Customer Success Playbook with Emilia D'Anzica (FULL EPISODE)

Hello and welcome to the Customer Success Playbook podcast where we're passionate about elevating your customer success game. I'm Roman Tried and I'm joined by my co host, Kevin Metzger. Kevin, how you doing today?

Doing well.

Good, good, good for our audience. Don't forget, for a deep dive into our past episodes, videos, articles and more, head over to our website, Customer Success Playbook. And remember to like, share and subscribe to our podcast and our YouTube channel. And we're committed to bringing you the latest insights and expertise from the industry's best minds. Kev, we got a great guest and topic lined up today. I'm super excited about this. You want to kick us off and do the introduction?

Yeah, I'm very excited as well. Today we're joined by Amelia Danzica, the founder and CEO of Growth Molecules. Amelia is an accomplished customer success leader, author, speaker and Entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience helping companies grow through customer centric strategies. Amelia's career spans leadership roles at high growth tech companies like WalkMe, BrightEdge and Jobvite, where she created and scaled customer success teams. And Amelia serves as an advisor, serves on advisory boards for several SaaS companies. She's also the co founder of Pressing on as a Tech Mom, a book and movement to support women in tech. She teaches an MBA class on customer analytics and marketing and recently had an academic paper published. In today's episode of Customer Success Playbook, we'll be exploring the growing role of AI in customer success and discussing how it can be used to elevate customer engagement and retention. The success of any business depends on creating lasting and meaningful relationships with customers. But as companies scale, delivering personalized service and predicting customer needs gets harder. And this is where AI can come in. From chatbots to predictive analytics, AI is transforming customer success. In this episode, we'll dive into how AI is impacting cs, from onboarding and education to proactive outreach and retention. We'll talk through use cases like churn predictions, virtual assistants, and conversational intelligence. I can't wait to explore this transformative topic with Amelia today. And Amelia, I don't think I mentioned it in the intro, but you're also on the board of Update AI, which is really sitting in the center of the space right now. I thought maybe that'd be a good place to start.

Yeah, absolutely. I love. And first of all, thank you for inviting me to be on the show today. I'm super excited to talk about this topic, but Update AI is doing incredible things with their platform and the way that Josh and Mickey are really bringing in the voice of the users to create the future of the product is incredible. Having been with Josh for now over a year and seeing how much the product has evolved is amazing. And our company uses it. And now that I have it in our organization, I think it'd be very hard to let it go because of the amount of time it saves us in communicating with our clients.

Yeah. And for those that our audience members who aren't familiar with update AI and keep me honest, Amelia, it's a AI kind of call transcription note taking. So if you have a meeting, it's going to give you the transcription, it's going to give you the kind of the key takeaways of that conversation, the next steps to take. I think it also, I've seen it has the talk track of how often I talk versus you talk, et cetera. Is that did I kind of mind the right ballpark there with the solution?

You're right. And now you can share snippets from the call, which I believe is incredibly important. When you're call coaching your customer success team, not enough people leverage that, that opportunity. And then the other thing you can do is it writes your emails for you, for your clients. Now of course you'll massage it to make it your voice you better or people will know right away. But it does save a tremendous amount of time because if you're a customer success manager, we've all been there. We have six, six to eight back to back calls and then you forget what the action items were in call one and it's draining to have to go through it. So this really helps speed up time.

Yeah, I think it's such an incredible tool as far as just really being able to capture stuff. We use tool with the podcast, doing things similarly and it really does help.

Yeah, I'm working with Kevin actually with a client now and they're scaling Amelia like a customer success team. Right. They're in like hyper growth mode and they're still trying to figure it out. And they, you know, I, a few people in the team are, all they're doing is taking notes and you know, transcribing this. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, I think I know something here because you had sent me that great like kind of summary of our call when we, before you came on the show. I'm like, this is a no brainer, like why are we not using this? Get something like this to come in here. How much time can you save? And I know just me being on calls and typing up notes and like you said, when you're back to back, you know, I have a call at 1 and I try to get to the notes at 4 and I'm like, I don't know my handwriting, maybe just me. I can't read half the notes I take. You know, I don't remember anything. I'm like, why did I put tree on there? We weren't even talking about trees. So I think it's a great tool. And with that is that like in terms of AI in specifically the customer success space? This, that, that a solution like that seems like a no brainer. Right, right. It's just a real, you know, it's a time saver for, for the CS team, you know, the efficiency you gain back. Where else? Like if, if companies are exploring AI tools like where else should they be looking to like really kind of help, you know, gain efficiency and better serve their, their customers?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think I have a biased perspective from our clients. We work with companies who want to scale customer success. And one of the biggest challenges right now we're seeing is that executives aren't showing up to their quarterly or executive business reviews. And when we interview the clients and then we interview the customers and we ask, you know, why the client asked us to interview you, they fully know that why aren't you showing up? And they flat out always, nearly always say the same thing. None of the information is new. I don't feel like it's a good investment of my time and I want to understand why I, as an executive, when I have 30 other vendors I'm working with, I would show up to this one. Imagine having 30 quarterly business reviews every three months. I mean, that's overwhelming, right? You have to your time. So what I'm leading to is a platform called Matic. It aggregates all of the data that you have and it literally builds your executive business reviews and talk tracks that bring insights that a CSM may not necessarily have access to because they don't have access to Snowflake. And all of the data that product might have through a platform like Walkme or Pendo. And then to be able to tell a story makes a very different conversation. So that's another one I'm really excited about is around the quarterly business reviews and then I believe for executives being able to aggregate data that you can bring to the board, the board wants to know what is happening, what is the pulse of the client and why and where's the leaky bucket. You can't just look at NRR for example, they want to know how many logos are you losing, how and why. And so those kind of platforms can really help change the narrative and then of course get budget. That's another reason why AI is becoming so incredibly powerful, is to be able to tell the narrative of why we should invest in one thing versus another and then what is the forecasted revenue as a result.

Yeah, makes sense. Sit. Those are a lot of great kind of areas where you see it using from a scale perspective. How do you see it playing in to help scale organizations? You know, especially as I think budgets are tighter, right? Hiring budgets are tighter. That means you've got to be able to get into more, more customers with fewer people, have more touch points. I think there's, I, I definitely know there's an opportunity to kind of drive more personalization through AI. But where, where, what other areas do you see or how else do you see that playing in?

Yeah, I, I believe in the training and onboarding space right now, especially with customer success professionals and AI driven onboarding processes can help provide guidance for the CSMS on what they should be improving. There are several platforms out there. All of the learning LMS platforms out there right now are researching and trying to understand how can we make onboarding not only go faster, but also be more interactive. So our organization does training live classes with cohorts of teams. However, what we tell them at the end is you need to keep this going, you need to keep practicing the role playing, submitting videos of each other, and then things like AI can tell you what are the keywords you missed or what, where did your voice, for example, start to falter, lack confidence, use filler words, all of those kind of things AI can help with. So that's incredibly important. And then customer engagement and communication. It's, it's really important when you're onboarding your customers that you make it a personalized communication experience. So even if you're automating a lot of it in HubSpot, a customer success platform, salesforce, whatever, you can still make it a personalized experience with AI. Even the automatic check ins, yes, they're automatic, but if you actually pull in data from the client's account, then you're able to have that more personalized experience. I see that you're actually talking about my account and I will click to schedule that button. I have become so obsessed with these emails I always analyze. Was this written by a human? Was it like it's actually directed to me? And always very tempted to click, reply and say here's how you can make it better. But of course I abstain.

So you are like super on top of like the AI space. And, and I, you know, I know Kevin and I talk about it a lot. Like, even offline of the podcast, like, we both are fascinated about it, but I, I feel like a little overwhelmed with it. Like, there is just so much data coming and it's hard to kind of for me to sort through it. Like, I guess my question is, like, who, like, what are the voices you listen to in the space? Like the thought leaders? Like, how do you stay on top of it? How do I kind of sift through some of the noise versus, like the real solutions? And like, what really should I be paying attention to on, you know, as we talk about AI?

Yeah. So, I mean, we've, we've already talked about Mickey and Josh. They're doing some amazing things specifically, specifically for customer success at Update AI. Another person who I think should, we should shine light on is Mira Murati. She's 34. She's the CTO of ChatGPT and so she deserves so much recognition in the space. I also believe that any of the customer success platforms, I don't want to have any bias towards any of them, especially as a consultant, but they're all doing pretty incredible things with ChatGPT and how they're incorporating Bard whatever in their platforms. Really looking at how can that help your team, even HubSpot, they've come out with a lot Canva. For anyone who's using Canva to create your marketing, your customer success experiences, the amount of images that you can create that are unique to your organization and your customer needs, you should be leveraging. And it's not even a person I would necessarily call out, but rather these organizations assigning someone to go research how can we better utilize this platform so that we are creating a more customized experience that tells the customer we're listening to your needs and those are just.

A few out there and yourself follow you as well.

Right.

We always have great stuff out there.

For sure.

I'll take it.

So, Amelia, I think you're hitting on something we've talked about with one of our other guests, a couple of our other guests that AI right now is really driving into the platforms as. And that's kind of one of the first step of where we're going to see AI go. One of the things that I keep, I have this vision in my head, I think is somewhere that we'll get to from a. When you have turnover in a company, when you have there's a lot of knowledge loss that occurs and I think one of the things we'll eventually get to is having a specific customer based AI where you can basically it knows everything that's happened on that customer. Right. Starting with contract negotiations and sales, especially as we're collecting the type of data that Mickey and Josh are collecting. With update AI, you've got all that meeting data, filling in, filing in and then you've got your contracts and then you've got all of your issue, whether it's track through ServiceNow or some other tool, you've got all your issues and that kind of stuff. Do you see a scenario where you've got an AI that actually knows your customer and you can interact with it to kind of pull out and make sure you don't have the knowledge loss and where that, that you get today when you have turnover in a company?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm so happy to share that a lot of these platforms are already pulling in all that data into your CRM or CSP customer success platform. And so you're able to capture every single call without having a human copy and paste the link and all the, all that good stuff that CSMs hate doing. And there's so much more room for Erro. And these platforms are also able to extract keywords like competitive words, for example. And so being able to look at that data holistically, I have not seen a platform out there for someone, an inventor seeking. How do I break into the tech world? Well, we need one of these platforms that can really go into something like a CRM or a CSP and look at all of the signals across that customer's journey and help create a win back program. Even if you do automate and have something like a win back program based on all of the signals that AI is giving you, there is nothing more powerful than a phone call or a text message to someone who you have lost as a client. Especially if you have the privilege, privilege to have that person's phone number. There's, there's nothing that will speak louder. Why not pick up the phone and find out and use that data from AI to have a conversation that's meaningful. I think that makes a huge difference. The other thing and, and this is in keeping that human connection with AI and not just automatically relying on it for everything, because as humans we know if it becomes too automated you need to keep that connection, is I believe that you can use AI to look at how much did you listen versus talk. That's incredibly powerful. Because if you let the customer talk or ex customer talk. You can learn a lot more from them and use that information and to help prevent future losses. So I really think yes, you can use AI and I think it's important. Unless you're bleeding thousands of customers, I mean then you have a whole other problem. But if you have a chunk where your sales and CS teams can call every month to really learn from them and use AI to augment those experiences, I would vote for that, that strategy instead.

Yeah, you know, you work with a ton of customers. You're talking to a kind of ton of people in the space. For those that are like embarking on their AI journey or they, they want to bring in AI they, they, you know, they, they see the writing on the wall, they do scale or whatever it may be, they want to, they want to explore that path. You know, what are some common like maybe pitfalls or challenges organizations should be aware of before they embark on the, on the AI, on their AI journey?

All right, I'm so happy you asked me this because James Scott, who you both know and I embarked on a journey a few months ago and we wrote a white paper on it. It's on our website. You can download it. It's all about how to bring AI into your organization in a way where you will succeed. Because starting with the common pitfalls is people will bring a platform in and not roll it out properly. One of the clients I went into a couple years ago, I slashed over $100,000 in technology in less than four months. They had licenses to products they didn't even know they were paying for. And I was thinking how did the C CFO approved this? But when there's changeover or multi year license, they don't look at that.

Yeah.

So it's really important that you roll out this technology with, with thoughtfulness. And what we talk about in our paper is one, it takes at least six communication touch points leading up to, during and after with your team to, for them to understand what, why is this technology coming? What's in it for me? Is it going to replace me? And if it's not, is it going to augment my job? And so having that communication set up and having open office hours, all of those things can make it better. The other thing is having a RACI model. We highly recommend that you can look in the paper to get a deep understanding of it. But really what it means is having key people responsible for key roles and knowing who is a listener, who is a decision maker, who is really the driver and having those clear roles. When you're implementing anything AI, anything new is incredibly important. And then I would say having quarterly reflections on how can we make it better. We recently helped a company in Canada implement a customer success platform with a lot of AI in IT features. And they brought us back after the initial five week implementation to do a reflection and see where couldn't we do additional improvements. They want to make sure that they're getting full value out of the platform. So a one and done is not a good project. You need to continuously reflect on it and improve because your clients are changing, your company products are being improved and new features are coming out. And then your CS team is changing, your leadership is changing. So you want to make sure that you're looking at it holistically and that's the key to success. When you're rolling out these kind of.

Technologies, you're reflecting some concepts. I had the opportunity to read a paper by Gartner on the rolling out of the new technologies and minimum viable products related to AI and stuff like that. It's interesting. When I read the paper, I'm like, all right, well this is a lot of DevOps type stuff. And Agile methodology is just reapplying it to a new technology. But it becomes so much more important in the space with the how fast you can spend and how fast you can get to things. It's interesting, it's a lot of the concepts, but reapply it into AI, all the change management concepts, all the quick iterations to try and get to your MVPs, to prove, to prove the value and get to, you know, once you've proven the value of the use case, then figuring out where your real investment wants to be, where you really want to invest, which is important. One of the other challenges that I know comes up a lot and just to hear your thoughts on this is the ethics and the biases and data and things like that of AI. I guess I'm kind of going to open it as a pretty broad question just to get your thoughts on what you think and how to address some of that.

This is not a new problem, Right? If anyone who has read Freakonomics and you can recall one of the chapters is about students going to Harvard and some of the students have very common names for an African American. And then the others have a very common white American, John Smith, let's whatever it is. And then they put the exact same resumes in front of the admissions officers with the exact same resumes and the outcome is very different. So there's no, nothing is new here. The biases will continue. Biden today is going up against AI companies right now around ethics. This morning it was on the news. So these things will continue to happen and be a challenge. What's incredibly important and what I'm really excited about, especially since my daughter's entering college next year and watching the papers or reading the papers that she's been writing. These things are on top of the minds of these 17 year olds, of these, of the new generation. They really care. They want to study ethics, sustainability, how it's going to impact more than just profit. And I truly, I always, I always talk about this when I think about a business is how are you impacting people? How are you impacting the planet and how are you impacting profit? If you don't have the triple bottom line, you don't have a scalable business, eventually people will catch up and start asking about your ethics. And so I think that's really important. Companies have to take ownership for this and leverage AI in a way that will help human centricity. Right. Help humans get better and then educate them, give them digital literacy to make up their minds on their own about what they want to do with the technology and balance. I mean, Facebook, one of my friends works there, she says her phones, the phones go off at a certain hour, emails go off at a certain hour because they want to balance people's time and it's hard for people to balance their own time. Will I lose my job if I don't answer that? All of these things we have to as an organization, as a society, decide what are the limits. And I think this is an ongoing conversation that's incredibly important.

Yeah. And you touched on this a little earlier, Amelia, with the change management aspect of it. You know, as you're working with companies that are bringing AI in, what's been the employee experience or what's their sentiment? I guess maybe when they first hear AI is coming, is it fear, is it? And then how do what is like, I guess, what is the typical reaction you're seeing or hearing? And then how do you overcome it? You make sure people what the benefit is, why, why this is coming into their organization.

Yeah. So like with any technology and as humans, we are first of all thinking about how is it going to impact me? That's absolutely Maslov's hierarchy. And then secondly, how will it impact the people around me? How will it impact the client? And so again, it comes down to communication and explaining the power of the platform. Why and how is it Selected over maybe others that people might be used to and then allowing for things like open office hours, practice training, role playing, all of those things not only will make the product more sticky, you'll quickly get your return on investment faster. And so that's really important. And I'm study after study says you need six to eight touch points regardless of what you're doing to get that person to click to get that person to be confident with anything that you're doing. So I really comes down to communication and explaining to the human, to the person what's in it for me, how will it make me better at my job, more confident and then take away a lot of the monotonous work that CSMs unfortunately get stuck with.

Yeah, I think it actually as, as somebody in the space, leader in the space, I think it's exciting. I think it gets, gives the opportunity to as a, for CSMs to really be more engaged and more, you know, really, you really get to use the information you have to help further your clients goals. And there, there are, I mean obviously there's, by taking away some of the monotony tasks which I think like everybody hates doing. Right. It's not, that's not doing all the notes, doing all that things, those are monotonous type things. You need to do it. But when you have a tool that can help you with that, that's fantastic and it allows you to go get into the data, get into figuring out how you really act as the strategic partner that you're, you should be in there trying to be as a csm. So I think it's very exciting. Roman, you think we're, you think we're at rapid fire?

I think we're. Yeah. Well, before we go to the rapid fire, I mean, any last closing thoughts? I don't know if you want to dust off the crystal ball at all and give us like a prediction where you see it, where you see the space, where you see AI in five to 10 years, that may be two even out there. I mean it's changing so fast. Any closing thoughts on AI or anything we didn't touch on that you would share with our audience?

The two most important items on my mind are one, data security and privacy. That's incredibly important. How is AI going to protect our human print online? I mean you think of any baby being born, they already have a human print online because people have the pictures all over social media whether that baby wants that picture online or not. So thinking about data and privacy and then how can we leverage AI to support Mental health. Right now there's a huge crisis and technology can be a source of stress and anxiety or it can provide well being features and operating systems and applications. And I'm part of an amazing group that has AI to support mental well being and balance. I struggle with balance. I'll be the first. I definitely would be a self professed workaholic, but I also really want to be present for my three children. And so having a platform, an app that can help with that and with people struggling is exploding. Modern Health was a client of ours and through that platform I was really able to understand the power of AI in technology and mental health. And I believe that space is only going to explode because not only people more open about mental well being and struggles with it, but also the crisis is growing. It's not getting smaller with, with digital.

Yeah. And to have a tool that can do and help people that need it at scale and it just, I, I'm, I'd love to hear more on that and what to follow you to keep track on all the going in that space as well. So Kev. So Amelia, we got one last time before we have these rapid fire questions. No preparation for this. Right. So this could be the hardest part. Kevin, you want to, you want, you want to get us started here?

Sure. Amelia, which one hobby you have outside of work that helps you unwind?

I have a beautiful organic garden. I plant all sorts of stuff. Yesterday I picked tons of figs, zucchini, tomatoes, lemons, limes. So that's just what's in season right now. But year round, I'm planting and growing what I, what I owned or what my company is named after. Growth.

Early bird or night out?

Oh, I've been up since 5am I've only in class, made muffins for my kids, lunches out the door, and here I am at 8am that's awesome.

And do you have a favorite sport to watch or play?

Any sport I'm playing. So whether it's cycling, running, swimming, volleyball, anything that involves me playing it is my favorite.

And favorite book.

Probably Siddhartha.

Siddhartha? I haven't heard of that.

It's. It's a book. It's a book that will really make you reflect on your own life. Herman Hess wrote it and I encourage you to check it out. It's a pretty fast read.

Cool. Awesome.

Always love our book recommendations and for our audience. We'll put the book recommendation in our, in our, in our podcast descri. The article you and James wrote will link to that as well. I know I'm definitely gonna check that out after this. So Kev, these keep doing these shows. My wish list of books I'm reading, it's just out of control. I gotta you know I'm like double. I got like two books at the same time here I'm trying to get but no, I can't wait to check that one. That one out a million and thanks for joining us on the show. It's been a great conversation, really appreciate your insights and into really a topic I know has been we get questions about all the time and I know it's our audience is thinking a lot about it as well.

So thank you Roman and Kevin, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed it as well.

And that's a wrap for this episode of the Success Playbook. We hope you found our conversation insightful and have a better sense of how AI can help you and your team to help better serve your clients and help your team members in the customer success space. All right, if you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe, comment and share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also find us on LinkedIn @Roman Treebond at Kevin Metzger. We also have our customer success playbook LinkedIn page to make the make sure to check that out. I mentioned the website earlier. CustomerSuccessPlayBook. AI Sign up for our newsletter. Connect with us. Let us know your thoughts, topics, yes, you'd like this to have on, etc. We're always here. We want to make sure we're bringing the right topics and discussion that you want to hear. And as always, thanks for listening.

Keep on playing.

Awesome. Thank you so much. That was great.