Agentic CS and the Future of Retention

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Julia Nimchinski: Awesome thanks again, and we are transitioning to our next demo. Welcome, Andrew. Humid solution consultant gains up

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Julia Nimchinski: and we’re going to be talking about the future of retention.

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Julia Nimchinski: What was that.

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Andrew Humitz: Hey, Julia, how are you doing.

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Julia Nimchinski: Excited for this. What’s new with Game Site.

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Andrew Humitz: Yeah, yeah, really excited to be here. Thanks everybody for for joining. And yeah, I’m here. I’m a solutions consultant at Gainsight, really looking forward to kind of showing you how

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Andrew Humitz: gainsight is is leveraging and some best in class customer success orgs are leveraging AI to really kind of transform what a Csm means.

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Andrew Humitz: and allow you to kind of grow and scale with like, you can see here without having to add headcount and and drive better retention rates. So yeah, looking forward to jumping in.

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Julia Nimchinski: That’s dive into it.

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Andrew Humitz: Awesome.

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Andrew Humitz: Well, let me get my screen up here.

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Andrew Humitz: Awesome.

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Andrew Humitz: So let me present really quickly. So really, really fast. Maybe for those who don’t know gainsight. We’re a, you know, industry, leading customer success and post sale, customer experience platform really designed to help

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Andrew Humitz: organizations

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Andrew Humitz: retain and grow their customer base. That’s really our bread and butter. We’re also a a leader, and we’re on the forefront of of how we can leverage AI in those processes, and how we can leverage AI to to really transform the Csm role in general so really, quickly. I think

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Andrew Humitz: we all know that Csms tend to be a very jack of all trades, type of a role. They really are involved in everything, from technical conversations and product support all the way over to to commercial relationships, driving revenue, driving expansion dollars with your customers.

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Andrew Humitz: And really, where gainsight is, is envisioning specifically AI and AI agents to step into that mixture is our vision is to help Csms

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Andrew Humitz: focus their time on the things that got them into being a Csm things like relationship management, things like driving value for customers.

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Andrew Humitz: and let AI do the rest. Let AI handle the grunt work as you can. See here, and let Csms get back to doing what they love and doing what they do best, which is the customer relationship management side of things.

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Andrew Humitz: What we’re seeing from like a best in class Cs organization framework

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Andrew Humitz: is the growth of AI. As you can see here, a lot of the foundational workflows our customers are leveraging AI for is much more in the humans with the AI in the loop, so much more of the AI being an executive assistant type of a persona in that dynamic being able to help me automatically capture, call notes and recordings, and help me surface up lists of customers that I need to be engaging in. Like all of that kind of

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Andrew Humitz: repetitive work that does take a lot of time for Csms. We’re seeing a lot of customers in a foundational workflow with AI drive a lot of those workflows. You know, in in much more of a foundational manner, as you start to kind of grow in that

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Andrew Humitz: that maturity phase. We’re seeing a lot of customers start to leverage AI platforms and and AI within gainsight to help with much more of the analyst side of things. How could gainsight and and AI uncover unknown insights that I might not know about as a Csm. Spot churn that I didn’t even know was happening, or I wasn’t even aware of much more in that. Like sidekick, you know, co-pilot type of an analyst role.

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Andrew Humitz: As we start to see the Csm role transforming in the future, it’s much more into that agent model. How could the AI

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Andrew Humitz: be looking at those those signals and and those insights, and then helping perform actions on my behalf, so that as a Csm, I’m really focused on kind of driving those those relationships with with customers. So where I’m gonna focus the the remaining time here is showing you how gainsight can help on all 3 of those things. So really gonna get started with much more of that assistant type of a role and how gainsight has AI features that are really relevant to helping me

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Andrew Humitz: do some of that kind of foundational, you know, grunt work type of activities. Then really, I want to show the the group here how gainside is positioned to to be that that sidekick analyst for you, and then how we can start really driving those actions on on the behalf of the Csm. Here.

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Andrew Humitz: So I will jump out here and I’ll get started with that that 1st workflow. So one of the really foundational areas that our customers and I’ll move my Zoom bar here. Our customers are leveraging. AI is game site, has

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Andrew Humitz: an AI agent, an app that can live right where the Csms are spending their time already. What you’re seeing here is in slack. I’m a Csm. I’m managing a book of customer relationships

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Andrew Humitz: right where I’m living, you know, 50, 75% of my time in slack. I can go ahead and just query the gainsight AI agent and say, Hey, like, show me a cus. A list of customers who have renewals coming up in the next quarter don’t have to go and build that report. I don’t have to go and sift through a list of customers. Let me just throw that to our our agent. Shoot me back a list of those customers that have renewals coming up cool

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Andrew Humitz: gainsight. Help me craft an email so I can get, you know, planning. And I can get a a meeting on the the books with those customers and start having those renewal discussions.

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Andrew Humitz: This is a really simplistic example, but the idea is, we have an AI agent within gain site, right where Csm spend a ton of time right in slack, allowing them to query reports, build lists of customers, craft emails. I do a lot of those foundational types of of workflows and actions

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Andrew Humitz: right where they’re spending a bunch of time. So again, really, really quick example of how gainsight is leveraging AI, and how some best in class Cs orgs are are leveraging AI to be much more of that foundational. You know assistant type of a of a persona

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Andrew Humitz: as I move forward here, though I want to jump into how gainsight could be much more of that analyst that sits next to me, that is surfacing up really key insights that maybe I wasn’t even aware of in the in the beginning.

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Andrew Humitz: So that’s where I’m gonna jump over into a platform. That gainsight calls our staircase AI system. What our staircase AI platform does is it has the ability to connect into all of the avenues at which we are engaging with customers think email support tickets meeting. You know, transcripts call recordings. Like all of those areas that our entire organization is engaging with customers

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Andrew Humitz: using AI. We can then use all of that context to start to surface up really interesting signals to me as a Csm.

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Andrew Humitz: so just jumping in here. What you’re seeing is the example of of an account. Maybe this is a customer that I’m responsible for managing as a Csm. This is one of my accounts.

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Andrew Humitz: What gainsight and our staircase platform does is we can automatically generate with no human manual intervention required. We can automatically start to to give high level summaries to those Csms to give them an idea of what’s happening on this account without having to go look through lists of of activities or emails or anything like that.

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Andrew Humitz: But, more importantly, as you can start to see here, one of the really key use cases of staircase is to start flagging potential insights that I should be aware of as a Csm. That maybe I didn’t even know of prior to to leveraging gainsight. So in this example, we actually note that this customer you can see they’re at risk. They’re a customer whose staircase has automatically flagged as being like, Hey, Csm, this customer is at risk. You need to be aware of that.

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Andrew Humitz: I can then look and see. Hey, why is this customer at risk? Okay, staircase is actually flagging, that there was a churn risk that happened maybe a couple a couple of weeks ago. So what does that actually mean? As a Csm. The beauty here is that the AI is trained to be a Csm sidekick. It can help analyze the interactions that we’re having with this customer and based off of just this email. Just this one message that this customer shared with us. You can see here this customer is clearly saying, Hey, like

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Andrew Humitz: we’re not quite sure that this partnership is working anymore. We might have to look at other options.

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Andrew Humitz: That is context that’s really really hard for a Csm to know and keep track of. And regularly look at all of the communications that a customer is having with the team.

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Andrew Humitz: What staircase is doing is it’s automatically flagging that up and saying, Hey, just so you’re aware this customer is really trending negatively. They’re you know, they’re a serious churn risk within our our customer base. So that’s where gainsight can be much more of that analyst. Let’s look at all the signals that are happening across this customer’s relationship and just start flagging risks, flagging opportunities for growth just being that analyst to surface up. You know. Key insights that I might need to to be aware of.

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Andrew Humitz: This is all well and good, but I think where AI and where gainsight can then start to really drive a lot more efficiency gains is starting to understand, like, what’s the next next best action cool.

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Andrew Humitz: This account is a churn risk. What should I do next? Okay, there’s a, you know, churn risk. Here. We need to pull together the the team create a plan to overcome this risk, or what are some of these other insights that that game site is is identifying. And what’s the the recommended next next best action as a Csm. So I can really know, like what my playbook is from here.

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Andrew Humitz: Now, the future of where this is going is to start to take things like those insights and then just drive automated workflows off of that and start to actually take those actions on behalf of me as a Csm.

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Andrew Humitz: so again, we’re just freeing up, you know, exponentially more time from the Csm so that they can focus much more on the relationship building piece. So maybe whenever we do receive that signal that a customer is at risk, or you know, one of those other signals that gainsight can surface up. Maybe we then just drive some really interesting automated workflows where we can engage those customers completely at scale.

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Andrew Humitz: Put some of those touch points in there. So where, as a Csm I should get involved, it can funnel those customers over to me. And I can be really, really.

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Andrew Humitz: you know, focused on what the most important kind of high impact customers and actions are that I should be taking.

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Andrew Humitz: So I want to be conscience of conscientious of time.

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Andrew Humitz: really, again, the the whole point here is that we do want. If I go back a a few slides here, our whole goal is.

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Andrew Humitz: Let’s take a lot of that grunt, work off the plate of the Csms and get them back to doing what they love being humans and working in that human relationship business. That’s kind of our whole goal, and where gain sites building AI and and agents into kind of that post sale ecosystem. Here.

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Julia Nimchinski: Thank you so much, Andrew, and let’s just a couple of questions here from the audience. One of them is what Roi benchmarks are you seeing from teams using staircase persistent or gainsight alone?

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Andrew Humitz: Yeah. So I think one. I think benchmark, of course, is going to be the ratios at which the Csm team can serve. So how many accounts can Csm support? You know effectively. That’s where I think the analyst persona can come into play is

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Andrew Humitz: as a Csm. I can support a greater number of customers, because

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Andrew Humitz: a tool like staircase can proactively be surfacing up churn risk to me. Negative sentiment issues with me. Expansion opportunities with me without me having to spend the time of like looking at reports digging into, you know, trend lines of data to kind of sort all that out. And then I think another one just quite simply is, you know, the the retention rates, of course, like, if we can be much more proactive in understanding those signals.

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Andrew Humitz: it allows us to course correct before that customer. Really, you know, it turns into a churn situation. So yeah.

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Julia Nimchinski: It helps. People are asking, what does the onboarding look like? How long before your models start producing actionable insights.

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Andrew Humitz: Yeah. And I think that’s 1 of the biggest benefits of staircase, specifically, is that the platform itself is trained on the persona of a Csm. So we are built in that Csm mindset. The onboarding process for staircase is extremely fast. We’ve seen customers get fully up and running and starting to see actionable insights in

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Andrew Humitz: 48 h, you know. It can be as as quick as as a day or 2, quite honestly. So that’s 1 of the really big benefits of staircases. How quick and and easy it is to start seeing those insights.

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Julia Nimchinski: Awesome, and for all the folks watching what’s the best next step.

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Andrew Humitz: Yeah, I would absolutely urge you to to go to to gainsight.com, for sure. I would absolutely urge you to to look at at coming to our pulse event here in a couple of weeks. In Las Vegas. It’s kind of our big flagship conference we host for the the Cs world. So certainly look into that if you’re not able to attend, certainly look into the recordings afterwards. But yeah, thanks everybody for the time.

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Julia Nimchinski: Amazing thanks. Again Andrew.

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Andrew Humitz: Yeah, thank, you.

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Julia Nimchinski: Team. Vivin! Welcome to the show!

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Jarod Greene: Thank you, Julie. How are you today.