February 22, 2024 • 51 mins
Dickey Singh, CEO of Cast joins us this week for a bonus episode in which we discover his fascinating journey from a long line of engineering leadership roles to today, where he's leading the charge of AI in CS.
We discuss at length what he and his team at Cast.app are doing to help revolutionize digital CS and what the future of all of this technology looks like.
Topics covered include:
- Dickey’s long history with AI and his journey from an engineering background into serving customer success today
- He was ‘there’ at the inception of Customer Success
- How Cast.app helps its customers achieve 30x ROI via providing digital CS
- 1:Many vs. 1:1 vs. Many:Many in Digital CS
- Getting persona-specific in your outreach, but don’t go by titles and go by responsibilities, interests and user profiles
- Digital provides efficiency and automation to drive efficiency for CSMs
- Executive personas are likely not going to be in the app and a lot of C-level execs prefer text messages
- SMS is a powerful way to reach certain personas and shouldn’t be as frowned upon as it is
- The tendency for AI to hallucinate and how it needs to be verified by the human
- Current and future state of AI in CS and how adopters stand to gain massive efficiencies. More and more useful AI tools are coming.
- Prompting won’t be as relevant in the future as it currently is
Enjoy! I know I sure did...
Dickey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dickey/
Cast: https://cast.app/
Pure Storage ROI with Cast: https://cast.app/purestorage-roi
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The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Talk about numbers, talk about, like you know right
things that matter to him.
Every user at the same accountshould get a separate subject,
separate body, separate email,because you're, at the end of
the day, you're trying tocommunicate as a digital CSM to
them, not as a customermarketing expert.
We want to send emails like howa human would write hey, I'm
concerned about this.
(00:23):
Your number dropped by XYZ.
Do you want to talk to me aboutthis?
Put that as part of the subject.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
And, once again, welcome to the digital customer
success podcast with me, alexTrokovich.
So glad you could join us heretoday and every week as I seek
out and interview leaders andpractitioners who are innovating
and building great scaled CSprograms.
My goal is to share what I'velearned and to bring you along
with me for the ride so that youget the insights that you need
to build and evolve your owndigital CS program.
(00:52):
If you'd like more info, wantto get in touch or sign up for
the latest updates, go todigital customer successcom.
And for now, let's get started.
Hello and welcome back to thedigital customer success podcast
.
Is so great to have you backfor episode 40.
I can't believe I'm saying that, but it has been 40 episodes
(01:12):
since I first said hello to you,and today I'm bringing you an
off cycle extra episode for theweek with none other than Dickie
Singh of castapp.
You will likely have heard ofDickie before because he's very
active in CS circles and is CEOof cast app, which is such a
(01:36):
cool platform because it is oneof a few emerging AI based and
AI driven CS platforms out thereand it's essentially digital
customer success in app form.
So we have a lot of greatconversation about digital CS,
but also personalized motionsand the future of AI current
(01:59):
state of AI such really greatand timely information in this
episode that I just couldn'twait to share with you.
So please enjoy thisconversation with Dickie Singh
of cast.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Just age myself.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Same here man.
Yeah, I remember verydistinctly sending my first
email.
I was, you know, I don't know,I guess I must have been in high
school maybe and I remembersending it and calling my friend
that I'd emailed and say hey,did you get it?
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Nothing is changed.
Now you were texting.
Hey did you get my email?
Because you sure as shit ain'treading it.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It's funny, well, dickie.
Hey, I really appreciate youcoming on the show.
It's a pleasure to have you.
I know we had to reschedule acouple of times on my end, I
think, once on your end, yeahbut we made it happen and I'm
really excited because, you know, not only are you doing awesome
(03:11):
things for the CS community,but you have just a crazy
background as well and I want todig into that a little bit.
But welcome to the show.
Thank you so much.
Yeah for sure.
So, speaking of background, Ido want to kind of maybe rewind
the clock a little bit.
You spent some time at MIT.
(03:33):
From the looks of it, you didsome cool stuff at MIT.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, we did I don't know like an AI course over
there before all this new stuffthat came out and learned a lot,
right.
I mean, like we wanted to likeuse AI everywhere.
So yeah yeah, I'll tell you moreabout it.
Like you know, right now we areusing AI as an assistant, right
?
So then we're talking aboutusing AI as a peer.
(03:59):
Then we're talking about likeusing AI as a manager that
manages me.
And then there were even likethings like organizations, right
, like the AI would run theorganization and it'll just give
you tasks, and there's likedistributed organizations and
also.
So we were very futuristic andwe thought, like you know, this
is 30 years in the making.
Then, openly, I came out andeverything like a six months,
(04:19):
seven months.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, crazy, crazy.
And you know, everybody kind ofthinks that the open AI thing
is like, it's like the firstthing that is AI, but it's.
I mean there's a long historythere that has led up to this
event in history.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
We were using OpenAI, obviously before it became
popular, and other will use likefour or five different services
models, and we ended up liketraining OpenAI with a whole
bunch of stuff, right?
Like we said, like you know,our CSMs don't know how to write
SQL.
Why can't they just describe itin natural language?
And it will here.
It'll connect with Gain Site,it'll connect with Salesforce,
(04:59):
it'll connect with Snowflake andwrite a query across platforms
and the CSM just has to look atthe results of the digital CSM
in our case, as you just look atthe results, if it looks fine,
click a button and it will beused to gather data, right?
So?
So we ended up doing that.
We had to train it quite a bit,but now it's available to
everyone because, you know, Iguess we didn't have business
accounts at that time, right?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
So early on.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
So whatever you're doing, you're able to do
everyone.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Well, so tell me a little bitabout your, I guess, what led
you up to?
I mean, today you're, you know,very well known in CS circles
because of CastApp that you knowyou're founder of, been a like
for, for, but you have thiscrazy rich history of
(05:47):
engineering and and and productleadership across all kinds of
segments, right, yeah, and I'mcurious to get your, your take
on kind of what led you downthis, this path.
What, what kind?
What was the evolution to getyou into, you know, serving the
CS community with software?
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Yeah, so.
So my background mostly been,like you know, like an SVP of a
product or a CTO with six orseven venture backed companies
in Silicon Valley.
As I said, like I've been heresince 95.
And before that I was inVirginia and and I had no idea
about customer success before Istarted Castapp and I think that
(06:32):
helped in a way as well.
But there are like two statsthat I read that kind of were in
the back of my mind, right?
75% of the revenue of mostcompanies comes from existing
customers and there are likeeight to 10x more tools for
pre-sales.
So it's like you know the exactopposite, right?
(06:52):
If we you know 70, 73% in salesfor 75% in UiPath, like you
look at, look at any any company, look at PLG companies or SLG
companies, it's the same thing,right?
So, but the number of tools wesell to pre-sales or to sales
people is like 10x more.
So I always wanted to likeunderstand it more.
(07:12):
So you know, you know what Idid is like I bought every book
on CS on and on post sales, likeyou know, read them cover to
cover, made yellow marks allthroughout, and I tend to like
read the books again and again,like you know, because sometimes
they oh, I missed this orsomething.
No, that's absolutely wrong,that doesn't work.
(07:33):
That's like he's just theauthor is just selling the
company or just selling you knowhis services, right?
So I always kind of thoughtthat way.
But then something interestinghappened.
I was just having lunch with myone of my ex CEOs at customer
sat where we kind of mostlyserved like Apple, yahoo,
salesforce, you know BA,weblogic and you know AMD, those
(07:56):
kind of companies and hementioned something someone
about, like Mary Alexander, andI said, oh, she was a board
member.
As he said yes, so I said likeI want to meet her and I had
lunch with her and then she toldme she formulated or she
pioneered or coined is the rightword customer success in 1990
(08:17):
for.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Vented.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And you know, and I read all the blog posts from
everyone like, oh, Salesforcethis is.
I didn't believe her to behonest, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then she followed up asconnected me to another person
she and he was her indirectreport like maybe two, two,
three levels down or something,and he shared with me his
customer success manager card.
Right, he showed it to me.
(08:40):
Like it was, like you know, ina bad shape, yellow and all that
stuff she's telling the truth.
So basically, so I got togetherwith like a few executives and I
did.
What did I do?
We did a interview for her,with her, and we kind of
actually posted on our cast on awebsite, castapp slash articles
(09:00):
you have to find it it's prettyinteresting is even in her mind
it was a way to add revenue,not just service the customer.
It's like full circle.
After so many years now it'sgoing back to talking about
revenue.
Even if you're not selling orupselling, you're influencing
(09:22):
the sale.
So that thing was pretty.
To be honest, that's how I gotto know CS.
From her original experience, Ialways thought it's about doing
better for the customers anddoing better for the teams.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, that's a cool genesis.
I like that.
We literally you started withthe genesis of CS.
I think a lot of people workbackwards into that, but yeah,
that's really cool.
Well, so fast forward to today.
Castapp, pretty well known.
The reason why I'm crazyexcited to speak with you is
(09:58):
because, essentially, whatyou're doing is digital customer
success in app form, which isvery just like meta and cool,
but like, and so this is aquestion that I ask all of my
guests which is this notion ofwhat is digital customer success
?
Because it varies fromabsolutely everybody I talk to.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
I think it's whatever thecompany is selling.
Is digital CS in my mind, likethat's how most people think of
it.
But I mean it could be webinarsoftware, it could be like
community software, even emailmarketing.
I guess everyone's jumping intothe bandwagon.
But seriously, I think, to medigital CS is, I guess, using
(10:46):
technology to help customers andeven the customer success team
members to grow and preservetheir revenue.
But, here's a kicker with amagnitude higher speed, accuracy
, reliability, consistency andscalability.
And that magnitude higher meanlike 10x, 20x higher.
(11:06):
And that's what automation andAI really get you is like our
customers have, like I'll sharewith you later.
I guess like 30x ROI on some ofthe products.
I mean we take the credit, butat the end of the day, is like
combining automation and AI andmaking sure that your AI does
not hallucinate.
We spent a lot of time doingthat, but we'll talk about that
(11:28):
as well.
I personally see digital CSSthree things right.
One is the very simple one toomany even like a blog post or
infographic or even a webinar ora webcast that you do.
You do it once you share withmultiple people.
This podcast is two peopletalking and sharing it with
(11:48):
multiple people.
And the second is what I kindof started calling many to many
like early on, and there arejust two things in there.
Right, one of them is multiplepeople helping multiple people,
like communities.
And the second thing that'sbecoming really popular these
days is customer and customersuccess manager, collaborative
(12:08):
wikis, in other words, right,they would write some post, the
customer will comment on it, theother CSS will comment on it
and it ended up becoming like acollaborative article.
So that is many to many.
The third is what we are doing,which is castaf, which is going
back to the roots of customersuccess, which is like
one-on-one personalized digitalexperiences for customers, but
(12:35):
one-on-one.
In other words, if I'm talkingto a C level executive, my tone
changes, my conversation changes.
When I'm talking to a CFO, I'ma little bit more professional.
I'm talking about ROI.
When I'm talking to a CCO, I'mtalking about like ROV or things
like that.
But when I'm talking to a user,I'm talking about hey, learn
this, do this, watch this videoand surfacing and making
(12:56):
summaries of those blog posts,and so we're showing it to them.
That's what we do.
And then also, when you talk toa power user, don't teach them
how to click the mouse oranything.
Like hey, you have too manyusers in your segment.
You should sub-segment them anddon't believe in a single
segmentation model.
Like you know, have severalsegmentation models.
(13:17):
It's okay, gaston, I can handleit right.
So those are the kind of thingsthat we talk about.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, I love that and it is really kind of one of
those kind of goldenopportunities in digital is to
get to the point ofsophistication where you can be
personas, and it's hard.
It's hard to get to.
You know, you got to know whoyour users are and you got to
(13:44):
have some data to support thatand all that.
But once you do it, it's sopowerful.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yeah, I think you personas the most important
thing you can talk about, likewhen we were talking to people.
But one advice that I figuredout is like, don't go by titles,
and the reason I say that is inan SVP at Salesforce may not
have that much authority, butlike a head of customer success
is a very small company wouldhave a lot of authority.
So it's a different thing.
(14:13):
Don't go by titles, go byresponsibilities, go by roles,
go by user profiles, go byinterests, and then we use all
that data to figure out behavior.
We have so much AI built in,even to our player kind of thing
, so if we notice that someonealways skips over support slides
or something, we move that awaythat they can click on and
(14:36):
access it, for example.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, so making it intelligent and really specific
to that person.
That's super important.
In a previous episode I had areally great conversation with
Dan Ennis.
I don't know if you're familiarwith him, but he's been doing
some pretty amazing work arounddata analysis of specific
(15:03):
personas, where he's essentiallybuilding a data profile of what
an admin might be versus whatan end user might be, versus
what an exec might be orwhatever, and then applies that
across the user segments towhere he doesn't necessarily
need to ask them or know forsure what they are, but based on
(15:24):
their usage and their behaviorsand things like that can get a
pretty good sense for what thepersona is, and I love that
level of sophistication.
It sounds like y'all arecracking that very similar thing
.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And the only thing I would sayis don't go by titles, go by
responsibilities, like a CEO ofa startup would do support and
customer success and bring therights for the team.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
From mopping the floors to signing the checks.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yes, there you go.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Probably at the same time too Good.
You've got two minutes.
So I want to get a little bitdeeper into CAST because I don't
like to kind of I hate havingfounders on and then basically
tell them what their app does.
I'd much rather hear it fromthe founders themselves and kind
(16:19):
of let you kind of speak aboutnot only the genesis of it but,
at its core, what are yousolving for?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah, what we are kind of solving is we only see
two major problems for every B2Bcompany.
It's a huge thing.
One is like OK, before I saythat there are two or three
types of companies Companiesthat are very simple products,
(16:50):
they don't need CSMs, they'llnever need CSMs.
It's a very simple idea.
They will just build it intothe product, and these are like
young PLG companies.
And then there is the wholemass of B2B companies and SaaS
companies which kind of rely onCSMs and account managers and
subject matter experts toprovide adoption and usage and
(17:15):
sales and upsells to customers.
So that's what we're going tofocus on.
And the last category iscompanies that take like nine
months to deploy and they havean army of professional services
, technical services and allthose kind of things.
So we are kind of focused onthe middle, which is luckily,
95% of the 5 million B2B users,customers right there.
(17:38):
Right, 5 million B2B companies.
So we're trying to help overthere.
And the two things we realizedis the CSMs are and account
managers, each have too manyaccounts and, the other hand,
not every account has a CSM.
So we are just trying to solvethose two problems and the way
(18:02):
we did it is we think it's veryunique, but everyone has his own
opinion.
So, in the traditional way ofdoing customer success, you put
a customer success manager inbetween the customer and the
playbooks and the data, and youneed a CSP tool, you need CRM
(18:23):
tools, support tools.
So what we did is what if wecould elevate that CSM, do a
more of a consulting role andmaybe so he or she can focus on
relationships with customers andnew challenges?
And, in his place, bring in adigital customer success manager
or an AI-driven digitalcustomer success manager, in our
(18:46):
case who executes playbooks,digitizes playbooks, executes
playbooks and communicates withthe customer in the manner that
is approved by salespeople orthe VP of sales, is approved by
the CCO and uses automatedbenchmarking to upsell and
cross-sell and uses things likehey, customers, your size, use
(19:11):
these four features.
You're only using three.
Do you want to talk to your CSM, scott Adams, to see if they
want to learn more about this?
Or same thing for sales right,when you use competitive
benchmarking.
So that kind of comes for freewith our product.
So what we are solving?
Just two simple use cases adigital business review with a
(19:32):
purpose.
What good is a digital businessreview when you cannot upsell,
cross-sell or recommend products, right.
So, and then advancedonboarding, which includes, like
pre-boarding prospects,onboarding accounts, onboarding
users, onboarding differentpersonas differently,
(19:53):
re-onboarding a previouslybundled product when a new hire
happens at your customer,onboarding the users again when
the account has already beenonboarded.
So the more complex theonboarding.
That's where we kind of come in.
So two simple use cases, like adigital business reviews could
that grow and preserve yourrevenue and accelerating value
(20:13):
realization through re-boarding,onboarding, re-boarding and
even off-boarding, although wedon't have a single customer
that's using our off-boardingpart?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I love that so much because it speaks to what
digital CS has kind of evolvedto over time, whereas and
regular listeners will haveheard me talk about this before
but, like a few years ago, thenotion of digital CS is okay, we
(20:46):
need this thing, a bunch ofcustomers and that's definitely
evolved into what it is today,which is to say, okay, yeah,
we're doing a lot of customerfacing things, but a big part of
it is automating things so thatyour CSMs can be more strategic
, provide more value and lesstime doing the mundane things
(21:07):
sending the same emails, doingthose kinds of things.
And I love that you're fittingright into that level of kind of
sophistication and automationto where it is removing the
burden, so that your CS, I hatesaying, can do more with less
but can be more valuable withless, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Yeah, people are sort of hating that term, like doing
more with less, but I guess Iguess I can see it's like built
in right, so yeah, absolutely.
And you may have heard of thatterm like in a death by
campaigns, right.
What that really means is likeyou have to write your own
campaigns and the campaigns thatthe customer marketing team
(21:52):
wrote versus the campaigns thatthe CSM is putting together or
versus the campaigns that themarketing.
They don't talk to each other.
Even your four campaigns don'ttalk to each other.
Now, the biggest problem withsuch environments is like, if
the campaigns don't talk to eachother, you're sending too many
emails, too many things, and ifyou upsell or cross-sell in an
email, you're going to be bannedas a spammer, right, Obviously,
(22:14):
because you know, and then youget like sort of getting really
poor results.
So the trick over there is tonot upsell and cross-sell an
email, but like take them intoan environment, whether which is
in-app or out-of-app, which isemail or text, so the executive
does not have to ever log in,right, yeah, If the executive
has to remember how to log in oryou're not going to be able to
(22:37):
reach a CFO or a ChiefAdministrative Officer, I'm
trying to say is like non-linowbusiness executives who are very
influential, whether to keepyour product or not keep your
product, If they don't know whatROI or ROV.
They're not going to continuethat.
So that's the underlying thing.
Like you know, instead ofasking everyone to come into
your product just so that youcan claim like higher monthly
(22:58):
active users or daily activeusers, what if you could take
the product to where the user is?
If they send an email or text,reach them over there.
If they log in like Power Usersand Users, show them in-app.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, it's interesting too that executive
persona.
Nine times out of 10, they'renot going to be in the app at
all, like they're not your users, they're not your intended kind
of audience for regular users,so why expect them to log into
the app just to kind of see howthings are going?
And one thing you hit on that Ithink is something that is very
(23:36):
often overlooked is textmessaging and SMS.
I don't think a lot of peopleare doing that because I think
there's an automatic assumptionthat it's kind of creepy or, you
know, it's invasive or whatnot.
My argument has always beenthat if someone wants to be
(23:57):
communicated via text, or ifsomebody wants to be
communicated via email orwhatever it is or Slack message,
like, we should give ourcustomers that option so that if
they want to be communicatedwith text, they can be.
But I think that's it for a lotof people.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
So one distinction that we liketo make is let's say you use
HubSpot or so for emailmarketing, you don't have a
relationship with the peoplethat you're sending your emails
to.
When you are talking to acustomer, you have a
relationship with the people.
They're like kind of opted inin your terms and conditions
(24:36):
that you can communicate withthem.
So use transactional emails andthat's what we do, and and
honestly God, we get likeminimum of 2.1x to 4x the
industry average when we sendout conversations.
Like you know we can.
Hp, you know they use CSPplatforms but send emails to us.
Their storage, aruba, samething, right?
(24:59):
So the interesting thing is, inthe presentations or digital
hubs that we generate and send,we ask them would you like to
opt in for getting text?
So we have to do an opt in.
So what we notice is like Clevel execs prefer text, whereas
operators and everything preferemail and users and power users
(25:21):
prefer to just log in into theproduct or so.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It's like a no brainer, but there's a huge
aversion to that.
I don't really get that, but Ithink it's extremely powerful
because your executive, they'vegot their phone like all the
time right.
What do you recommend whenfolks are, you know, setting up
the system and doing those kindsof things?
Do you make recommendations onwhat they should send via SMS
(25:50):
versus email?
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, you let your end customers choose SMS, but
you reach out to executives overemail, but give them an option
to switch to SMS.
But then the campaign shouldalso change, as I was mentioning
earlier.
Right, like our camp, you know,you don't have to create
multiple cameras because we havea generative platform.
So not only the presentationsare generated, the digital hubs
(26:14):
are generated, but even thecampaigns are generated, right?
So if I take one 30 seconddeparture, why is that helpful?
Because if somebody has alreadydone steps eight and 12, the
campaign won't get stuck, itwill overlook that.
Tell them to do steps one toseven and then, as of two, step
nine and then it move on.
Right, because it's agenerative platform.
(26:35):
Since it's a generative, don'twrite like really long emails,
put like really short emails.
Give them a single call toaction button, right.
Or, if you have several call toactions, they should point to
the same result, which is likethe presentation or view, your
digital hub or so.
And then, if you're sending itby text, should be like one or
(26:56):
two lines, right?
You know, we have come up likewe call it, like anti patterns
of emails.
Like you know, everyone putsthe name of the customer on the
top in the subject and that doesthis.
No, talk about numbers.
Talk about, like you know right, things that matter to him.
Every user at the same accountshould get a separate subject,
separate body, separate email,because at the end of the day,
(27:16):
you're trying to communicate asa digital CSN to them, not as a
customer marketing.
We support customer marketingalso in our product, but we want
to send emails like how a humanwould write hey, I'm concerned
about this.
Your number dropped by XYZ.
Do you want to talk to me aboutthis?
Put that as part of the subject, right.
So, and again, you can do thatwith generative platforms.
(27:37):
It's very hard to set it upwhen you are kind of creating
campaigns separately.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, are there?
Are there some like particular,like success stories or really
cool like use cases that you'vecome across?
Yeah, and customers that areusing it particularly well?
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I mean, yeah, there are quite a few.
Right, there's a paper on ourwebsite about pure storage.
This is the first division thatsigned up.
They are making over $400,000 aquarter and they're attributing
it to digital CSMs.
Wow.
(28:18):
And, and another division ofthem forget, I think they do
like Six Sigma training forcustomers, or so they save over
150 hours per account byswitching from a cell service
LMS to gas personalized learning.
(28:40):
Now, the difference in LMS islike, you know, yeah, you have a
30 minute video.
Or you watch that, but or wecan generate like a four minute
conversation.
Five minute conversation thatgoes over and teaches you the
five vies of Six Sigma, but alsoteaches you how to use, like,
(29:01):
fish boning and all those kindof things.
In case you have forgotten why?
Because the prerequisites youneed to know fish boning before
you do this, right?
So the presentation video thatgoes out is custom created for
Alex.
Why?
Because we know that Alex hastaken these four courses.
He got three A's and one D, sowe'll talk more about the thing
(29:23):
that he got.
Yeah, right, it's likepersonalized, because we know
this, we know, and it's muchshorter, right?
Like, if what is four or fiveminutes, is there an option to
look into that.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
So those are some of the yeah it's if that's a cool
combination of kind of theconcept of micro learning and
and AI generated kind of content.
Curation is essentially what itis.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yet another example this customer route this and I
tell this to all my customersbecause I they've given me
permission to share some oftheir analytics they get like
four, x, the other people as faras like success metrics are
concerned, and they have a verysimple philosophy Less is more.
They don't want to tell morethings to a customer.
(30:05):
They show like two or threeslides, but they let them ask
questions.
They let them.
So I don't know whether you'reaware or not that our product
trains on every tech stack andyour products automatically.
So what that?
What that really means is likewhen you are giving a
presentation, you usually showseven to 10 slides, but on your
(30:28):
eighth slide, the CCO has 20questions, right?
So what normally people do in aQBR or something, they create
like a 50 page deck and have abig appendix and all that stuff,
right, but that's not the rightthing.
You just keep it very small,but when the people ask
questions, ask them, answertheir questions live using an
agent, right?
So that's what we do.
(30:50):
It's quite interesting.
It was very well received by HPPure Storage, aruba, v-com,
route, this and, yeah, I mean HPshared something that engaged
customers by 90% more often andspent 60% more for transaction.
So I mean, yeah, they have beenusing digital and our product
(31:11):
for a long time.
They were one of our designcustomers and yet another
customer which I should be ableto mention.
Early next month they showed usthat a CSM can handle 2.17x the
number of accounts acrosssegments and I have to read this
while improving the CSM NPS by16% and improving the onboarding
(31:36):
CES by 21%.
So, at the same time, right.
So basically what I'm saying isthe CSM can handle 2.17x the
number of accounts acrosssegments and the CSM NPS
improved by 16% and theonboarding exports CES in a
customer effort score improvedby 21%.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
To me, what this boils down to is finding those
key moments and just reallydigging in on those and being
hyper focused on the outcome andthe metric behind the outcome.
Because, again to the earlierSMS example, right, if you can
(32:19):
text your executive and say, hey, your team is doing this well,
your team isn't doing this well,this is your ROI, etc.
Etc.
In like one or two lines, Imean, how impactful is that
versus the 20 page deck that wetalked about?
That has the huge, but why justyeah?
Speaker 1 (32:39):
and that's the difference.
Why just inform the user right,tell them what to do.
In other words, hey, great jobon this, your team is doing
really good.
This is the next thing that youshould focus on.
Really bad job on this.
You should consider going tothis training.
So the purpose is not likeinforming.
The purpose is like an actionthat was generated on the fly.
(33:00):
You know we take credit, butit's the AI doing it right.
So, on the fly telling themwhat to do.
So never show them negatives.
Always use the negative to tellthem what to do.
Because, then, and nine out of10 times you're right.
Right, but there may be timesyou're not right, but still, you
gave us a suggestion and youcan always say I don't have a
suggestion.
Do you want to set up like 30minutes with the CSM?
(33:22):
Right, we do that.
All the you know, we do that,as I was saying earlier.
Right, ai tends to hallucinate.
So what we do is like wefigured out with every answer we
ask for, how confident are you?
You know, the confidence levelis less than 0.36.
We say we think this is theanswer, but we are not sure.
(33:43):
But if it is less than 0.26 orsomething, we say we don't know
the answer.
But here is the calendar for aCSM.
Like when we introduce likethese, being able to connect CSM
, and people may say, yeah, so Ican put this in my database and
we, you know everyone canconnect to calendar, so it's not
no big deal.
But this is the reason why wedid that is because the AI tends
(34:03):
to hallucinate.
And then we can bring in theCSM as an end need.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
As the human backup?
Yeah, yeah, do you feel likeyou're your newness to customer
success and you, coming at thisfrom an outside of CS
perspective, has served you wellin this?
I mean, that's my impression,because you have this other view
(34:33):
and you're not bogged down bythe traditional sentiment of
what a QBR is or whatever.
Do you feel like that's servedyou well in this whole thing?
Speaker 1 (34:45):
I hope so, I believe so, I hope so.
But you know, see, whateverhappened in customer service,
like 15 years ago, is happeningin customer success now.
So in customers, you cannot askfor help without having.
When you start typing aquestion, it starts giving you
suggestions right, you goanywhere, but the problem is
(35:06):
they are going against a staticdocument, right?
In other words, they're goingthrough your health documents
and or whatever, like you know,university documents or whatever
we call it schoolcastapp.
So they're going through that.
So what we are doing differentfrom over there is we are
reading account information andhelping the information.
But that's an aside.
But that's the point that I'mmaking is like, whatever
(35:28):
happened in customer servicewill happen in customer success,
which is like more automationand more AI agents answering
your question and bringing in anexport, which is like the
person who did the customerservice agent later on, right?
So for that to happen, whathappened in that industry is
they started paying more tocustomer service agents, right?
(35:50):
The humans?
Yeah, I call them coffee drivenCSMs and AI driven CSMs, right?
So that makes it easier for meto explain.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Yeah, same thing is going to happen, like the AI
driven CSM is going to requestthe coffee driven CSM to like
come in and help her right.
So I'll see.
We'll see a lot more of that.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, if you haven't trademarked that already, I
would do that immediately.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
I should.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Well, I mean speaking of seeing more of that.
I think you know, arguably, aihas been around for a while, but
we're now getting into a levelof usability of gen AI that is
obviously unprecedented, and alot of people are coming to
terms with that, some betterthan others.
(36:42):
But what is, in your opinion?
What is?
What are the next few yearslook like in terms of the
adoption of this technology, andI guess, specifically to CS,
like what do you see all thisgoing?
Speaker 1 (37:00):
So I mean, we have been noticing this since early
October already.
Right, like people are not that.
Even like we were signing up, acustomer just sent the document
sign early morning and he saidwe'll sign as soon as I pick up
the kids.
So even like security companiesare adopting AI, you know.
(37:23):
Obviously they ask us toughquestions and then we have I
have a demo where I put his nameand I say who is such and such,
right, the CCO's name?
And in the past we have triedto answer that no, we cannot
answer that because this personis talking to you, you know.
So it says like I don't know,do you want to connect with our
CSM to answer?
(37:44):
So that gives a good way totell them that people are
getting comfortable with this AIthing.
At the end of the day, I don'tthink so.
There are still few people whoare resisting, right, like say,
hey, human touch and all thosekind of things.
But I feel it can do moreservice to you and make your job
(38:05):
as a CSM or as a CS leader alot easier and you can look at
like minimum 12X to 40X ROI withthe products that you use,
instead of using a system ofrecord tool that put data in it
and you run reports and then youcreate campaigns and reach out
to people and say nobody'sclicking on my campaigns.
You know things like that.
(38:27):
So things that can learn canreally help you take it to the
next level.
Thank you.
If I may, a lot has changed.
When I was at the MIT AI thing,we were focused on supervised
learning and unsupervisedlearning.
We we even have unsupervisedlearning in our player because
it learns if you always skipover support and it will yeah,
to the side right.
(38:49):
But then again Some I supervisedlearning was a big thing at
that time, like we were like, oh, we're waiting for it to like
show up.
And then we were talking aboutlike one shot learning, a few
shot learning, which is likejust give it a few samples and
it learns.
And that's what open AI waslike just a year and a half ago.
But when we were like trainingthem how to generate SQL from
(39:10):
commands or we're Telling it howto have a combination generate
code from liquid, which we dothat today Also, right, we were
doing that.
But now you don't even have totrain as part of the prompt.
You can give an example here, acouple of examples, just these
two or three examples.
You know, yes, we want to takecredit because we trained it,
but at the end of the day,everyone can use those kind of
(39:31):
things.
Right, few shot learning.
So I think that's where theworld is headed and this whole
opening I Sam Alton fiasco,whether Whether it was because
of a GI or whatever the realreason is.
Hopefully we'll find out whenhe writes his book.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
But because you know it's coming.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, but yeah, I mean again, they're okay, wall
Street is saying one thing, thecircle valley saying another
thing, but but, at the end ofthe day, more AI is coming, more
useful AI is and I'm nottalking about what MIT should
teach us like it are using AI asan assistant and eventually
appear and eventually Like yourmanager and eventually, like the
(40:11):
, it runs the corporation andjust gives you tasks, or yeah,
that we are far from that.
But at the end of the day, anytool that's available, I mean,
yeah, look at, look at the thingno one's hiring.
We're the chief of staff,because this open AI, this tool,
is your chief of staff.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely do you.
So you know, I think back tokind of Google and early kind of
search engines and back Back inthe day I mean, we were dating
ourselves earlier.
Right, I'm giving our earlyinfluence, influences of the
internet or whatever.
(40:48):
But back in the early days youkind of had to know how to
search for something Like onGoogle to to get accurate
results, whereas today Google'spretty smart, it knows, you know
, kind of, what you meant to sayor what you meant to search for
, and it, you know, hascontextual history and all that
kind of fun stuff.
(41:09):
And I feel like I is still kindof in this place where you kind
of have to know how to prompt,and I kind of feel like I need
to educate my on.
You know I'm engineering alittle bit, but I don't know
that that's always going to bethe case, right, because it's
(41:30):
your right.
I'm doing it, I'm going to goaway and so yeah, so so I mean
it does that.
If is that really a thing?
I mean, you know, you see allthe posts about, like you know
top, you know Top prompts for CSprofessionals and all this kind
of stuff.
Like, is that going to be athing in 10 years or five years?
Speaker 1 (41:49):
No, not really, I think that'll go away.
What, what they're doing islike reusing the same how to
write an email.
They're putting that inside thecode.
How to Create the initialworkflow like diagram.
They're putting everyone'sputting in there, but those are
like barely scratching thesurface, right, so what?
And yeah, I mean like, why can'tyou create the prompt right
when, like in our case, like wehave like Narration was
(42:12):
generated and then we can clickon a button and say make it
humorous for peers, but keep itprofessional for the CFO, right,
so we do it just by one button,but we have made the prompt
behind the scenes to do allthose kind of things, right,
yeah?
So yeah, I think prompt wholething is gonna Go away.
It's gonna become more of a hey, ask the user.
(42:34):
But along with that we have tobe very careful, because if you
put the prompt in front of theend user, they can ask anything.
It can ask you to expose hey,what is the underlying platform,
what security system are using.
But you could even ask, like,what was the question that one
of my engineers asked like hey,what are the?
What security patches have notbeen applied and how can I use
(42:55):
them to infrared.
He's asked something like thisand he was shocked that he got a
really good answer, right.
So who's?
Yeah, we were, we were shocked,right, like you did it in a
short meeting, like we went forlike lunch and all this stuff.
He's just put it up his laptopand did that.
So we have to be very careful.
But on that's why you know thesecurity companies, they come to
us, they ask first thing, firstquestion Do you have sock to?
(43:17):
Yes, we have sock to and sockthree?
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Okay, then this one I have a conversation with yeah,
yeah, it's very interesting andyou hear about you know like AI
being now and you know used inin a call, you know collegiate
setting, you having to like citeyour prompts and how you got
(43:42):
there, and those kinds of yeah,it's very interesting to me
Because, yeah, I think there areall kinds of implications from
a plagiarism perspective and andwhat yeah, but just to see how,
where that goes.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Yeah, but don't get me wrong.
There are already promptsavailable that will say you can
prompt and say only give meanswers that you can cite and
then it'll put the citation also.
So you can be.
It's easy to do that.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Yeah, judge, judge, don't think, don't try to solve
an AI problem outside the realmof AI.
Just ask the same thing, likeyou know how we do here.
How confident are you with youranswer?
And if the answer is betweenpoint two, two and point
whatever, point three, six, thenwe save somewhat confident.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
I think that's very important for people to hear,
because I think there's a.
I've talked to a lot of peoplewho just have a general distrust
distrust for it, yeah you know,because it's this little black
box.
You know, yeah, and I'm and sowhat I mean?
Yeah, you know figure outwhat's behind it is is important
.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yeah, so what I mean is that there are Three types of
people, like you know.
The one in the middle could bethe open minded people.
They're looking for answers orignore them, that's you know.
And one is like who's a skeptic.
So when a skeptic writes a word, he's looking for that answer.
That is wrong, so he canadvertise that.
Where is the other end?
Like people like me, they onlylook at the positives and like
(45:09):
advertise that, right.
But the right person is, likeyou know, who has an open mind
and say knows the limitations ofAI, well, still is willing to
give her try to use it to heradvantage, right?
So that's, that's the key thing.
Yeah, love both extremes are bad.
Like me, like everythingpositive, but AI is also bad.
And the other person who's like, hey, no human does no nothing,
(45:30):
ai is gonna take over our lives.
That's also right.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, balance.
It's all about balance.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
I could have said that and giving a long story.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
It's perfect.
Yeah, it's, it's fascinating.
I could.
I think I could talk about thisstuff all day.
But you know, the unfortunatething about the fact that it is
eight till the hour is that weare running out of time and that
sucks.
But I Do have a couple of justkind of round out questions.
Yeah, the first one is what?
(46:05):
What are you paying attentionto?
Listening to that informs kindof who you are.
It could be business, could benot business.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
I'll be honest, I think I'm spending a whale a lot
of time on tiktok these daysand somehow it had figured, had
figured out that I read a lotabout entrepreneurship and I
kind of you know, look at likeAI, hallucination problems and
AI, so those three things ittalks a lot about.
And it also talks to me aboutshoes, yeah, and sunglasses,
(46:37):
because it knows that I collectsunglasses and it knows that I
collect shoes, right, or herboots and stuff.
So between these five topics Iuse like tiktok.
But then I, when I go for walks, I'm usually have like one
airport and I'm listening tobooks.
I tend to listen to the booksthat I've read before.
Because, I'm trying to look formore things that I missed or
(47:01):
I've started to disagree with alot of stuff that I've
re-listened to now, I guess, asI'm evolving as my concept.
So I figure out like, okay,they're just saying the norm,
for example, their product isfor CSMs, so there is no way
they are interested in having ahigh ratio of account to CSN
(47:26):
because they charge with CSN, sothat's why they're going to say
this.
So I've become skeptical, sinceI was just learning from that
and I'm saying why are theydoing that?
So I've started to think likethat, which I think people
should listen or read books thatthey have read before.
Again after like a three or sixmonth period.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, I think that's really helped, the fact that
you're reading it and thenlistening to it, because I feel
like I know our brain verydifferently if whether it's
auditory input or visual input.
So you're actually right,you're probably picking up on
stuff just because of that verything.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Yeah, and what you're describing is and this is one
of the research that we did whenwe started cast.
So University of Washington,some biomedicine doctor.
He said like if you just useone model, which is like reading
a blog post or listening to apodcast, you retain 10 percent
of the information.
If you add one more, likevisuals as well as reading, it
(48:22):
goes to 65 percent, and I havethe research to actually paid
for it.
But if you add a third one, itgoes to 73 percent.
You add a fourth one, 73.5.
So it doesn't matter, butminimum two is kind of.
That is the reason our avatarshave lip movement when they talk
.
Oh, wow, right.
(48:42):
So you're listening to somethingyou are watching and you see
the lip movement and all this.
This gave directly from theprofessor, right, like, but are
we very transparent?
Like 50 percent of ourcustomers turn the avatar off
and 50 percent, like, want tolabel it, name it.
Like I said, hi I'm Amy or hiI'm Mark, depending on the
gender.
So they do all sorts of things.
(49:03):
But you're absolutely right.
Sorry for the you know.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
No, it's great.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
I'll look up the research.
Actually, it might be linked onour website also at the bottom.
I'll look it up and see.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Well, I mean, you know it's even in editing this,
you know these podcast episodes.
You know I do edit the videoand the audio at this end.
I notice that when I'm when I'mlooking at it and I've even had
this feedback when people arelistening on YouTube versus just
on their podcast app, they pickup different things Because
obviously so much of ourcommunication as humans is
(49:35):
visual.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Yeah, so, yeah, I, you know I have CarPlay and
recently the podcast app inCarPlay enabled like the 1.5X,
1.7x feed, right.
So what I noticed?
Like if I listen and 1.7X feed,I'm driving much faster.
So I had to like go back to1.25 and 1.5, because, you know,
(49:59):
I'm into sports cars a littlebit, but I tend to drive a lot
faster when I'm listening tosomething really fast, right.
So it's like that was thereason why I switched it back to
1.5 or you know, versus like 2X.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
That's really funny.
Apple's probably going to haveto update their terms and
conditions for that, Just for mejust because of this guy who
tends to drive faster when he'sjust taking faster podcasts.
Exactly, Exactly.
Well, look, I've.
I've enjoyed this conversationtremendously.
I'm sure people can find you onLinkedIn.
Are there other resources orplaces?
(50:32):
People?
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Yeah, the eialingtoncom slash in slash
deki d-i-c-k-e-y, and the bestway to reach me is like my email
.
So d-i-c-k-e-y-at-castapp, Ithink those are the two best
ways to reach me.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Amazing.
Well, again, I appreciate it.
Thanks for the time.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you for joining me forthis episode of the Digital
Customer Success Podcast.
If you like what we're doing,consider leaving us a review on
your podcast platform of choice.
It really helps us to grow andto provide value to a broader
audience.
You can view the DigitalCustomer Success Definition word
(51:09):
map and get more details aboutthe show at
digitalcustomersuccesscom.
My name is Alex Turchovich.
Thanks again for joining andwe'll see you next time.
Talk about numbers, talk about, like you know right
things that matter to him.
Every user at the same accountshould get a separate subject,
separate body, separate email,because you're, at the end of
the day, you're trying tocommunicate as a digital CSM to
them, not as a customermarketing expert.
We want to send emails like howa human would write hey, I'm
concerned about this.
(00:23):
Your number dropped by XYZ.
Do you want to talk to me aboutthis?
Put that as part of the subject.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
And, once again, welcome to the digital customer
success podcast with me, alexTrokovich.
So glad you could join us heretoday and every week as I seek
out and interview leaders andpractitioners who are innovating
and building great scaled CSprograms.
My goal is to share what I'velearned and to bring you along
with me for the ride so that youget the insights that you need
to build and evolve your owndigital CS program.
(00:52):
If you'd like more info, wantto get in touch or sign up for
the latest updates, go todigital customer successcom.
And for now, let's get started.
Hello and welcome back to thedigital customer success podcast
.
Is so great to have you backfor episode 40.
I can't believe I'm saying that, but it has been 40 episodes
(01:12):
since I first said hello to you,and today I'm bringing you an
off cycle extra episode for theweek with none other than Dickie
Singh of castapp.
You will likely have heard ofDickie before because he's very
active in CS circles and is CEOof cast app, which is such a
(01:36):
cool platform because it is oneof a few emerging AI based and
AI driven CS platforms out thereand it's essentially digital
customer success in app form.
So we have a lot of greatconversation about digital CS,
but also personalized motionsand the future of AI current
(01:59):
state of AI such really greatand timely information in this
episode that I just couldn'twait to share with you.
So please enjoy thisconversation with Dickie Singh
of cast.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Just age myself.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Same here man.
Yeah, I remember verydistinctly sending my first
email.
I was, you know, I don't know,I guess I must have been in high
school maybe and I remembersending it and calling my friend
that I'd emailed and say hey,did you get it?
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Nothing is changed.
Now you were texting.
Hey did you get my email?
Because you sure as shit ain'treading it.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It's funny, well, dickie.
Hey, I really appreciate youcoming on the show.
It's a pleasure to have you.
I know we had to reschedule acouple of times on my end, I
think, once on your end, yeahbut we made it happen and I'm
really excited because, you know, not only are you doing awesome
(03:11):
things for the CS community,but you have just a crazy
background as well and I want todig into that a little bit.
But welcome to the show.
Thank you so much.
Yeah for sure.
So, speaking of background, Ido want to kind of maybe rewind
the clock a little bit.
You spent some time at MIT.
(03:33):
From the looks of it, you didsome cool stuff at MIT.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, we did I don't know like an AI course over
there before all this new stuffthat came out and learned a lot,
right.
I mean, like we wanted to likeuse AI everywhere.
So yeah yeah, I'll tell you moreabout it.
Like you know, right now we areusing AI as an assistant, right
?
So then we're talking aboutusing AI as a peer.
(03:59):
Then we're talking about likeusing AI as a manager that
manages me.
And then there were even likethings like organizations, right
, like the AI would run theorganization and it'll just give
you tasks, and there's likedistributed organizations and
also.
So we were very futuristic andwe thought, like you know, this
is 30 years in the making.
Then, openly, I came out andeverything like a six months,
(04:19):
seven months.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, crazy, crazy.
And you know, everybody kind ofthinks that the open AI thing
is like, it's like the firstthing that is AI, but it's.
I mean there's a long historythere that has led up to this
event in history.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
We were using OpenAI, obviously before it became
popular, and other will use likefour or five different services
models, and we ended up liketraining OpenAI with a whole
bunch of stuff, right?
Like we said, like you know,our CSMs don't know how to write
SQL.
Why can't they just describe itin natural language?
And it will here.
It'll connect with Gain Site,it'll connect with Salesforce,
(04:59):
it'll connect with Snowflake andwrite a query across platforms
and the CSM just has to look atthe results of the digital CSM
in our case, as you just look atthe results, if it looks fine,
click a button and it will beused to gather data, right?
So?
So we ended up doing that.
We had to train it quite a bit,but now it's available to
everyone because, you know, Iguess we didn't have business
accounts at that time, right?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
So early on.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
So whatever you're doing, you're able to do
everyone.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Well, so tell me a little bitabout your, I guess, what led
you up to?
I mean, today you're, you know,very well known in CS circles
because of CastApp that you knowyou're founder of, been a like
for, for, but you have thiscrazy rich history of
(05:47):
engineering and and and productleadership across all kinds of
segments, right, yeah, and I'mcurious to get your, your take
on kind of what led you downthis, this path.
What, what kind?
What was the evolution to getyou into, you know, serving the
CS community with software?
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Yeah, so.
So my background mostly been,like you know, like an SVP of a
product or a CTO with six orseven venture backed companies
in Silicon Valley.
As I said, like I've been heresince 95.
And before that I was inVirginia and and I had no idea
about customer success before Istarted Castapp and I think that
(06:32):
helped in a way as well.
But there are like two statsthat I read that kind of were in
the back of my mind, right?
75% of the revenue of mostcompanies comes from existing
customers and there are likeeight to 10x more tools for
pre-sales.
So it's like you know the exactopposite, right?
(06:52):
If we you know 70, 73% in salesfor 75% in UiPath, like you
look at, look at any any company, look at PLG companies or SLG
companies, it's the same thing,right?
So, but the number of tools wesell to pre-sales or to sales
people is like 10x more.
So I always wanted to likeunderstand it more.
(07:12):
So you know, you know what Idid is like I bought every book
on CS on and on post sales, likeyou know, read them cover to
cover, made yellow marks allthroughout, and I tend to like
read the books again and again,like you know, because sometimes
they oh, I missed this orsomething.
No, that's absolutely wrong,that doesn't work.
(07:33):
That's like he's just theauthor is just selling the
company or just selling you knowhis services, right?
So I always kind of thoughtthat way.
But then something interestinghappened.
I was just having lunch with myone of my ex CEOs at customer
sat where we kind of mostlyserved like Apple, yahoo,
salesforce, you know BA,weblogic and you know AMD, those
(07:56):
kind of companies and hementioned something someone
about, like Mary Alexander, andI said, oh, she was a board
member.
As he said yes, so I said likeI want to meet her and I had
lunch with her and then she toldme she formulated or she
pioneered or coined is the rightword customer success in 1990
(08:17):
for.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Vented.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And you know, and I read all the blog posts from
everyone like, oh, Salesforcethis is.
I didn't believe her to behonest, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then she followed up asconnected me to another person
she and he was her indirectreport like maybe two, two,
three levels down or something,and he shared with me his
customer success manager card.
Right, he showed it to me.
(08:40):
Like it was, like you know, ina bad shape, yellow and all that
stuff she's telling the truth.
So basically, so I got togetherwith like a few executives and I
did.
What did I do?
We did a interview for her,with her, and we kind of
actually posted on our cast on awebsite, castapp slash articles
(09:00):
you have to find it it's prettyinteresting is even in her mind
it was a way to add revenue,not just service the customer.
It's like full circle.
After so many years now it'sgoing back to talking about
revenue.
Even if you're not selling orupselling, you're influencing
(09:22):
the sale.
So that thing was pretty.
To be honest, that's how I gotto know CS.
From her original experience, Ialways thought it's about doing
better for the customers anddoing better for the teams.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, that's a cool genesis.
I like that.
We literally you started withthe genesis of CS.
I think a lot of people workbackwards into that, but yeah,
that's really cool.
Well, so fast forward to today.
Castapp, pretty well known.
The reason why I'm crazyexcited to speak with you is
(09:58):
because, essentially, whatyou're doing is digital customer
success in app form, which isvery just like meta and cool,
but like, and so this is aquestion that I ask all of my
guests which is this notion ofwhat is digital customer success
?
Because it varies fromabsolutely everybody I talk to.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
I think it's whatever thecompany is selling.
Is digital CS in my mind, likethat's how most people think of
it.
But I mean it could be webinarsoftware, it could be like
community software, even emailmarketing.
I guess everyone's jumping intothe bandwagon.
But seriously, I think, to medigital CS is, I guess, using
(10:46):
technology to help customers andeven the customer success team
members to grow and preservetheir revenue.
But, here's a kicker with amagnitude higher speed, accuracy
, reliability, consistency andscalability.
And that magnitude higher meanlike 10x, 20x higher.
(11:06):
And that's what automation andAI really get you is like our
customers have, like I'll sharewith you later.
I guess like 30x ROI on some ofthe products.
I mean we take the credit, butat the end of the day, is like
combining automation and AI andmaking sure that your AI does
not hallucinate.
We spent a lot of time doingthat, but we'll talk about that
(11:28):
as well.
I personally see digital CSSthree things right.
One is the very simple one toomany even like a blog post or
infographic or even a webinar ora webcast that you do.
You do it once you share withmultiple people.
This podcast is two peopletalking and sharing it with
(11:48):
multiple people.
And the second is what I kindof started calling many to many
like early on, and there arejust two things in there.
Right, one of them is multiplepeople helping multiple people,
like communities.
And the second thing that'sbecoming really popular these
days is customer and customersuccess manager, collaborative
(12:08):
wikis, in other words, right,they would write some post, the
customer will comment on it, theother CSS will comment on it
and it ended up becoming like acollaborative article.
So that is many to many.
The third is what we are doing,which is castaf, which is going
back to the roots of customersuccess, which is like
one-on-one personalized digitalexperiences for customers, but
(12:35):
one-on-one.
In other words, if I'm talkingto a C level executive, my tone
changes, my conversation changes.
When I'm talking to a CFO, I'ma little bit more professional.
I'm talking about ROI.
When I'm talking to a CCO, I'mtalking about like ROV or things
like that.
But when I'm talking to a user,I'm talking about hey, learn
this, do this, watch this videoand surfacing and making
(12:56):
summaries of those blog posts,and so we're showing it to them.
That's what we do.
And then also, when you talk toa power user, don't teach them
how to click the mouse oranything.
Like hey, you have too manyusers in your segment.
You should sub-segment them anddon't believe in a single
segmentation model.
Like you know, have severalsegmentation models.
(13:17):
It's okay, gaston, I can handleit right.
So those are the kind of thingsthat we talk about.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, I love that and it is really kind of one of
those kind of goldenopportunities in digital is to
get to the point ofsophistication where you can be
personas, and it's hard.
It's hard to get to.
You know, you got to know whoyour users are and you got to
(13:44):
have some data to support thatand all that.
But once you do it, it's sopowerful.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yeah, I think you personas the most important
thing you can talk about, likewhen we were talking to people.
But one advice that I figuredout is like, don't go by titles,
and the reason I say that is inan SVP at Salesforce may not
have that much authority, butlike a head of customer success
is a very small company wouldhave a lot of authority.
So it's a different thing.
(14:13):
Don't go by titles, go byresponsibilities, go by roles,
go by user profiles, go byinterests, and then we use all
that data to figure out behavior.
We have so much AI built in,even to our player kind of thing
, so if we notice that someonealways skips over support slides
or something, we move that awaythat they can click on and
(14:36):
access it, for example.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, so making it intelligent and really specific
to that person.
That's super important.
In a previous episode I had areally great conversation with
Dan Ennis.
I don't know if you're familiarwith him, but he's been doing
some pretty amazing work arounddata analysis of specific
(15:03):
personas, where he's essentiallybuilding a data profile of what
an admin might be versus whatan end user might be, versus
what an exec might be orwhatever, and then applies that
across the user segments towhere he doesn't necessarily
need to ask them or know forsure what they are, but based on
(15:24):
their usage and their behaviorsand things like that can get a
pretty good sense for what thepersona is, and I love that
level of sophistication.
It sounds like y'all arecracking that very similar thing
.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And the only thing I would sayis don't go by titles, go by
responsibilities, like a CEO ofa startup would do support and
customer success and bring therights for the team.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
From mopping the floors to signing the checks.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yes, there you go.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Probably at the same time too Good.
You've got two minutes.
So I want to get a little bitdeeper into CAST because I don't
like to kind of I hate havingfounders on and then basically
tell them what their app does.
I'd much rather hear it fromthe founders themselves and kind
(16:19):
of let you kind of speak aboutnot only the genesis of it but,
at its core, what are yousolving for?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah, what we are kind of solving is we only see
two major problems for every B2Bcompany.
It's a huge thing.
One is like OK, before I saythat there are two or three
types of companies Companiesthat are very simple products,
(16:50):
they don't need CSMs, they'llnever need CSMs.
It's a very simple idea.
They will just build it intothe product, and these are like
young PLG companies.
And then there is the wholemass of B2B companies and SaaS
companies which kind of rely onCSMs and account managers and
subject matter experts toprovide adoption and usage and
(17:15):
sales and upsells to customers.
So that's what we're going tofocus on.
And the last category iscompanies that take like nine
months to deploy and they havean army of professional services
, technical services and allthose kind of things.
So we are kind of focused onthe middle, which is luckily,
95% of the 5 million B2B users,customers right there.
(17:38):
Right, 5 million B2B companies.
So we're trying to help overthere.
And the two things we realizedis the CSMs are and account
managers, each have too manyaccounts and, the other hand,
not every account has a CSM.
So we are just trying to solvethose two problems and the way
(18:02):
we did it is we think it's veryunique, but everyone has his own
opinion.
So, in the traditional way ofdoing customer success, you put
a customer success manager inbetween the customer and the
playbooks and the data, and youneed a CSP tool, you need CRM
(18:23):
tools, support tools.
So what we did is what if wecould elevate that CSM, do a
more of a consulting role andmaybe so he or she can focus on
relationships with customers andnew challenges?
And, in his place, bring in adigital customer success manager
or an AI-driven digitalcustomer success manager, in our
(18:46):
case who executes playbooks,digitizes playbooks, executes
playbooks and communicates withthe customer in the manner that
is approved by salespeople orthe VP of sales, is approved by
the CCO and uses automatedbenchmarking to upsell and
cross-sell and uses things likehey, customers, your size, use
(19:11):
these four features.
You're only using three.
Do you want to talk to your CSM, scott Adams, to see if they
want to learn more about this?
Or same thing for sales right,when you use competitive
benchmarking.
So that kind of comes for freewith our product.
So what we are solving?
Just two simple use cases adigital business review with a
(19:32):
purpose.
What good is a digital businessreview when you cannot upsell,
cross-sell or recommend products, right.
So, and then advancedonboarding, which includes, like
pre-boarding prospects,onboarding accounts, onboarding
users, onboarding differentpersonas differently,
(19:53):
re-onboarding a previouslybundled product when a new hire
happens at your customer,onboarding the users again when
the account has already beenonboarded.
So the more complex theonboarding.
That's where we kind of come in.
So two simple use cases, like adigital business reviews could
that grow and preserve yourrevenue and accelerating value
(20:13):
realization through re-boarding,onboarding, re-boarding and
even off-boarding, although wedon't have a single customer
that's using our off-boardingpart?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I love that so much because it speaks to what
digital CS has kind of evolvedto over time, whereas and
regular listeners will haveheard me talk about this before
but, like a few years ago, thenotion of digital CS is okay, we
(20:46):
need this thing, a bunch ofcustomers and that's definitely
evolved into what it is today,which is to say, okay, yeah,
we're doing a lot of customerfacing things, but a big part of
it is automating things so thatyour CSMs can be more strategic
, provide more value and lesstime doing the mundane things
(21:07):
sending the same emails, doingthose kinds of things.
And I love that you're fittingright into that level of kind of
sophistication and automationto where it is removing the
burden, so that your CS, I hatesaying, can do more with less
but can be more valuable withless, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Yeah, people are sort of hating that term, like doing
more with less, but I guess Iguess I can see it's like built
in right, so yeah, absolutely.
And you may have heard of thatterm like in a death by
campaigns, right.
What that really means is likeyou have to write your own
campaigns and the campaigns thatthe customer marketing team
(21:52):
wrote versus the campaigns thatthe CSM is putting together or
versus the campaigns that themarketing.
They don't talk to each other.
Even your four campaigns don'ttalk to each other.
Now, the biggest problem withsuch environments is like, if
the campaigns don't talk to eachother, you're sending too many
emails, too many things, and ifyou upsell or cross-sell in an
email, you're going to be bannedas a spammer, right, Obviously,
(22:14):
because you know, and then youget like sort of getting really
poor results.
So the trick over there is tonot upsell and cross-sell an
email, but like take them intoan environment, whether which is
in-app or out-of-app, which isemail or text, so the executive
does not have to ever log in,right, yeah, If the executive
has to remember how to log in oryou're not going to be able to
(22:37):
reach a CFO or a ChiefAdministrative Officer, I'm
trying to say is like non-linowbusiness executives who are very
influential, whether to keepyour product or not keep your
product, If they don't know whatROI or ROV.
They're not going to continuethat.
So that's the underlying thing.
Like you know, instead ofasking everyone to come into
your product just so that youcan claim like higher monthly
(22:58):
active users or daily activeusers, what if you could take
the product to where the user is?
If they send an email or text,reach them over there.
If they log in like Power Usersand Users, show them in-app.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, it's interesting too that executive
persona.
Nine times out of 10, they'renot going to be in the app at
all, like they're not your users, they're not your intended kind
of audience for regular users,so why expect them to log into
the app just to kind of see howthings are going?
And one thing you hit on that Ithink is something that is very
(23:36):
often overlooked is textmessaging and SMS.
I don't think a lot of peopleare doing that because I think
there's an automatic assumptionthat it's kind of creepy or, you
know, it's invasive or whatnot.
My argument has always beenthat if someone wants to be
(23:57):
communicated via text, or ifsomebody wants to be
communicated via email orwhatever it is or Slack message,
like, we should give ourcustomers that option so that if
they want to be communicatedwith text, they can be.
But I think that's it for a lotof people.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
So one distinction that we liketo make is let's say you use
HubSpot or so for emailmarketing, you don't have a
relationship with the peoplethat you're sending your emails
to.
When you are talking to acustomer, you have a
relationship with the people.
They're like kind of opted inin your terms and conditions
(24:36):
that you can communicate withthem.
So use transactional emails andthat's what we do, and and
honestly God, we get likeminimum of 2.1x to 4x the
industry average when we sendout conversations.
Like you know we can.
Hp, you know they use CSPplatforms but send emails to us.
Their storage, aruba, samething, right?
(24:59):
So the interesting thing is, inthe presentations or digital
hubs that we generate and send,we ask them would you like to
opt in for getting text?
So we have to do an opt in.
So what we notice is like Clevel execs prefer text, whereas
operators and everything preferemail and users and power users
(25:21):
prefer to just log in into theproduct or so.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It's like a no brainer, but there's a huge
aversion to that.
I don't really get that, but Ithink it's extremely powerful
because your executive, they'vegot their phone like all the
time right.
What do you recommend whenfolks are, you know, setting up
the system and doing those kindsof things?
Do you make recommendations onwhat they should send via SMS
(25:50):
versus email?
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, you let your end customers choose SMS, but
you reach out to executives overemail, but give them an option
to switch to SMS.
But then the campaign shouldalso change, as I was mentioning
earlier.
Right, like our camp, you know,you don't have to create
multiple cameras because we havea generative platform.
So not only the presentationsare generated, the digital hubs
(26:14):
are generated, but even thecampaigns are generated, right?
So if I take one 30 seconddeparture, why is that helpful?
Because if somebody has alreadydone steps eight and 12, the
campaign won't get stuck, itwill overlook that.
Tell them to do steps one toseven and then, as of two, step
nine and then it move on.
Right, because it's agenerative platform.
(26:35):
Since it's a generative, don'twrite like really long emails,
put like really short emails.
Give them a single call toaction button, right.
Or, if you have several call toactions, they should point to
the same result, which is likethe presentation or view, your
digital hub or so.
And then, if you're sending itby text, should be like one or
(26:56):
two lines, right?
You know, we have come up likewe call it, like anti patterns
of emails.
Like you know, everyone putsthe name of the customer on the
top in the subject and that doesthis.
No, talk about numbers.
Talk about, like you know right, things that matter to him.
Every user at the same accountshould get a separate subject,
separate body, separate email,because at the end of the day,
(27:16):
you're trying to communicate asa digital CSN to them, not as a
customer marketing.
We support customer marketingalso in our product, but we want
to send emails like how a humanwould write hey, I'm concerned
about this.
Your number dropped by XYZ.
Do you want to talk to me aboutthis?
Put that as part of the subject, right.
So, and again, you can do thatwith generative platforms.
(27:37):
It's very hard to set it upwhen you are kind of creating
campaigns separately.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, are there?
Are there some like particular,like success stories or really
cool like use cases that you'vecome across?
Yeah, and customers that areusing it particularly well?
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I mean, yeah, there are quite a few.
Right, there's a paper on ourwebsite about pure storage.
This is the first division thatsigned up.
They are making over $400,000 aquarter and they're attributing
it to digital CSMs.
Wow.
(28:18):
And, and another division ofthem forget, I think they do
like Six Sigma training forcustomers, or so they save over
150 hours per account byswitching from a cell service
LMS to gas personalized learning.
(28:40):
Now, the difference in LMS islike, you know, yeah, you have a
30 minute video.
Or you watch that, but or wecan generate like a four minute
conversation.
Five minute conversation thatgoes over and teaches you the
five vies of Six Sigma, but alsoteaches you how to use, like,
(29:01):
fish boning and all those kindof things.
In case you have forgotten why?
Because the prerequisites youneed to know fish boning before
you do this, right?
So the presentation video thatgoes out is custom created for
Alex.
Why?
Because we know that Alex hastaken these four courses.
He got three A's and one D, sowe'll talk more about the thing
(29:23):
that he got.
Yeah, right, it's likepersonalized, because we know
this, we know, and it's muchshorter, right?
Like, if what is four or fiveminutes, is there an option to
look into that.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
So those are some of the yeah it's if that's a cool
combination of kind of theconcept of micro learning and
and AI generated kind of content.
Curation is essentially what itis.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yet another example this customer route this and I
tell this to all my customersbecause I they've given me
permission to share some oftheir analytics they get like
four, x, the other people as faras like success metrics are
concerned, and they have a verysimple philosophy Less is more.
They don't want to tell morethings to a customer.
(30:05):
They show like two or threeslides, but they let them ask
questions.
They let them.
So I don't know whether you'reaware or not that our product
trains on every tech stack andyour products automatically.
So what that?
What that really means is likewhen you are giving a
presentation, you usually showseven to 10 slides, but on your
(30:28):
eighth slide, the CCO has 20questions, right?
So what normally people do in aQBR or something, they create
like a 50 page deck and have abig appendix and all that stuff,
right, but that's not the rightthing.
You just keep it very small,but when the people ask
questions, ask them, answertheir questions live using an
agent, right?
So that's what we do.
(30:50):
It's quite interesting.
It was very well received by HPPure Storage, aruba, v-com,
route, this and, yeah, I mean HPshared something that engaged
customers by 90% more often andspent 60% more for transaction.
So I mean, yeah, they have beenusing digital and our product
(31:11):
for a long time.
They were one of our designcustomers and yet another
customer which I should be ableto mention.
Early next month they showed usthat a CSM can handle 2.17x the
number of accounts acrosssegments and I have to read this
while improving the CSM NPS by16% and improving the onboarding
(31:36):
CES by 21%.
So, at the same time, right.
So basically what I'm saying isthe CSM can handle 2.17x the
number of accounts acrosssegments and the CSM NPS
improved by 16% and theonboarding exports CES in a
customer effort score improvedby 21%.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
To me, what this boils down to is finding those
key moments and just reallydigging in on those and being
hyper focused on the outcome andthe metric behind the outcome.
Because, again to the earlierSMS example, right, if you can
(32:19):
text your executive and say, hey, your team is doing this well,
your team isn't doing this well,this is your ROI, etc.
Etc.
In like one or two lines, Imean, how impactful is that
versus the 20 page deck that wetalked about?
That has the huge, but why justyeah?
Speaker 1 (32:39):
and that's the difference.
Why just inform the user right,tell them what to do.
In other words, hey, great jobon this, your team is doing
really good.
This is the next thing that youshould focus on.
Really bad job on this.
You should consider going tothis training.
So the purpose is not likeinforming.
The purpose is like an actionthat was generated on the fly.
(33:00):
You know we take credit, butit's the AI doing it right.
So, on the fly telling themwhat to do.
So never show them negatives.
Always use the negative to tellthem what to do.
Because, then, and nine out of10 times you're right.
Right, but there may be timesyou're not right, but still, you
gave us a suggestion and youcan always say I don't have a
suggestion.
Do you want to set up like 30minutes with the CSM?
(33:22):
Right, we do that.
All the you know, we do that,as I was saying earlier.
Right, ai tends to hallucinate.
So what we do is like wefigured out with every answer we
ask for, how confident are you?
You know, the confidence levelis less than 0.36.
We say we think this is theanswer, but we are not sure.
(33:43):
But if it is less than 0.26 orsomething, we say we don't know
the answer.
But here is the calendar for aCSM.
Like when we introduce likethese, being able to connect CSM
, and people may say, yeah, so Ican put this in my database and
we, you know everyone canconnect to calendar, so it's not
no big deal.
But this is the reason why wedid that is because the AI tends
(34:03):
to hallucinate.
And then we can bring in theCSM as an end need.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
As the human backup?
Yeah, yeah, do you feel likeyou're your newness to customer
success and you, coming at thisfrom an outside of CS
perspective, has served you wellin this?
I mean, that's my impression,because you have this other view
(34:33):
and you're not bogged down bythe traditional sentiment of
what a QBR is or whatever.
Do you feel like that's servedyou well in this whole thing?
Speaker 1 (34:45):
I hope so, I believe so, I hope so.
But you know, see, whateverhappened in customer service,
like 15 years ago, is happeningin customer success now.
So in customers, you cannot askfor help without having.
When you start typing aquestion, it starts giving you
suggestions right, you goanywhere, but the problem is
(35:06):
they are going against a staticdocument, right?
In other words, they're goingthrough your health documents
and or whatever, like you know,university documents or whatever
we call it schoolcastapp.
So they're going through that.
So what we are doing differentfrom over there is we are
reading account information andhelping the information.
But that's an aside.
But that's the point that I'mmaking is like, whatever
(35:28):
happened in customer servicewill happen in customer success,
which is like more automationand more AI agents answering
your question and bringing in anexport, which is like the
person who did the customerservice agent later on, right?
So for that to happen, whathappened in that industry is
they started paying more tocustomer service agents, right?
(35:50):
The humans?
Yeah, I call them coffee drivenCSMs and AI driven CSMs, right?
So that makes it easier for meto explain.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Yeah, same thing is going to happen, like the AI
driven CSM is going to requestthe coffee driven CSM to like
come in and help her right.
So I'll see.
We'll see a lot more of that.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, if you haven't trademarked that already, I
would do that immediately.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
I should.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Well, I mean speaking of seeing more of that.
I think you know, arguably, aihas been around for a while, but
we're now getting into a levelof usability of gen AI that is
obviously unprecedented, and alot of people are coming to
terms with that, some betterthan others.
(36:42):
But what is, in your opinion?
What is?
What are the next few yearslook like in terms of the
adoption of this technology, andI guess, specifically to CS,
like what do you see all thisgoing?
Speaker 1 (37:00):
So I mean, we have been noticing this since early
October already.
Right, like people are not that.
Even like we were signing up, acustomer just sent the document
sign early morning and he saidwe'll sign as soon as I pick up
the kids.
So even like security companiesare adopting AI, you know.
(37:23):
Obviously they ask us toughquestions and then we have I
have a demo where I put his nameand I say who is such and such,
right, the CCO's name?
And in the past we have triedto answer that no, we cannot
answer that because this personis talking to you, you know.
So it says like I don't know,do you want to connect with our
CSM to answer?
(37:44):
So that gives a good way totell them that people are
getting comfortable with this AIthing.
At the end of the day, I don'tthink so.
There are still few people whoare resisting, right, like say,
hey, human touch and all thosekind of things.
But I feel it can do moreservice to you and make your job
(38:05):
as a CSM or as a CS leader alot easier and you can look at
like minimum 12X to 40X ROI withthe products that you use,
instead of using a system ofrecord tool that put data in it
and you run reports and then youcreate campaigns and reach out
to people and say nobody'sclicking on my campaigns.
You know things like that.
(38:27):
So things that can learn canreally help you take it to the
next level.
Thank you.
If I may, a lot has changed.
When I was at the MIT AI thing,we were focused on supervised
learning and unsupervisedlearning.
We we even have unsupervisedlearning in our player because
it learns if you always skipover support and it will yeah,
to the side right.
(38:49):
But then again Some I supervisedlearning was a big thing at
that time, like we were like, oh, we're waiting for it to like
show up.
And then we were talking aboutlike one shot learning, a few
shot learning, which is likejust give it a few samples and
it learns.
And that's what open AI waslike just a year and a half ago.
But when we were like trainingthem how to generate SQL from
(39:10):
commands or we're Telling it howto have a combination generate
code from liquid, which we dothat today Also, right, we were
doing that.
But now you don't even have totrain as part of the prompt.
You can give an example here, acouple of examples, just these
two or three examples.
You know, yes, we want to takecredit because we trained it,
but at the end of the day,everyone can use those kind of
(39:31):
things.
Right, few shot learning.
So I think that's where theworld is headed and this whole
opening I Sam Alton fiasco,whether Whether it was because
of a GI or whatever the realreason is.
Hopefully we'll find out whenhe writes his book.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
But because you know it's coming.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, but yeah, I mean again, they're okay, wall
Street is saying one thing, thecircle valley saying another
thing, but but, at the end ofthe day, more AI is coming, more
useful AI is and I'm nottalking about what MIT should
teach us like it are using AI asan assistant and eventually
appear and eventually Like yourmanager and eventually, like the
(40:11):
, it runs the corporation andjust gives you tasks, or yeah,
that we are far from that.
But at the end of the day, anytool that's available, I mean,
yeah, look at, look at the thingno one's hiring.
We're the chief of staff,because this open AI, this tool,
is your chief of staff.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely do you.
So you know, I think back tokind of Google and early kind of
search engines and back Back inthe day I mean, we were dating
ourselves earlier.
Right, I'm giving our earlyinfluence, influences of the
internet or whatever.
(40:48):
But back in the early days youkind of had to know how to
search for something Like onGoogle to to get accurate
results, whereas today Google'spretty smart, it knows, you know
, kind of, what you meant to sayor what you meant to search for
, and it, you know, hascontextual history and all that
kind of fun stuff.
(41:09):
And I feel like I is still kindof in this place where you kind
of have to know how to prompt,and I kind of feel like I need
to educate my on.
You know I'm engineering alittle bit, but I don't know
that that's always going to bethe case, right, because it's
(41:30):
your right.
I'm doing it, I'm going to goaway and so yeah, so so I mean
it does that.
If is that really a thing?
I mean, you know, you see allthe posts about, like you know
top, you know Top prompts for CSprofessionals and all this kind
of stuff.
Like, is that going to be athing in 10 years or five years?
Speaker 1 (41:49):
No, not really, I think that'll go away.
What, what they're doing islike reusing the same how to
write an email.
They're putting that inside thecode.
How to Create the initialworkflow like diagram.
They're putting everyone'sputting in there, but those are
like barely scratching thesurface, right, so what?
And yeah, I mean like, why can'tyou create the prompt right
when, like in our case, like wehave like Narration was
(42:12):
generated and then we can clickon a button and say make it
humorous for peers, but keep itprofessional for the CFO, right,
so we do it just by one button,but we have made the prompt
behind the scenes to do allthose kind of things, right,
yeah?
So yeah, I think prompt wholething is gonna Go away.
It's gonna become more of a hey, ask the user.
(42:34):
But along with that we have tobe very careful, because if you
put the prompt in front of theend user, they can ask anything.
It can ask you to expose hey,what is the underlying platform,
what security system are using.
But you could even ask, like,what was the question that one
of my engineers asked like hey,what are the?
What security patches have notbeen applied and how can I use
(42:55):
them to infrared.
He's asked something like thisand he was shocked that he got a
really good answer, right.
So who's?
Yeah, we were, we were shocked,right, like you did it in a
short meeting, like we went forlike lunch and all this stuff.
He's just put it up his laptopand did that.
So we have to be very careful.
But on that's why you know thesecurity companies, they come to
us, they ask first thing, firstquestion Do you have sock to?
(43:17):
Yes, we have sock to and sockthree?
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Okay, then this one I have a conversation with yeah,
yeah, it's very interesting andyou hear about you know like AI
being now and you know used inin a call, you know collegiate
setting, you having to like citeyour prompts and how you got
(43:42):
there, and those kinds of yeah,it's very interesting to me
Because, yeah, I think there areall kinds of implications from
a plagiarism perspective and andwhat yeah, but just to see how,
where that goes.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Yeah, but don't get me wrong.
There are already promptsavailable that will say you can
prompt and say only give meanswers that you can cite and
then it'll put the citation also.
So you can be.
It's easy to do that.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Yeah, judge, judge, don't think, don't try to solve
an AI problem outside the realmof AI.
Just ask the same thing, likeyou know how we do here.
How confident are you with youranswer?
And if the answer is betweenpoint two, two and point
whatever, point three, six, thenwe save somewhat confident.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
I think that's very important for people to hear,
because I think there's a.
I've talked to a lot of peoplewho just have a general distrust
distrust for it, yeah you know,because it's this little black
box.
You know, yeah, and I'm and sowhat I mean?
Yeah, you know figure outwhat's behind it is is important
.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yeah, so what I mean is that there are Three types of
people, like you know.
The one in the middle could bethe open minded people.
They're looking for answers orignore them, that's you know.
And one is like who's a skeptic.
So when a skeptic writes a word, he's looking for that answer.
That is wrong, so he canadvertise that.
Where is the other end?
Like people like me, they onlylook at the positives and like
(45:09):
advertise that, right.
But the right person is, likeyou know, who has an open mind
and say knows the limitations ofAI, well, still is willing to
give her try to use it to heradvantage, right?
So that's, that's the key thing.
Yeah, love both extremes are bad.
Like me, like everythingpositive, but AI is also bad.
And the other person who's like, hey, no human does no nothing,
(45:30):
ai is gonna take over our lives.
That's also right.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, balance.
It's all about balance.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
I could have said that and giving a long story.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
It's perfect.
Yeah, it's, it's fascinating.
I could.
I think I could talk about thisstuff all day.
But you know, the unfortunatething about the fact that it is
eight till the hour is that weare running out of time and that
sucks.
But I Do have a couple of justkind of round out questions.
Yeah, the first one is what?
(46:05):
What are you paying attentionto?
Listening to that informs kindof who you are.
It could be business, could benot business.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
I'll be honest, I think I'm spending a whale a lot
of time on tiktok these daysand somehow it had figured, had
figured out that I read a lotabout entrepreneurship and I
kind of you know, look at likeAI, hallucination problems and
AI, so those three things ittalks a lot about.
And it also talks to me aboutshoes, yeah, and sunglasses,
(46:37):
because it knows that I collectsunglasses and it knows that I
collect shoes, right, or herboots and stuff.
So between these five topics Iuse like tiktok.
But then I, when I go for walks, I'm usually have like one
airport and I'm listening tobooks.
I tend to listen to the booksthat I've read before.
Because, I'm trying to look formore things that I missed or
(47:01):
I've started to disagree with alot of stuff that I've
re-listened to now, I guess, asI'm evolving as my concept.
So I figure out like, okay,they're just saying the norm,
for example, their product isfor CSMs, so there is no way
they are interested in having ahigh ratio of account to CSN
(47:26):
because they charge with CSN, sothat's why they're going to say
this.
So I've become skeptical, sinceI was just learning from that
and I'm saying why are theydoing that?
So I've started to think likethat, which I think people
should listen or read books thatthey have read before.
Again after like a three or sixmonth period.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, I think that's really helped, the fact that
you're reading it and thenlistening to it, because I feel
like I know our brain verydifferently if whether it's
auditory input or visual input.
So you're actually right,you're probably picking up on
stuff just because of that verything.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Yeah, and what you're describing is and this is one
of the research that we did whenwe started cast.
So University of Washington,some biomedicine doctor.
He said like if you just useone model, which is like reading
a blog post or listening to apodcast, you retain 10 percent
of the information.
If you add one more, likevisuals as well as reading, it
(48:22):
goes to 65 percent, and I havethe research to actually paid
for it.
But if you add a third one, itgoes to 73 percent.
You add a fourth one, 73.5.
So it doesn't matter, butminimum two is kind of.
That is the reason our avatarshave lip movement when they talk
.
Oh, wow, right.
(48:42):
So you're listening to somethingyou are watching and you see
the lip movement and all this.
This gave directly from theprofessor, right, like, but are
we very transparent?
Like 50 percent of ourcustomers turn the avatar off
and 50 percent, like, want tolabel it, name it.
Like I said, hi I'm Amy or hiI'm Mark, depending on the
gender.
So they do all sorts of things.
(49:03):
But you're absolutely right.
Sorry for the you know.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
No, it's great.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
I'll look up the research.
Actually, it might be linked onour website also at the bottom.
I'll look it up and see.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Well, I mean, you know it's even in editing this,
you know these podcast episodes.
You know I do edit the videoand the audio at this end.
I notice that when I'm when I'mlooking at it and I've even had
this feedback when people arelistening on YouTube versus just
on their podcast app, they pickup different things Because
obviously so much of ourcommunication as humans is
(49:35):
visual.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Yeah, so, yeah, I, you know I have CarPlay and
recently the podcast app inCarPlay enabled like the 1.5X,
1.7x feed, right.
So what I noticed?
Like if I listen and 1.7X feed,I'm driving much faster.
So I had to like go back to1.25 and 1.5, because, you know,
(49:59):
I'm into sports cars a littlebit, but I tend to drive a lot
faster when I'm listening tosomething really fast, right.
So it's like that was thereason why I switched it back to
1.5 or you know, versus like 2X.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
That's really funny.
Apple's probably going to haveto update their terms and
conditions for that, Just for mejust because of this guy who
tends to drive faster when he'sjust taking faster podcasts.
Exactly, Exactly.
Well, look, I've.
I've enjoyed this conversationtremendously.
I'm sure people can find you onLinkedIn.
Are there other resources orplaces?
(50:32):
People?
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Yeah, the eialingtoncom slash in slash
deki d-i-c-k-e-y, and the bestway to reach me is like my email
.
So d-i-c-k-e-y-at-castapp, Ithink those are the two best
ways to reach me.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Amazing.
Well, again, I appreciate it.
Thanks for the time.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you for joining me forthis episode of the Digital
Customer Success Podcast.
If you like what we're doing,consider leaving us a review on
your podcast platform of choice.
It really helps us to grow andto provide value to a broader
audience.
You can view the DigitalCustomer Success Definition word
(51:09):
map and get more details aboutthe show at
digitalcustomersuccesscom.
My name is Alex Turchovich.
Thanks again for joining andwe'll see you next time.
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