Customer intelligence | Thomas Voigt

[Thomas] (0:00 - 0:20)

But what I mean with this is I think we should start having a discussion on a higher level about what we want to do with AI going forward. You know, we see every newsletter is full of AI tools, AI items, how it will help us eventually. But I think the discussion should be, how can we actually create a customer intelligence?

[Dillon] (0:28 - 0:39)

What's up lifers and welcome to the daily stand up with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:40 - 0:41)

Hey, what's going on people?

[Dillon] (0:42 - 0:45)

And we've got Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:45 - 0:46)

What's up everybody?

[Dillon] (0:47 - 0:51)

And we have Thomas with us. Thomas, can you say hi, please?

[Thomas] (0:52 - 0:52)

Guten tag.

[JP] (0:53 - 0:59)

Oh, guten tag. Guten is free, but guten tag, you know what I mean?

[Dillon] (0:59 - 1:07)

Guten tag. Yeah. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Thomas, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Thomas] (1:08 - 1:47)

Sure. Hello everyone in English. I'm Thomas.

I'm the founder and CEO of the CS Academy. It's basically a company to help and go out and help CEOs, founders, scale up companies and build together with them as a co-pilot their CS function. That's what I do as a consultant, as a fractional leader.

And I also create some online courses to help our lovely CSMs to upskill themselves, but also leader to kind of really get up to speed on what's important, what do we need to change? And yeah, that's just me in 30 seconds. Very cool.

[Dillon] (1:47 - 2:05)

I like it. Thomas, you know what we do here? We ask every single guest one simple question and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

And I do believe you are uniquely positioned to have a very interesting perspective here. So can you tell us what is on your mind when it comes to CS?

[Thomas] (2:06 - 4:40)

Yeah, totally. So my question is, or the topic that I'm thinking about is, shall we move from artificial intelligence to customer intelligence, from AI to CI? And with CI, you know, it's not a new word, but what I mean with this is I think we should start having a discussion on a higher level about what we want to do with AI going forward.

You know, we see every newsletter is full of AI tools, AI agents, how it will help us eventually. But I think the discussion should be, how can we actually create a customer intelligence hub or pool or whatever to really collate all the information that we have from our customers? Because we have isolated information, isolated discussions, right?

So we know we need to need more information about our clients and what the value is and how it can change. And we need to predict, you know, the revenue a little bit better and so on. But these are all isolated things.

A customer intelligence is the conglomerate of everything. And ideally, a multiple co-pilot that is available not only for CSMs, but also to everyone who works in revenue. So it connects user behavior and payment history.

And you've got the financial data, like EONR, you've got your prediction of churn or not, you've got your conversational data that you gather from chatbox and, you know, from recorded things. But also, of course, you know, your product usage and your survey. So think about all this in a tool.

So for me as a consultant coming in now and helping these founders scale ups and scale up companies, my question is, how big should I start thinking right now? Is that something that we need to kind of consider? And how should we approach this topic basically now with go-to-market leaders when we come in?

And I think we should start right now. I think we should not, you know, focus on single solutions, how we can, you know, turn the kind of screw here and there. I think we need to have a bigger picture.

And this bigger picture might just vary from company to company, and it's a bit bigger or a bit smaller. But I think we need to move to customer intelligence. And that would be really cool to hear you guys on what your thoughts on this is.

Is it a topic? Is it too early? Is it too thought-provoking or not relevant?

Would be really keen to hear you guys out.

[Dillon] (4:41 - 5:08)

I wonder, before I let the guys loose, I love the idea. It's not the first time I've heard it, but it is, I feel like it is closer than ever to being a realistic option. And I wonder, Thomas, let me take a step back.

But I do not think it exists yet today. Do I have that wrong? Is Salesforce doing something like this?

Or is HubSpot doing something like this? Do you want to do it, Thomas?

[Thomas] (5:12 - 6:11)

Well, I do agree with you. I believe it does not exist. And this is just by listening to millions of podcasts, reading a lot of stuff.

And I feel like I've touched upon this, but we have not really thought about the end product as such, you know, what we actually need. Because the sweet spot for me is the end product. I believe that folks like, you know, Gainside folks and Salesforce people and HubSpot people, they might just think about it, or at least how to integrate this, how to facilitate this.

But it's really for me to come in, not only from a technical perspective, but also from a human perspective. So how we use this, how does it really make sense? How does it really deliver the utmost value to the client?

Will I do it? I don't think so. I'm just sharing the idea, but yeah.

It's big and it's hairy.

[Dillon] (6:12 - 6:51)

And it feels like at this stage, it's very much, it's got to be custom built for everybody because of all of those disparate systems. I assumed it would live within a CRM, but you threw out Gainside, which I think is an interesting wrinkle because it then requires you to transfer everything from pre-contract life cycle into another system, which to me just immediately felt foreign. Like it doesn't seem like the right solution.

I hate to say that for all of our CSP friends, please sponsor the podcast, but because it doesn't feel like the solution. Anyway, Rob, why don't you jump in?

[Rob] (6:51 - 7:23)

Yeah, this is a, I'm going to tell you guys how novel this concept is in my world. And Thomas, I like that you brought this to the table. In the last probably month, I've had several conversations with founders of startups where they say to me, this, we're building something that's never been done before.

And I'm like, what is it? And they're like, a co-pilot for customer success built on AI. And I'm like, oh, you too.

Okay. I have to mute my reaction. No, I don't want that to sound disparaging.

It's not disparaging.

[Dillon] (7:24 - 7:26)

Is this your reaction? You just bang your head against the...

[Rob] (7:26 - 8:53)

No, so here's actually why. Initially, I realized everyone's calling AI co-pilot for success, but actually they mean different things and they are actually working on innovative different things because some of these quote unquote co-pilots, it all depends on what the co-pilot is really designed to do. Some are designed for opportunity expansion.

Some are designed for customer retention. Some are designed for customer health scoring. Some are designed for referrals and advocacy opportunities.

And some are internally facing and some are externally facing to the customer. And so I actually do think there's an extraordinary amount of novelty in this space and a lot of innovation happening in this space. I mean, even some are just for support inboxes, which is very intriguing.

And so I was asking myself, why haven't these things, to your point or your question, Dillon, and your point, Thomas, why aren't these things widely adopted on the market yet? I mean, part of it's just the novelty and the fact that these tools are largely untested. And part of it too is this is forcing a question that a lot of CS teams have to deal with, that they may not have a very healthy customer journey or customer database.

Dillon and I talked about this for this one company in our network recently. We realized that in order for them to digitize customer success in meaningful ways, they had a lot of homework to do when it came to customer journey mapping and data cleanup. So it's going to be a bit of a challenge over the next year for a lot of CS teams, but I'm curious to hear the rest of your thoughts on that.

[Dillon] (8:54 - 8:58)

Thomas, any sort of response to what Rob said before I toss it over to JP?

[Thomas] (8:59 - 9:27)

I think you're right, Rob. And on the other side, I think it depends on the company, where you are. If you, of course, we operate in the same space, scale ups and tech companies, I'm assuming if you talk with the bigger companies, they might just get their head around this.

And I believe they do have a data pool that's a little bit more organized than just Excel spreadsheets. But I see what you mean. So I think this question is not for everyone.

[Dillon] (9:28 - 9:46)

Well, certainly not for everyone. I think a lot of folks don't think they need it or their business isn't there yet. Or there's a lot of them who think it's just going to live in Salesforce.

And I don't know that we live in a world where that solution carries a lot of water going forward. But JP, why don't you jump in?

-: 11:52

Yeah. So as a person on the front lines, the big problem is I don't want to do a lot of detective work. I want to be able to...

It benefits me greatly to be able to see everything I possibly can about the customer. Of course, the issue is, and it's a spoiler because it's the issue for the other thing I'm going to talk about too, is humans. We are imperfect.

So people are taking notes in all sorts of different ways. People are using Salesforce, which to me is a great system, but people use it all kinds of ways. You have something, there's like a million opportunities, there's information living in all these different places.

So even in one system, the information is fractured, it's fragmented, it's all over the place. So I have to hunt through even just in one to see some information. Then I have to hunt through in another system.

So even if something like Salesforce and Gong are integrated, I have to look everywhere. Now, the other thing that I'll say, and this is the thing that I think is ultimately going to get in the way, is people have to play nice. I love fragrances.

There's two sites I love looking at. If I wanted to create something to take advantage of their database, well, they own that data. I have to get their permission in order to be able to access their data so I can create my wonderful fragrance app that can make all these recommendations based on all this data that these people have.

And so if you're using a tech stack and you're using the Salesforce and Gong and you have things in Google and all these different things, well, how are all these sources of information going to talk to each other? Do you have something that has the capability to maybe go into one and extract all that information? I believe that still requires a level of permission.

So to me, this is a situation where bureaucracy or politics holds us back in terms of the innovation that would solve a very human problem, which is, hey, I just want to be able to do this much faster, but data boundaries, right?

[Dillon] (: 11:52

This is the same guy who was preaching optimism not long ago. That's real.

[JP] (: 12:00

That was real. I was real.

[Dillon] (: 12:03

I was real. I agree. Hey, look, you're speaking to my senses, my sensibilities.

Anyway, Thomas, we've got to get out of here. Do you have any final thoughts before we do that?

[Thomas] (: 12:11

Thank you for having me and thank you for just digesting this topic with me together and hopefully it will take off at some point in some shape. Thank you very much, guys.

[VO] (: 12:48

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