It was the spring of 2020 and we were hearing rumors of a pandemic. Events were getting cancelled, people were wearing masks and gloves, and no one wanted to travel for fear of catching the new Corona virus.
Is the time right?
Having run global Customer Success teams for the past decade, my first thought was that we have to redefine how we work in this new environment. Face-to-face meetings will go from boardrooms to our houses on a video call and it’s really hard to “read the room” from your small video screen. The challenge of managing customers to success, which was hard enough when you could be in the room with them, just got much harder.
Is the time right for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Customer Success? This could change the game and balance the playing field for everyone.
The Gong for Customer Success
Bhupendra Chopra and I met and started to brainstorm how we could affect this for Customer Success teams as we had worked together well in the past. Zoom gave their software to schools for free. Sales teams bought Gong to transcribe and rewatch recorded conversations. And every decent-sized SaaS company was buying a platform for Customer Success (Gainsight, Totango, ChurnZero, Client Success).
But no one was taking it to the next level – truly applying Customer Success Intelligence to the problem. There are ways to better use even deeper data, explore NLP and NLU, apply machine learnings to find patterns, and even provide digital coaching of CSMs.
We’ve come a long way in a short year, Bhupendra and I co-founder the company, hired the industry’s leading SaaS advisors across the globe, and partnered with the top AI technologies from Google AI, Amazon Comprehend, covert startup AI operations in Silicon Valley and top minds at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford.
Next Generation Customer Success
We are the next generation of Customer Success and integrate with the top CS platforms to add AI extensions to Gainsight, Salesforce and Zoom and that’s just the starting point.
We’ve raised a half million dollars in this seed round from experienced investors, B2B SaaS experts, friends and family. Our top priority through the end of the year is to deepen our partnerships with pilot customers, integrate even deeper with our technology partners, and be cybersecurity-ready with our biometrical, emotional, and sentimental data. Executing on these initiatives will lead us to a Series A next year.
If you run a customer success team and are trying to figure out how to use Customer Success Intelligence to massively scale your team, drive deeper loyalty with customers, and increase your NRR, give me a shout and let’s see how AI can help you.
Bryan Plaster