Balling on a budget with AI | Parker Chase-Corwin | TDSU Ep. 54

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Rob, what the hell is going on? You're not going to believe me when I tell you, so I'm not going to bother. Should I tell you? I think you should, yeah. So my computer is overheating, so I took some frozen tortillas.

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I was like, let me slot these under. Episode title. It worked.

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Episode title. That's clever. It worked.

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Frozen tortillas. So also my AC is out in my house, so that's also why I'm glowing and fluffy. Glowing and fluffy.

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That's the episode title. Are you dialing in from the tropics, Rob? What's going on? Yeah, exactly. What's up, lifers? And welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day.

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I got my man, Rob, with us. Rob, do you want to say hi? Hola, compadres. Got my man, JP, with us.

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JP, do you want to say hi? Hola, amigos. Muchachos, vamonos. We've got Parker with us.

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Parker, do you want to say hi? I'll stick with the trend. Hola. Okay.

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All right. I don't know Spanish, so I'm not going to- That's all I got. That's like from the country.

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Hola. And I am your host, the Pablo Escobar of customer success. I just mean I have pet hippopotamuses, guys.

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My name is Dillon Young. Parker, thank you so much for being here. Please introduce yourself in English.

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Hey, everybody. My name is Parker Chase-Corwin. I am a CS and customer experience consultant, and I work with founders to build out their scalable customer management programs to drive revenue and retention.

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Right on. You've said that before, it sounds like. A few times.

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Right on. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for, I assume, you're going to share some wisdom.

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You know what we're doing here. We ask every guest one single question. What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So why don't you tell us? Yeah, sure.

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So first of all, I'm just going to apologize in advance. We got some thunderstorms rolling through it. If you hear my dogs in the background, they don't like thunderstorms.

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So hopefully they'll be quiet for us. But I'm frustrated. What I see happening out there is a large gap in the narrative around AI tech driven customer success, and then the ability for customer success teams to actually embrace it.

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So I actually want to speak to the CS leaders out there that are feeling like they're failing right now, because when they compare themselves to what's being said in LinkedIn or conferences or things of that nature, the bar is just extremely aspirational, I think. And a lot of teams are really struggling in the fact they don't have budget. They can't go out and procure new systems.

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Their teams have been cut. They're doing more with less. And I feel like it's setting really kind of this unreasonable expectation for CS leaders.

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You got folks that are working 60, 70 hours a week just trying to make the ends meet. You've got budgets been frozen. And I feel like those CS leaders are sort of being like silently shamed into, hey, how come you're not on board the train and what's going on? So that's got me frustrated right now.

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So it sounds like you think these folks need to have a tool or a solution, quote unquote. Is that what you're saying? Or is it just they don't have the time to even put together like a Google sheet that talks to Zapier that sends emails? Or what level of failure are most CS leaders at right now? Allegedly. Allegedly.

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We don't actually think that. Allegedly. Allegedly.

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Tell me what you think. Yeah. So I'm seeing a couple of things.

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So first of all, I do think that there are things that people can do without a budget. And so talking about a couple of those things. And I think you all have had guests on talk about this.

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It's not sexy. It's not cool. But cleaning up your data, number one.

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Like just start to build the foundation so that when budget does open up and you have the opportunity to be able to invest again, you've got a really strong foundation and you're not playing catch up. So there are things like that that I think that leaders can focus on. But even actually, and I wasn't there.

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I've heard this kind of secondhand. But anybody attend the Gainsight Pulse Conference this year? No. No.

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So the big theme that I heard coming out of that was AI is the future. AI is going to be the thing that all customer success teams should jump on board with. And while that's nice in theory, in practice, I think there are a lot of teams that maybe are experimenting with it, but they're not really broadly embracing it yet.

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So you think about sort of interest and experimentation is high, but practical adoption is low. All right. So first of all, I want you to take a guess at what I'm about to say.

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No, you go ahead. Just go ahead. Come on.

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Two points. Two points. Number one, and I don't mean this aimed at you, Parker, but duh, of course, clean up your data, right? That's like the foundation of your house.

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It's not going to matter whether you have a beautiful, trendy new kitchen if your house falls through the ground, right? That's right. So you've got to have that foundation. And then I think there's a lot of cheap ways to even use that data today.

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ChatGPT 4.0 or whatever is 20 bucks a month, and you can throw a whole data set in there and ask it to start answering questions for you or running calculations and blah, blah, blah. So it's not as unattainable as people think, though there is a huge learning curve there, and you probably got to dedicate a decent amount of time to learning how to do that and understanding the systems that it can tie into. Secondly, AI, of course, it's the future.

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It's like when the Internet was the future back in the day. But you can't go from, oh, I just learned what the Internet is and the ability for bits and bytes to go through my telephone wire and talk to somebody else via an electronic letter to we're having Zoom calls every single day and nobody ever has to leave the house a la Wally. It doesn't happen overnight.

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And so, yeah, of course it is. That is the easiest and lowest hanging fruit to say ever, to say this new innovation is the future. Like that's such a blowhard statement.

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What's up, guys? It's Dillon here, and you know why I'm here. Hat in hand. I got a favor to ask of you.

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If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on. And if you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow. Give us a subscribe.

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And maybe best of all, you want to give us some feedback, drop a comment and let us know what you like, what you don't like, or how we can get better. We want to make sure we're giving the best content we can to you and others within the community. Thanks so much, guys.

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I'll let you get back to the show. And I'm just going to stop right there because I could keep going. Yeah, JP, I want to give.

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Okay, I like what you said. And of course, it was a chuckle when you mentioned the big reveal of Pulse, which none of us went to. I like what you said about doing what you can without budget.

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You said something like that, right? Like seeing what you can do without budget. Because I think sometimes there's this, and I don't want to speak for leaders, but even me just as a manager of JP Corporation, just like managing my own now. There's lots of opportunities if we can find the time.

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Time is one of the most expensive things we have that we could budget for. So even if you don't necessarily have the dollars to spend, there's time that can be spent. We talked about cleaning up your data, being foundational, to spend some time doing that.

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I think a lot of these AI tools and things, to speak on it quickly, is where the budget comes from, obviously, is at scale. But I think that there's also things that people can do, maybe even on a smaller level. Think about ways that you can compartmentalize and be innovative, right? I think that I'll sort of end with this.

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I think that what gets me about the AI trend in general is sort of like going from using these things to augment what we do and maybe automate some of the more rote tasks to completely leaning into it to where it actually takes us backwards. So actually, we actually stopped losing the number one thing that makes humans and will always make us such a rich, I think, hopefully, steward and resource in this planet, which is our ability to innovate and be creative. And I think that there's not like a creativity budget, right? And so I think that if I were to present at some other conference, I would probably say that creativity is actually the future, right? You automate too much of that and you remove that human element, right? Yeah.

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Yeah, that's fair. You take that back to what the internet did for creativity, right? It didn't stifle it. It made it a whole lot better.

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You'll hear people complain like, oh, my kid spends all their time on their phone now, blah, blah, blah. But they're spending time on their phone playing Minecraft, which is this whole new understanding of reality. And it's a whole new world that lives inside their phone.

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I'm not saying that's better or worse. It changed it. It blossomed in certain ways.

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It may have stunted growth in other ways for some people, not everybody. Rob, why don't you go ahead? Tortilla Rob. So AI.

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Tortilla Rob. AI will never replace my tortillas. AI is a series of tubes.

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I hope you guys know that reference. If you don't. No, all I'm going to say is, Parker, you spoke to my soul with the topic you brought up.

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Because honestly, I've been there. I feel like I'm still there all the time. And you probably are too, because we're in similar lines of work where it's like there's vocabulary that becomes just sometimes a vague and unrealistic distraction from the actual basic fundamental foundational work we can do.

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And it's really unfortunate for a lot of leaders, right? Because, I mean, I've been there as a leader where, so you mentioned what you could do without budget. I think what I would add to that, too, is there's a whole lot of strategies I've had to learn to do to earn that budget as well, right? Like, how do you make the case to earn that budget, which is really hard. A lot of times, actually, I noticed a lot of CS leaders who are advocating for new tools, they don't leverage the vendor enough, who's actually very well-practiced at making this case for ROI.

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But, I mean, for the vendors out there that I've worked with, I apologize that I've put you to work, but you've been very helpful to me. But yeah, I think that if in the next year, we don't see a lot more specificity around what it is, what this whole world of quote-unquote AI actually looks like in practice, and what are the actual tools that are making a meaningful difference? And then also, how do we evidence clear and obvious ROI on those tools so that we can make this case on repeat and sort of separate the wheat from the chaff? I think it's kind of on us as practitioners to lead that charge, as long as we don't touch the tortillas. Parker, any last thoughts? Yeah, I think one other thing I'd add to this is taking a look at doing an internal audit of what you have in-house across other teams, so other departments.

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I mean, AI is a feature, but it's also a strategy. So you think about all these other tools that you probably have in-house today that have added some sort of feature that might be useful to you, you may not even know about it. So just start internally, take a look at the teams, and see if adding a couple of licenses is a lot easier than adding a whole new product or a new stack.

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Appreciate it, Parker. That's our time. Hey, we made it without your dogs making any noise.

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I know. I was very excited. So hopefully that means the storm is passing.

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We got that earlier today. It was pretty wild, but glad you're surviving it and the dogs are happy. So Parker, thank you so much for being here.

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Love this topic. As you can tell, I got a little jacked up, but would love to have you back in the future. But for now, we've got to say goodbye.

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Right on. Thanks, guys. See ya.

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