Irreplaceable | Archana Somasegar

[Archana] (0:00 - 0:25)

What empowers a lean team to be able to build those relationships is a lot of data analysis. It's a lot of context, understanding, it's a lot of looking at metrics. And that's the piece that I think we can do a good job of streamlining it, analyzing, understanding, and putting it into action oriented forward-looking terms.

So our team can do what they do best, which is building those relationships, closing the deals, but they have the right information to do so.

[Dillon] (0:33 - 0:44)

What's up lifers and welcome to the Daily Standup 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] (0:44 - 0:46)

Hey, what's going on people?

[Dillon] (0:47 - 0:49)

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

[Rob] (0:50 - 0:56)

With great power comes great responsibility. And we have, I'm afraid of spiders guys.

[JP] (0:56 - 1:00)

Oh my gosh.

[Dillon] (1:00 - 1:05)

Good to know, noted. And we have Archana with us. Archana, can you say hi, please?

[Archana] (1:05 - 1:06)

Hey there.

[Dillon] (1:06 - 1:13)

Hey there. And I'm your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Archana, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Archana] (1:13 - 1:33)

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Archana Somasegar, CEO of MindMe, and we're building an AI co-pilot to help customer engagement teams do what they do well already, but better. And what I mean by that is understand their customer, understand where the growth and revenue opportunities are, and proactively identify them in a personalized way.

[Dillon] (1:33 - 1:54)

I love it. I have a million questions. I'm going to refrain.

Archana, you know what we do here? We ask one simple question of every single guest. And this is your opportunity to, without knowing it, answer some of these questions I have for you.

The question is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success or customer engagement? So can you tell us what that is for you?

[Archana] (1:55 - 2:31)

Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing that's on my mind, and dare I say many people's minds, is the role of AI in customer success and customer engagement. And I know that that is a big, broad question.

Sales has already been taken over, but customer success, as its attractive sibling, is beginning to enter the conversation. And I think we're thinking about, OK, is it a world where customer success can be replaced by AI agents, or is it something where AI can actually help the person be better at what they do? And I think I feel pretty strongly about that, about where I kind of fall on that line.

So, so excited to talk about it today.

[Dillon] (2:31 - 2:48)

Now, I'm going to fall into your trap here, Archana, because I feel like we have to hear more about what your company does in order for us to talk about this in an informed manner. So can you run us through that just really briefly, and then we can take off?

[Archana] (2:48 - 3:51)

Yeah, so what MindMe does is we integrate pretty seamlessly into two main systems of our customers. One is your customer database. So we learn about who your customer is, what they do, how they do it.

And then the second thing that we do is we integrate into sort of what we call your product utilization database. So not only do we know who your customer is, but we're learning how does your customer use your product today, and how could they be using it better? I'll spare you some of the technical details, but we run it through some very sophisticated models to help our system understand what is the right next best action that our reps should be taking for an account to drive the most value.

Is that, hey, they could actually be using, you know, a different tier of the product to help them get more value? Or is it, hey, actually, I've got a million tickets open. Maybe they haven't been onboarded appropriately, and we need to intervene so that they can realize the value that was promised to them.

And then our platform takes those recommendations and helps a lean team action on them by creating personalized outreach based on the company, based on their context. And of course, based on the action that we think they should be taking.

[Dillon] (3:52 - 3:54)

When you say customer database, do you mean a CRM?

[Archana] (3:54 - 3:55)

I do. I do.

[Dillon] (3:55 - 4:02)

Okay. All right. Is there a reason you said customer database and not CRM?

Are there other systems I'm not thinking of that can do the same thing?

[Archana] (4:02 - 4:15)

Yeah, I think there's a couple of like customer success platforms out there. I would say the foundation and the bedrock of what most people do are think your HubSpot, your Salesforce. So that is, you know, 99.9% of the time what we're talking about. Cool.

[Dillon] (4:15 - 4:19)

Love it. Thank you. JP, why don't you jump in here?

What are you thinking?

[JP] (4:22 - 4:48)

Well, you know, there's, I'm trying to sort of maybe draw. I want to see maybe some more. What's the personal draw for you doing this?

In other words, you know, there's a lot of people doing, you know, AI co-pilots for CS. What is it that you sort of really see as the value that called to you? Like the thing that called to you, like, Hmm, I really want to, I really want to make this.

I really want to put this out.

[Archana] (4:48 - 6:27)

Yeah. So in my career, I've done a couple of things. One of which I think has been the most maybe formative for me as I joined what at the time was an early stage startup.

It was acquired by Shopify in: 2022

And I think it struck me how much people need to be talking about this organization because they are a core revenue driver for a business. And I think oftentimes people think of them as a cost center, as a extension of support. And in many cases they can fill that role, but it really is about how do you not only keep your existing customer base happy, but grow them.

And I think like when I was running the team, you know, we were in a fortunate position that we had a lot of customers, but a lean team. And the idea was how do we do right by our customers to help them see the value that we promised them in a sales cycle in a proactive one-to-one personalized relationship building way. And candidly, the tools that we had, you know, we were lucky we were well-capitalized.

So we sort of were looking at the gamut of what was out there. And there just wasn't a tool that took all of the data that we had and streamlined it into a customer facing action. And that was what we needed.

We just needed that one, hey, here's where we point and shoot our team to capture the most value. And nothing did that for us. And that really, I will tell you, it caused me some heartache in my time at Deliver.

And so when, you know, after the acquisition went through, I had time to take a step back and say, I have to be a better way to do that. You know, we came out of it alive because of the talent of the people we were working with, which is amazing, but how do we help ourselves be better?

[Dillon] (6:28 - 6:46)

And so what does the tool, is it some sort of like browser extension that just sort of like lives on the side of your screen at all times that you can ask questions of, or does it sit more in the background and it's like iframed into your CSP or your CRM? What exactly, how do folks experience it?

[Archana] (6:46 - 7:26)

Yeah, great question. So Pete, so customer success teams can log in directly into our platform and it's a very streamlined interface. And so what we do is we import all the accounts that a CSM might be owning, and we tie it directly to the action.

We say, hey, here's the action we think you should take today on this account. Here's the revenue opportunity we're tying to it, which is really unique to what we do, is we make it tie directly to your top line. And from within our platform, people can actually auto-generate and craft and send these personalized emails that'll go directly from their personal Gmails.

It's a layer that sits on top of your CRM, so we integrate into HubSpot and Salesforce, but we have our own interface.

[Rob] (7:26 - 7:37)

Rob, why don't you jump in? Yeah, I'm so intrigued by this topic. I'm intrigued by like the secret sauce, or the not-so-secret sauce, like the layer behind it.

[Dillon] (7:37 - 7:38)

That's what it's all about in Orkuta.

[Rob] (7:38 - 8:16)

But to start with the top layer, I think this is making me think about, I have a friend who posted something yesterday about a bot he built. It's the VAT generator. VAT stands for value-added touch points, and it's meant for non-responsive customers or prospects.

I want you guys to take a wild guess. Now, this is just over 24 hours ago that he posted this. How many people commented requesting the template?

And now, mind you, this guy has about 4,000 followers on LinkedIn, so not a massive number, but take a guess. Throw a number out there. 20,000.

Come on, you're supposed to go low.

[Archana] (8:17 - 8:22)

Okay, I'll go low, but I'm also intrigued. But let's say, you know, 500.

[Rob] (8:24 - 9:07)

1,347 people have requested this bot that generates, you know, what is supposed to be personalized follow-up. And it's been so much that this friend, he's the CEO of this company, he's like, I just pulled off of our current product road. And he's like, the engagement on this was so high that I pulled off of our current roadmap.

We're putting all of our dev efforts into this thing now because the market signal is clearly there. And so what's happening in the market is really interesting. Is it clearly there?

For him, based on the responses he's getting. You know, whether a LinkedIn post is representative of the market, like I would be lying if I said it were. It's not, by the way.

Prize goes to Dillon. No, I mean, this is one of several ways that he's evaluated the market.

[Dillon] (9:07 - 9:09)

Sounds cool, by the way.

[Rob] (9:09 - 9:40)

And I look at it and I look at like, I have, for example, I have a non-responsive customer playbook that I've refined over years and years dealing with non-responsive customers. And it varies the approach and the terminology. And I share this with all of my clients.

Personalizing it is the challenging part. And I look at it and I'm like, thank God there's finally technology that can help me take these templates and bring them to the 21st century by personalizing this outreach a lot more. I think that the interesting thing is we as an industry.

And by the way, thank you for calling us the attractive sibling of sales.

[Dillon] (9:40 - 9:41)

Yes, yeah.

-: 10:33

First time I've been known as the attractive sibling. But yeah, shout out to my sisters. What's up?

If you don't watch the show. But anyway, we all have this like collective unease about what the future looks like. And I think it's tools like this that intrigue me.

There's a lot of tools out there that are calling themselves an AI copilot of customer success. And what I've learned is that none of them are wrong. And actually many people are talking about quite different technologies, different methodologies, different inputs, different outputs, different functionalities.

So just for example, like when people say that, a question that I often ask is like, are you talking about technology that helps customer success teams, enables them to be better at retention and expansion? Are you talking about things that help drive customer value outcomes? Those are two totally different tools, right?

[Dillon] (: 10:34

Archana.

[Rob] (: 10:34

And you might have to train a bot, by the way. I'll just wrap up. You might have to train your copilot to know that difference and to make decisions on that difference.

Almost like the way, like I have a friend who engineers autonomous vehicles and they have to train these cars to know how to make game time decisions about what to do in crisis situation. And so it's intriguing, but I'll put it back to you Dillon.

[Dillon] (: 10:58

Yeah, I picked up what you were putting down and I wanted to pose this question to Archana as our closing thoughts of, how do you think about your target market with that understanding? I mean, you will understand that way better than we do. I'm sure in building this of, you've got a certain secret sauce, do not tell us what it is, but have you decided like, okay, I'm very specifically trying to solve this one pain point.

I mean, we talk about it a bit ambiguously, but it's like relieving the CS professional of having to debate in their own head what the next best step is with each customer.

[Archana] (: 11:37

Yeah, listen, I think my take here is we ask a lot of our CS professionals because we're asking them to be support reps. We're asking them to be salespeople. We're asking them to be data analysts and it's candidly just impossible for someone to really excel at all of those things.

And so when I think about what customer success means to me and how we can make it successful, it's the relationships that people are building and how they can build that one-to-one, understand the context, feel like they're the go-to person and be a partner. And that is fundamentally human. That's the first thing I'll say.

And then what is left, what empowers a lean team to be able to build those relationships is a lot of data analysis. It's a lot of context understanding. It's a lot of looking at metrics.

And that's the piece that I think we can do a good job of streamlining, analyzing, understanding, and putting it into action-oriented, forward-looking terms so our team can do what they do best, which is building those relationships, closing the deals, but they have the right information to do so. And I think that gap has been what's been lacking in customer success teams for years. And it's what makes people think of them as cost centers and not revenue drivers.

It's because they can't successfully look at this overload of data and translate it into action because no one can.

[Dillon] (: 12:50

Archana, that is our time, but I love it. Thank you so much for coming and sharing this project you're working on. Come back in a couple of months and tell us how it's going, what you've learned.

Maybe I would love to hear a failure and not because I wish that upon you, but because I feel like those are some of the best learnings. But until that time, we've got to say goodbye.

[Archana] (: 13:06

Thank you so much for your time, everyone.

[VO] (: 13:13

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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