CSP S3 E9 - Keith Hanks - AI for Developing the Customer Profile

The conversation delves into how AI is reshaping customer success operations, from analyzing customer profiles to enabling personalized micro-learning experiences. Keith Hanks shares valuable insights on leveraging AI for content repurposing, pattern recognition, and operational efficiency, emphasizing how individual CSMs can take initiative with AI tools to enhance their customer engagement strategies.

Detailed Analysis

AI-Driven Customer Profile Analysis

The discussion highlights three primary areas where AI is making significant impacts in customer success:

1. Pattern Recognition and Analysis: AI's capability to identify traits, outliers, and patterns within customer profiles, bridging the gap between ideal and actual customer profiles.
2. Content Adaptation: The technology's potential to transform new business content into customer success-focused materials, creating efficient infrastructure templates for existing customer engagement.
3. Automated Trigger Systems: Integration with platforms like Gainsight and ChurnZero to establish data-driven, prescriptive plays based on customer behavior patterns.

Democratizing Innovation in Customer Success

A significant focus is placed on individual empowerment, with Keith emphasizing that CSMs don't need to wait for organizational initiatives to leverage AI. The discussion outlines practical ways CSMs can use AI tools to:

• Repurpose content for different audience segments
• Create personalized micro-learning experiences
• Develop customer onboarding paths
• Generate customer-specific training materials

Future Implications

The conversation addresses the evolving landscape of customer success, referencing recent Bain Company research highlighting the growing need for technical expertise in customer success roles. The speakers predict a significant transformation in the CSM role over the next 2-3 years, driven by AI-enabled efficiencies and the resulting ability to focus on deeper technical engagement.

Implementation Considerations

The episode provides practical guidance on tool selection, emphasizing the need to balance between:

• Free/low-cost AI tools for individual initiatives
• Enterprise-grade solutions for handling proprietary data
• Security considerations when processing customer information

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Kevin Metzger on Linked In.

You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Transcript

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Roman Trebon 0:10

Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm Roman Reba, and this is our Friday episode where we discuss the impact of AI on this week's topic. Today I'm joined by my co-host, Kevin Metzker, and this week's guest, Keith Hanks. Guys, we've been talking a lot about the customer profile this week, and I know, Kev, you're always excited for our Friday episode about

Kevin Metzger 0:32

AI. Yeah, Roman, this is an interesting topic because there are several potential approaches to using AI related to the customer profile. You know, Keith, I'm wondering where you want to start.

Keith Hanks 0:43

I think the first place I want to start is, am I the first person to be on three episodes? Of this, of this podcast. Yeah. You're number one. You're you have three

Roman Trebon 0:53

episodes. Our next leader has one. So you're way above. I'm going to rain for seven days and that's an

Keith Hanks 0:58

infinite

Roman Trebon 0:59

tie. That's right. You're the leader, man. You're the

Kevin Metzger 1:01

leader. Other than the hosts, the two right here. I love it. So Keith, with AI and thinking about customer profile, there's so many different areas we could potentially talk about, whether it be looking at it from a machine learning perspective and looking at your customer data and trying to learn from there, or whether you're using the generative properties of artificial intelligence to kind of help with it. Building your profiles and driving questions back to the team. I, what do you think, like, I mean, what are your, some of the thoughts on where we could potentially use AI related to customer profiles?

Keith Hanks 1:37

This is really going to be the future of this, whether it's from an efficiency standpoint or just an expansion standpoint of workflows or. Being missed opportunities, the first place that is going to be assisting with is going to be around the analysis and assisting with that analysis of what are those traits versus those outliers versus those patterns that's sitting in your actual customer profile. And how does that compare to your ideal customer profile? Typically, for those in customer success, you're not going to be resourced nearly to the extent from a product marketing standpoint or an after sales sales enablement standpoint as your, as your counterparts that are in new business and new logo acquisition. So the next place that AI is absolutely going to assist. Is being able to take some of that content creation that is focused on those new logos and how do you take those pieces and how do you rebrand it and repurpose it into an existing customer voice or even better a customer success voice and create a series of infrastructure templates and kind of a groundwork for them to do that. The last place is going to be now that we've covered across the week. We've got these personas that we've broken down into. We know that they're different than the ideal customer profile. They're the reality. We cannot ignore them. Is how do we pull this all together and establish different rep triggers? If you're using a game site, a churn zero to tango, et cetera, how do we put that in there? And ultimately, how do we Put all this together with AI to speed up the process, speed up the quality, and have those prescriptive plays. And when I think about the, the podcast here and where you guys started, in so many different ways, this seems like where you are trying to get to is having this type of You know, this, this bubbled out experience, this bubbled out infrastructure, but a little bit more standardization. So if a person goes from one organization to another organization, it still feels like customer success. It doesn't feel foreign. It doesn't feel like we're, we're leaving things on the table.

Roman Trebon 3:39

Another thing, Keith, you talked about earlier in the week, which I really liked was around micro learning, right? And you talked about micro learning and So, you know, again, creating learnings and content for end users that they can consume and start to adapt your product. It's so heavy, right? I think AI, right? Nowadays, you can really accelerate that learning, really understand what your users need, and then really be able to quickly produce content, videos. trainings, exactly what they need to help really get become like, I think you mentioned power users of your platform. I think that's a really exciting area that AI is going to impact this.

Keith Hanks 4:18

That's one of the most exciting pieces of this is you don't have to wait for your organization to do this. And this is really the power of AI. You as an individual contributor can start doing this on your own tomorrow. You can start taking pieces of content and start putting that into that voice. Um, I did this 10 years ago, manually, it really kind of tapped in. I would take content from a sales and marketing meeting on 11 o'clock on Monday. I repurpose it, whether it's, we're going to be at a new event trade show. We've got a new release. You've got a new feature coming out. We've got a new partner, whatever that is. I would take it from that voice from product marketing. And I was manually putting it into my own voice. Now, fast forward with AI now. I will know my own voice will be able to recreate these things in my voice. And I'm going to save a lot of time building this out. So any rep out there, that's a, that's a CSM. Um, that's whether they're a strong CSM, whether they're in this emergency, I'm trying to make this big wave. This is a wide open opportunity for you in terms of how you can approach micro learning across these different personas in your actual customer profile. And once you get some wins here, my biggest recommendation is share it out to the team, share it out to your teammates. You may not have a department that focuses on some of these things or customer success enablement, a couple of different titles this can have. You can be the person that kind of kicks this off and you can prove it out with your own book of business, your own accounts. In those different personas in those different use cases.

Kevin Metzger 5:49

Um, there are tools out there, right? That people can buy and leverage, but really a lot of this stuff, you can leverage the free or the low cost subscription versions of GPT. I mean, you gotta be careful because depending on the content and the proprietary nature of it. You got to make sure you're getting permissions to use it in the right places that we're using it in, but you can use these tools to build out content already without going to the full subscription models or paying a third party provider necessarily. If you're doing it on a small level and you're trying to do it on, For your specific customer and build out those micro learnings, you can really start using these tools to help you build customer onboarding paths that from a learning perspective in a way that is just so much faster and really allows you to be much more dynamic as a person developing this type of content. I've been. Having conversations about some stuff related to how AI can be used for, for some other stuff, non business related. But one of the things I've started to coming to talk about is it's almost a new media form. We've now got the ability to create a new form of socially interactive, not social, but interactive media in how you can learn, learn content and present content and put it together. You really are able to build new, new interactions and new forms with these AI tools. And it's, it's such a cool thing. Um, and then I think again. Coming back to ICP and the ACP, using AI to look at the data, look at it, do comparisons, and really get into how you, how you look at the details of the data, do the comparisons, and understand what the ideal versus actual is and where you need to make the changes. You can use AI to help with, with all of that. You know, there you're really are looking at proprietary data, so it's probably better to use AI. Tools that are either internal or purchased through a third party where there's some security involved in protecting your company and customer data. It's fun to have the opportunities to, to play with it and build on it. Um, as a company, this is where I think things are going over the next, next, uh, this year, this year, there'll be a lot of it this year.

Keith Hanks 8:22

It's, it's going to have to, as, as well, I posted about this, I kind of just stumbled on this a couple of weeks back, there was this Bain Company annual, um, survey, and they drilled into customer success as one of these, um, kind of one of these things to be, to be aware of, and the gap between the satisfaction of when they're pulling customers versus when they're pulling vendors, and It's, it's very stark. And it's also pointing out that there's a huge need to have more help with technical expertise. And the more that AI can be used to help solve some of these repetitive business things and, and try to, and try to make that a little bit more operationalized, the more ability folks are going to be able to have to. Get more technical, get more in the product, be able to get a little bit deeper into these types of conversations. But in order for reps to have that type of time and bandwidth, some of these other things have to be made a little bit more efficient for them. And they have to have some wins elsewhere. I think the type of rep that's going to be servicing these accounts is going to look very different in the next two, certainly three years than the last two or three years. And I think AI is going to power this a lot, whether it's at the department and team level, or whether it's at the individual CSM level, doing it smartly and kind of balancing what is proprietary in house versus, you know, what's not getting dangerous by some of the free open source tools. Keith, you

Roman Trebon 9:58

stole a little of my thunder because you mentioned your post and newsletter on Bain Company, which I'll get to in a second. But Keith, I got to say you brought it this week. You were the best guest we've had in 2025. I love the insights throughout the entire week. Longest serving guest. Thank you for joining us on the show, Hey, but number one, you, you said earlier you're our, our top guest ever. We've had so three episodes for you leads the pack. So we really appreciate you coming on. Love the insights throughout the week for our guests. If you missed any of our episodes, go back and check them out. We had number one tip on Monday. We had the one big question on Wednesday. And today we talked about AI again, uh, as we wrap up this three part series with Keith, make sure you check out Keith on LinkedIn at K Hanks. All right. He's a must follow Keith. I got to say, you're putting out great content with the newsletters. I just read last night embracing, uh, our love of self learning, how that's more important than ever. You talk about the Bain article in there, which I was going to mention, but it's great stuff. So you got to follow Keith. Sign up for his newsletter and you're putting out great stuff, Keith. To our audience, if you found this mini episode format helpful, make sure you subscribe to the podcast and share it with your team. We'll be back next week with more customer success tips and strategies. Thanks again for tuning in and as always, Kevin, keep on playing.