their assets, where that is a VIN based asset, construction vehicles, all of that good stuff.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:05:59]:
It’s all like the workforce that’s out there helping to maintain inventory. All the tracking and measuring, all the.

Sean MacPherson [00:06:04]:
Inventory, all the preventative maintenance, all the DOT compliance, all of the fun stuff that you just don’t think about.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:06:11]:
Oh, I think about that stuff all the time. Yeah.

Sean MacPherson [00:06:13]:
Always getting your oil changes.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:06:14]:
Yes. Let’s talk about AI. I want to understand what’s on your hit list for AI. How are you guys using it internally for your own strategy and enablement? Magic wand moment. How would you love to be using it? You personally and your team so what’s the current landscape of AI tooling and platforms and enablement at Fleetio?

Sean MacPherson [00:06:33]:
Yeah, we’re dabbling in it kind of broad right now, I would say, in the sense that we haven’t necessarily figured out what is the one or two use cases and we’re trying to start to narrow that down to make our team more efficient. So there’s two things we’re really focused on. One, on the post sale customer success side, what we. My vision really is how do we. From an external standpoint, when we look at, when our customers look at our team, I want them to view our team as the experts in the field so they understand fleet inside and out. So when you talk to One of our CSMs, they’re an expert. So what we want to really offload and make them more efficient at is how do you. From like note taking to emails to any of the more transactional work that sucks them away from being in front of the customer and providing that expertise.

Sean MacPherson [00:07:20]:
How do we actually automate that and how do we get better data out.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:07:23]:
Of that and save them time? How are you saving them a few hours a week if not more?

Sean MacPherson [00:07:26]:
Save them time and bring a lot of those learnings back to other folks in our company. So whether it’s the product team, the marketing team or the sales team, how do we democratize essentially that. That customer conversation, more saving time and.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:07:41]:
Knowledge transfer, potentially also even just creating a little knowledge too. How are they using AI to pull in that knowledge? Right. That they’re. That you want them to be educated on. Yeah.

Sean MacPherson [00:07:50]:
And then even on the, on the smaller side is how do we, how does someone interact with something that can just help themselves serve better instead of always having to pick up the phone?

Charlie Ferraro [00:07:59]:
Right, right.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:08:00]:
Okay, what’s the number one? What’s like the most annoying, frustrating piece of busy work you’d want to eliminate?

Sean MacPherson [00:08:07]:
Oh, it’s.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:08:08]:
And you can’t say one on ones with your team. Bad joke.

Sean MacPherson [00:08:15]:
No, it’s aggregating the reporting from all of these different systems and getting that into a singular place that’s digestible. So whether that is digestible from a roll up standpoint, from a cross functional standpoint, or even a down standpoint. But that is one of our biggest challenges right now. So we have so much data, but the visualization and just the extraction of the story is a lot of telemetry. Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:08:43]:
Voice of customer. Yeah.

Sean MacPherson [00:08:45]:
We have every gadget, application, you name it, but we still struggle to bring.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:08:51]:
The story 360 to tell the story. So maybe yeah. Capturing the data, analyzing the data, but then also, like you said, presenting the data as well. Yeah.

Sean MacPherson [00:09:00]:
And having the. I think the biggest thing is having the stakeholder understand what they’re consuming. If you are very intimate with the data, you understand exactly what you’re seeing. But if you’re a CEO that has five seconds to talk about the data, you just want it real fast and real quick. You don’t want the whole all the.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:09:17]:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Because we talk a lot about how AI can help us understand our own data and narrative internally, but we actually don’t talk about it all that much or as much nearly how it can.

Tony Pante [00:09:27]:
Help the customer on their end as well.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:09:29]:
I like that. I like that. Well, I’d love to have you back next year. We’ll check in with you, see how those things are going if you’re forming, norming, storming, all the rest. Sean, thanks, man. Appreciate it. Always great catching up with you and wishing you and Fleetio the best of luck in the coming year.

Sean MacPherson [00:09:43]:
Yes, thank you.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:09:45]:
Up next, we have Tiffany Taylor with Handshake.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:09:48]:
Tiffany, thank you so much for being with us today. I want to know what are the biggest rocks right now that you and the team at Handshake are focused on?

Tiffany Taylor [00:09:57]:
We are changing the way our customers have done their work for so long. And so it’s a lot of change management without going in the nitty gritty of the product. It’s where we need to drive adoption around some key features that are kind of changing the way some old school work was done.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:10:13]:
I want to go into the nitty gritty, but go get deep.

Tiffany Taylor [00:10:16]:
Well, for a long time job search was. I’m not going to age both of us, but it was. You submitted a resume for some folks in the post and you may or may not have heard back and the process was long. Today’s generation searches in different ways. We’re looking at community, connection, networking. We are transitioning fields differently from what you got your major in. And at Handshake, we believe a singular platform can do all of those things. Peer to peer feedback, connect with mentors, connect with an alum, get feedback on the resume, get suggested jobs.

Tiffany Taylor [00:10:51]:
And so that’s a little bit different for folks who are career counselors for maybe 40 years ago. And so we are trying to bring folks along with respect to an institution that they know better than anyone else and do that in a way that is going to continue to help to give Gen Z jobs, hopefully our jobs in the future.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:11:10]:
Yeah. So what’s your playbook look like for change management.

Tiffany Taylor [00:11:13]:
In that sense, it’s slow, but also fast. It starts with getting a lot of feedback from the customer. We start with the beta groups, small intimate champions and detractors getting that feedback, talking with R and D and when that launches. The part that I think Gainsight really plays a critical role is then tracking how fast are we able to get maximum adoption for each of those tools along the way, of course, while not deterring sentiment.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:11:44]:
AI. Let’s talk about AI. Somewhat of a big topic, right?

Tiffany Taylor [00:11:48]:
Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:11:49]:
I’d like to know how you’re thinking about it, how you’re exploring it, the early days of it, what’s going on at handshake right now with your team.

Tiffany Taylor [00:11:55]:
A couple ways right now might feel very rudimentary to folks, but my team is very. We are on site a lot with our customers and so you can imagine the feedback loop even just from sending a survey and wanting to get that back from them can be kind of slow. They could be on the road for five days. I might not read that feedback for six, seven days. Then we have a one on one and implement it. You get the gist. Impact analyzer actually in Gainsight can help to analyze that feedback immediately and then suggest the actions and almost if I heard our product roadmap today correctly, generate the advise action. So hey, you just had this great experience on site.

Tiffany Taylor [00:12:34]:
Go set X feature up so that you can execute Y action so that lessening of time to value for the customer and certainly my own time is where we need to go. We have the tools and now we just need to get there. But on a very simple basis. It’s just analyzing feedback and getting the actions rolled out as quickly as possible.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:12:53]:
And what’s the impact of that decreased time to value for you and for your customers?

Tiffany Taylor [00:12:58]:
Amazing. First of all, I actually think we’ll be able to even meet our customers more and have. I think when you do it manually, you end up looking at your email and you’re saying, oh, I want them to do five things. But let me just suggest one. I am certain AI will help us generate. No, we can do all five, but in fact if we roll it out at this cadence, at this pace, so inevitably we’re getting our customers to do more at a shorter period of time. Which seems boggling to me because I couldn’t have thought that we could have done that even a year ago. The next is that we are in a global space and I think not immediately, but certainly helping with localization, translation of language of the information that we’re using and we’re definitely underutilizing, just scraping all of our resources, use, glean all of our resources to help create course content.

Tiffany Taylor [00:13:51]:
Right now, again, we’re relying on a human, a beautiful human’s brain to do that. But AI can certainly help. So that’s now making our content more efficient.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:13:59]:
Tiffany Taylor, thank you so much for joining me.

Tiffany Taylor [00:14:01]:
It was a pleasure.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:14:02]:
Up next, we have Matt Krebsbach, the director of technology and Strategy Operations at boomi.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:14:09]:
Matt, great. Thanks so much for joining me. I want to ask you, what are the biggest rocks right now that in your role, you’re the director of technology Strategy Operations at boom, what are the biggest rocks you’re tackling?

Matt Krebsbach [00:14:21]:
Scalability, I think, is the biggest rock that all of us are trying to tackle. And I think with that comes AI and how we want to use AI to help handle the most repeatable actions that we have in our business so that we can use our resources in the most meaningful way.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:14:36]:
What do you want to have scale more?

Matt Krebsbach [00:14:38]:
Everything. I think customer outcomes is the first one that comes to mind. We want scale in how we deliver consistent customer outcomes, whether through our success services, support engagements, and really repeatable actions for our team. Our team, we have great folks, but we want them to be as efficient and effective as possible. So arming them with the best data so the right people in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:15:04]:
The perfect trifecta. I guess it’s four, but okay, so like what repeatable actions, like what’s, what is the key daily flow that you would love to be able to just have scale repeatedly, consistently across your organization.

Matt Krebsbach [00:15:20]:
Yeah. If we think about it from a success viewpoint, starting out, we want them to automatically know going into their day what are their priorities for the day and not have them have to go and deliver that or their manager to have that surface through the open actions that are happening within their customer accounts or their book of business. And so they get a recap of, here’s what I need to do today. And then as you’re engaging with the customer, automatic summarization of what’s happening in those engagements and the action items they take out of it. So their work is constantly being prioritized and reprioritized on the things that are most important for the business and most important for the customers that they serve.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:15:56]:
And what are you guys doing now to get to that scalability?

Matt Krebsbach [00:16:00]:
So we use a combination of Gainsight solutions, including Gainsight CS platform. We use Staircase AI we also have a platform called Reef AI which is doing kind of scarcity based regression modeling around churn for us to help prioritize kind of the long run of accounts for us. So we have all of these that are ingesting all of the signals that are happening and then prioritizing those signals for our customer success folks to be able to understand what is the biggest.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:16:28]:
Actionable items for them and how’s the team received all this new next generation tooling.

Matt Krebsbach [00:16:33]:
I think the first viewpoint everyone had was can I trust the score? Can I trust the insights? And I think as you start to engage them and enable them on how the insights are created and delivered, then they start to build trust in it. And then as they start to use it, you pilot it out and you start to see groups for it, then they’re like, yeah, this is great. This saves me four hours a day that I was doing this repeatable action. Now I can just focus on customers. Then they start to see it in action and then it reinforces the behavior that this is good, this helps me. And so it’s really just connecting and enabling them so that they feel that trust in the solution, that it benefits them and it benefits the outcomes they’re trying to deliver for their customers.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:17:15]:
Let’s keep going on AI, the AI train here. So clearly you’re doing things to help increase the scale and time savings as well. Any other priorities as you think about what you’re currently doing with AI or what you want to be doing in the near term or longer term, that’s on your radar.

Matt Krebsbach [00:17:32]:
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of things around AI. I think we need to understand how agents are going to work both independently and with each other. And so for us it’s understanding from a tech stack standpoint. You know, where are we contributing all of our focus to and what are the bets that we’re making? Right around, hey, do they have the vision that aligns to how we’re thinking about things and the outcomes we’re trying to drive to customers and then doubling down, tripling down on those so that you can deliver the outcomes you want. But then how do they play together? So for us thinking about, you know, gainsight and the outcomes are trying to drive from a success perspective where we pull in data from, you know, gong from CRM, from you know, our product, from our data warehouse, pulling all of this in so we then have all of the insights within one solution that then you’re putting these AI agents over that have all the data they need, need to be able to interact with and then it’s all right, what’s possible then? Right? So you’re enabling the data so that the agents can access the data and then anything becomes possible. If you can dream it, you can build it kind of thing. But you need the data. Right?

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:18:36]:
Matt, it was great. I love what you guys are doing. You seem to be like a step.

Matt Krebsbach [00:18:39]:
Ahead on the curve.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:18:40]:
This is very intentional for you and I think you’ve shared some great learnings for the rest of us out there. Thank you so much for joining me.

Matt Krebsbach [00:18:46]:
Appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:18:47]:
Up next, we’re chatting with Charlie Ferreira.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:18:51]:
Charlie, thanks so much for being here with me today to get things started. I want to ask you, what are the biggest rocks right now that you’re tackling in your post sales roadmap?

Charlie Ferraro [00:19:01]:
Probably like every other CS person. Retention. Retention. Retention. And of course, AI efficiency.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:19:10]:
And AI efficiency. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, I think I’ve heard those before. Yeah. Okay, so retention. Let’s break that down.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:19:16]:
What specifically about retention? How are you like, where is the gap and how are you trying to solve it?

Charlie Ferraro [00:19:23]:
Yeah, great question. So, I mean, our top line is grr. So we were measured on GRR and logo retention. And yeah, we’re partway through the year. But in CS land, we’re pretty much working the end of the year right now. And we. Our busiest time is December. So, like, that’s when, you know, all our deals usually close.

Charlie Ferraro [00:19:49]:
So what we’re working on now is all Those like critical EBRs and things like that, all the value realization and value articulation for that crazy busy time at the end of the year. So some of the things that we’re doing is like, do you, like, what is your pain as a csm, as a customer facing person, to deliver value as efficiently as possible to your customer.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:20:13]:
Cool.

Charlie Ferraro [00:20:13]:
How can you make that more efficient? And how do like. So we’ve taken all our. We’ve taken as much of our data as possible, put it into our data warehouse. So vibe code away. And maybe a few of the team have already built agents that interact with the account team in Slack.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:20:34]:
I know that’s one of the more popular features for Staircase. You mentioned that you’re using Staircase.

Charlie Ferraro [00:20:39]:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:20:41]:
And you know, Staircase is the rising star in the AI landscape of customer success and post sales. How are you specifically getting the most value out of Staircase?

Charlie Ferraro [00:20:50]:
Oh, man. So we’ve been with staircase since 2023, so it’s been.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:20:54]:
You’re OG. I think we kind of are.

Charlie Ferraro [00:20:56]:
Yeah, yeah. So it’s been pretty great. We’ve got a really great baseline with Staircase. At the end of last year, we operationalized all our internal OKRs. So we’ve got those, which are what we. Those are our leading indicators that we believe will get us to this. Like, you know, our GRR and retention targets. Right.

Charlie Ferraro [00:21:14]:
So we’ve operationalized those. Those are all sitting there in Staircase. Staircase does all the AI analysis, engagement analysis, early 2023 pre staircase, it was probably like, you know, CSM, Spidey sense plus, you know, adoption metrics and timing triggers. And now. Yeah, like we’re going to have to move away from your typical, you know, a license adoption feature function adoption to what is adoption in an agentic product.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:21:47]:
We’re all going to be figuring out new ways of working.

Charlie Ferraro [00:21:50]:
Yeah. So as a CS team, we’re going to have to figure out, okay, what is that? Like, what are those signals and how do I proactively act on that to deliver customer outcomes.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:22:00]:
Yeah. Charlie, thank you so much for stopping by. It’s a great conversation. Thanks for sharing what you guys are doing.

Charlie Ferraro [00:22:05]:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:22:07]:
Please welcome Margo Martin, the chief customer officer at Deltek.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:22:11]:
Margo, thank you so much for joining me on this program.

Margo Martin [00:22:14]:
Thanks, Josh, for having me. I’m excited to chat with you.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:22:16]:
A large domain of lots of things going on. I’m a little bit privy to some of the activities. What are the biggest rocks right now that you’re focused on? Biggest priorities?

Margo Martin [00:22:24]:
Yeah, I think on the customer success side, I mean, obviously, you know, churn and nrr and so that’s a big boulder for us, like making sure that we’re taking care of our customers. Focusing on adoption is a big boulder for us this year.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:22:38]:
We, by the way, sorry, I love the fact that I talked about rocks, but you upgraded us to boulders. So you’re giving a little bit of a peek into your mind of like the real, you know, the imminence and the impact of these things. I love it.

Margo Martin [00:22:50]:
Exactly what keeps me up at night.

Charlie Ferraro [00:22:51]:
Right.

Margo Martin [00:22:52]:
So I would say scalability, obviously. And how do we scale? Because I remember our former CEO telling me when I took on the customer success job, he said, I’m not going to keep throwing bodies at this. You can’t keep hiring csm, so how are you going to scale? So scalability, digital, how are we going to work on adoption and getting our customers to use our product when a CSM has 500 accounts right at the small end? So scalability, digital AI keeps me up at night and Those are big boulders. Like, how can we do. How do we do more with less?

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:23:26]:
And so do more with less. Oh my God. If I would nickel for every time.

Margo Martin [00:23:29]:
If you would nickel for everything. I always think it’s funny that we put that in with our tagline, but our CEO at the time didn’t really like that.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:23:36]:
No, I get it, I get it. Okay, so AI is keeping you up at night, but is that good anxiety or is that worry something?

Margo Martin [00:23:44]:
I just want to go faster. I want all of it. I want agents, I want, I want all of it. I just want us to go faster because I think having that will free up our CSMs to do the real work. Right. Work on adoption, build relationships, become that trusted advisor.

Margo Martin [00:24:03]:
It’ll help our renewals team get through more quickly. It’ll add so much automation and I think it’ll get us in front of problems faster. If I don’t have to wait for the support cases to flow over to Gainsight and the NPS scores to flow over to Gainsight because that’s all. They’re lagging indicators of what’s really going on in a business. But all of a sudden I know within 15 minutes that 20 of our customers have submitted sub one cases and there’s a defect and that we can get ahead of that and we can go out and say, hey, we’re working on it. Don’t panic. The fix is going to be available within an hour. That instead of finding out about it because a customer calls us and yells at us.

Margo Martin [00:24:43]:
Right. I mean, I just think the value we’re going to be able to add for our customers is going to be truly amazing.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:24:48]:
And where are you in the journey right now? Have you dabbled yet? Are you kind of on the precipice?

Margo Martin [00:24:53]:
So like I want Staircase AI our Gainsight instances set up at the relationship level, which that’s usually the last thing that Gainsight rolls out is at the relationship level. So I’m pushing them really hard to roll out Staircase AI at the relationship level sooner rather than later. So I would, I would jump all over that.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:25:12]:
But what’s the top insight you would want at the relationship level via Staircase?

Margo Martin [00:25:17]:
Because our customers own multiple products. Multiple products. Right. It’d be great to see that holistic picture. Like, okay, this add on is they’re in trouble. Like this one’s not going well or. But their ERP is going well. But seeing that like the whole relationship of the customer.

Margo Martin [00:25:33]:
Because some of our products are really different. They’re like subscription based and so they have separate CSMs for that. But like unless that CSM tells the main CSM like, or they put it in gainsight, like you’re not, you’re not getting all that information, but having that information before you have to go tell someone and it’s all teeing up and that just sounds amazing to me. But again, I just, I really want our CSMs and our renewals team to be able to focus on the bigger picture items than putting out fires all the time.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:26:03]:
Lots of exciting things.

Margo Martin [00:26:04]:
Lots of exciting things.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:26:05]:
Thank you, Margo. I appreciate your time. Thanks for being on the program.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:26:08]:
Yeah, welcome.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:26:10]:
Tony Ponte, global head of scale and engagement center at SAP.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:26:14]:
Tony, thank you so much for being here.

Tony Pante [00:26:16]:
You bet. Thanks for the opportunity. Good to meet you.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:26:18]:
Yeah, likewise. Okay, so you’ve been at SAP for 18 years. Just, you know, just a little bit of a tenure. Yeah. I want to learn, I want to learn about your role. I want to learn. Usually we ask like, okay, well what does your company do? I think everybody kind of knows what SAP does, but you could give us the 10 seconds on that. But a little context setting.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:26:34]:
So tell us about SAP, tell us about your org and then I want to learn about your amazing trajectory and your growth through those at sure, sure.

Tony Pante [00:26:41]:
SAP, pretty big company. Well over 50 years, we run the world’s economy. So think of inventory management, account management, hr, all running on a platform. And the beauty of the products is you got the products, you get the data AI on top of it. We’re all talking about AI. The organization that I lead is about, it’s a global organization focusing on customer success. How do we make sure our customers use the best features to drive their business value? You drive business value, you reduce churn, you drive adoption and consumption. So we’re really committed to making sure our customers are successful.

Tony Pante [00:27:09]:
We do that two ways. We’ve got large customers, biggest customers on the planet that will use the high touch motion that will help engage with those customers. Maybe one to four, one to two type customer relationship. So they have real intimate relationships with.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:27:22]:
One CS member to two large customers.

Tony Pante [00:27:25]:
Correct. But then on the other end of the spectrum could be a digital coverage where we got digital CSMs and they could cover maybe 100 customers. Again, working through a value journey, being there to support customers, but looking to do a little bit more digital engagement, self service promotion. But what we find out is as you engage with customers, you share best practice, you share community, good things happen.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:27:46]:
So I was going to ask you what biggest priorities and biggest rocks for you right now? You might have just answered it. I mean, where are you right now?

Tony Pante [00:27:52]:
We’ve had a decent amount of change at SAP as we continue continue to grow and get more efficient. We’ve come out with a lot of new capabilities around AI. AI embedded into our software, data supporting all of our different applications. Commercial.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:28:04]:
You heard from this commercial?

Tony Pante [00:28:05]:
Yeah, yeah. So we’ve got some really fantastic capabilities built in and then being used by our customers. So we’re trying to help make sure we drive adoption. That is our single biggest big rock. We still have many customers that either use a single product or not enough of that single product. How do we drive adoption? And that comes back to understanding value drivers, understanding the capabilities or the value that the customer wants to drive, supporting them with capabilities that we have in our software and making sure they have the assets and content to use it. So we’re going to continue to stay on that. We’re covering more and more customers.

Tony Pante [00:28:36]:
We’re covering an expanded set of solutions that we provide. So those are the kind of the big rocks is some of the basic themes. How do we engage, how do we make sure we drive adoption? Where it’s getting interesting for us is the portfolio has expanded and oh, by the way, we just moved the gainset. So that’s changing how the CSM organization operates. 2000 CSMs all around the planet with the expectations even to go higher.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:28:59]:
Did you go from zero to 60? You went from zero to 2,000.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:29:01]:
What was the phase approach we went from?

Tony Pante [00:29:03]:
This is our first phase. We went from zero to 2,000. When we flipped the switch, we had a lot of training. Phenomenal change management organization, really great partnership with Gainsight with our IT organization. And we really focused on change management, communication and training to make sure we brought the capabilities to the CSMs. Still early, early. We just came out of a meeting. We’re saying, hey, how do we know how things are working? And right now we’re tracking are people using it? And then the next step is to say, hey, how are they using it?

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:29:32]:
Let’s talk about AI. We have to talk about AI.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:29:34]:
You talked about IT being embedded now into your products. How are you thinking about it? What are you most excited about? Maybe anxious about as well?

Tony Pante [00:29:42]:
Yeah, a couple things. It’s just fascinating to see how powerful it can be. I mean, we’re at the early stages as we think about using it internally. How do you help write presentations, translation? It’s pretty cool because we support many, many different languages. We’re using AI to help us with translation and content creation for 10 different languages around the world. So you get 95% of it done. And then we have folks with local language that help us. So that’s gotten us off the.

Tony Pante [00:30:08]:
That’s off the track.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:30:09]:
Huge cost savings, huge speed ramping of those efforts.

Tony Pante [00:30:12]:
Very much so.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:30:13]:
And then what we did is we.

Tony Pante [00:30:13]:
Actually took a lot of the Gainsight content and a lot of our training on Gainsight and we took the AI agent to learn from that. So that’s helped with the enablement and the learning. And now we’re starting to think about, okay, how do we build an SAP best practice? So we’re using the AI cheat sheet from Gainsight. That’s helping us with some account information. We’re going to bring our SAP product, which is SAP jewel soon. I believe that’s going to be happening in about two months where you have that agent sitting on Gainsight to help us with insight. So you start thinking about where a CSM is now and it’s helping to get some efficiency gains. Six months from now, a year from now, it could be a completely different game where the data and the analysis of the data from the agent supports the csm.

Tony Pante [00:30:54]:
So the basic stuff the CSM has to do can be automated. You know, how do you free up the human so that they can be human? And that’s exactly the presence that we’re taking is. I’m not too worried about AI taking away jobs because we help customers and customers still want to talk to people. I just want to make sure that they can get more efficient because I don’t know, honestly, we’re growing substantially. I don’t know if we’re going to be able. I’d rather not have to go back to my board and say, hey, I’d like more headcount. I’d rather be able to say, here’s the efficiencies I’m seeing. Oh, by the way, and I can bank on it for the next year, two years.

Tony Pante [00:31:26]:
This technology helps us get more productive.

Josh Schachter [Host] [00:31:28]:
I can do more with the same. Yeah. Tony, thank you so much for joining me. Great conversation. Thanks for the tips. You bet.