AI Agents & The Value Equation: How Customer Success Drives Revenue in the Age of AI 

Transcript

[00:00:06] welcome to the Content Center Perspectives, the podcast where we explore what’s really happening in the intersection of customer service, technology, and the people who make it all work. I’m your host today, Tracy Weinger, CMO of Vial, 24 7, and today we’re diving into a topic that’s on.

[00:00:22] Every customer service leader is mind AI agents, but we’re not talking theory. My guest today is actually using AI agents extensively throughout the entire customer journey, and he’s got the metrics to prove it works. My guest today is Florian Rock Bickler. And he is the Director of Customer Service at Hive mq, A B2B infrastructure software company, specializing in edge to cloud data movement solutions.

[00:00:47] And under Florian’s leadership, hive MQ has achieved some truly exceptional numbers, which he will discuss. As we get going on this podcast today, Florian, welcome to the Content Center Perspectives. And why don’t we kick off with just a little bit of background about yourself and your, what you’re doing today at Hi Vmq.

[00:01:09] Thank you, Tracy. Thank you for the warm, introduction. I’m very glad to be here. thank you for having me. So a little bit about me. I am a software engineer turned customer success, executive throughout my, 12 year, career in tech. Honestly, at one point in my career I noticed we are project management that I like talking to humans more than writing source code.

[00:01:31] And so one thing led to another. I had a fairly typical career path starting with. Technical support, going to professional services, and then eventually ending up in customer success. Alluding to the numbers that you said, I’m, very honored and proud to say that Vem q over the last three years has had a growth revenue retention of above 97% slightly, and then average net revenue retention of over 125%, which we are very proud of.

[00:01:55] Obviously. No, that’s wonderful. It’s extremely impressive coming from my lens where I really enjoy KPIs and progress and outcomes. So, I know the listeners are, on the edge of their seat waiting to hear more. So you’ve obviously, been building out the function for hi mq. Since the beginning.

[00:02:16] Tell me a little bit more about that journey. Absolutely. And this is also something that, you know, whenever I get the chance, I, I, I like to also mentor up and up and coming, leaders in this space or people that are interested in this, in this space. And, I, I walk the talk that I’m gonna give here, and I think it all starts with doing things.

[00:02:35] Don’t scale. Just really focus on that customer obsession, especially if you’re, if you’re in a, in a smaller company, make sure that you, that you help your first customers, whatever it takes, hop on calls, go on site, whatever it is, you can figure out the process and, and how to make it scalable later. But it’s really important to understand.

[00:02:52] Your customer and understand where their problems are coming from. Now, the further down the journey, your team gets and also your company gets. This has to be turned into systems and this has to be turned into feedback loops. Right. And this is again, as a good segue, I think what in today’s world, if we started new today, we could probably take a a lot of shortcuts because with the help of AI and the help of specifically AI agents, you can really optimize and.

[00:03:16] Get more efficiency for a lot of the processes that took us, a lot of scrambling and running through Google Sheets and Excel sheets and, a lot of conversations that can now be much more easily analyzed from a data perspective. So, just the last thing I wanna say, like you mentioned KPIs, you mentioned outcomes, and that is really, what it’s all about

[00:03:35] where customer success and customer services are going. It’s moving away from a cost center that’s about keeping customers happy, towards a revenue engine that understands the customers, understands the value and the outcomes that they’re looking for. And finding a KPI driven way to accelerate those outcomes.

[00:03:52] so during our pre-call, you talked about the elephant in the room, the AI agents. You mentioned that you’re using them exclusively, you know, through the entire customer journey. Can you take me through how that actually works and, you know, did you think about.

[00:04:10] Starting off, like dipping your toe in, into the water for AI agents, or did you come up with a, a comprehensive plan on what that will look like for the full stream? Thanks, Tracy. That’s an excellent question and I, I’d, I’d like to be able to say I saw the full picture from the, from the start and, and we built this out, top, down with the end goal in mind.

[00:04:32] But that is not the reality that happened. when the really AI creates. Started really kicking off. And I would say this was more or less about the release of chat GPT. That’s where it like really got into everybody’s mind and went to mainstream. At that time, we had already have, you know, on the support and self-serve chat bot services activated for our customers.

[00:04:50] But that’s when we really, also started looking into, you know, what, where else can this be applied? And I was. More on the skeptical side of things, to be quite honest with you at the beginning, like when we’re talking mid 23. But, today, I am no longer a skeptic of what I can do for the business and for the customer.

[00:05:05] And so it is fair to say that we dipped our toes. We try to find, workflows where we can. Augment them with chat bots as well as the Gentech ai and make them better and more efficiently. And I believe that’s where most companies started. But I’m very happy to say that as a company, not only in my organization, we’ve had a radical s.

[00:05:23] Switch in, or shift in how we do things. And now we are, every process that we have is basically under scrutiny and we are happy to throw it out if we can just do it better and differently with ai. So it’s no longer about augmenting with ai, it’s really about replacing with ai. Mm-hmm. And today this looks, and we were still, we’re still not at the end of the journey, obviously, but it’s from, from.

[00:05:43] Qualifying inbound leads in a way where a prospect can talk about their outcomes, talk about their business problems, and get a good guidance whether or not, HQ is the right fit to them all the way through, business values assessments and pre-sales DD deployment planning in post-sales, and then obviously, throughout the customer success journey, optimized experiences for the customer status.

[00:06:04] That is the journey we are on. We are probably about 60% there, and it’s just amazing to see where you’re going. And again, if anybody’s listening out there who’s maybe starting out a customer success or a customer services function. You should be thinking AI first. It’s not about replacing, humans, obviously.

[00:06:19] It’s not about, cutting headcount, but it’s about getting your employees superpowers. I like that. Superpowers. Absolutely. And what you just said made me think a little bit more about, you know, being AI first. But what about, where do you see the human touch is still Irres, irreplaceable. Yeah.

[00:06:39] That’s, that’s a, that’s a another very, very good question. And again, I, I said AI first. I didn’t say a AI only. And AI has, it’s, has a lot of uses, right? It can really, help you. Just get a, get a more contextualized big, bigger pitch picture of things. Even if you may or may not have the perfectly groomed CRM system.

[00:07:00] To the listeners out there, this might sound familiar. You may or may not have a hundred percent, trust in the data quality and all the fields might not be updated, day to day. Right? But when you have, AI tools that are out there that can really hook

[00:07:12] into your company knowledge. You can augment it with Slack or teams messages. You can look into documents. You can look through slides and get that contextualization that would’ve taken, a CSM four hours. You can do it in five minutes now. So that stuff. Can really be, automated a lot or helped by ai.

[00:07:28] But when it comes to obviously getting on a call, talking to a person, reading a room, understanding where, the person is coming from, yes, we’re talking about, business outcomes with, at the end of the day, any business is a people business. So I think the human interaction.

[00:07:42] Will, can never be, replaced. And I think that that’s also what I’m seeing with my team. AI has allowed my team to get face-to-face with customers much more frequently, which is obviously very helpful, both from a perspective of moving along the business relationship, but then also.

[00:07:56] These feedback looks I talked about if you have the time to have like a more frequent, feedback discussion about new features, for example, that were released now, AI can generate that time for the CSMs and the technic account managers in my team. Excellent. So for our listeners or for our companies that are getting started in and exploring AI agents.

[00:08:18] And they’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed right now. What do you recommend as the first use case that they should explore? I mean, that’s another good question. We asked ourselves the same. We had this journey at Hive Q where, you know, late in Q3, last year, we were like, Hey, across the whole company.

[00:08:38] Even think about where can you put, put ai? And I think that’s a good exercise to, to do for, for anyone. But what’s what’s worked for us and what I’ve heard others, talk about is, again, most use cases that require a lot of data gathering and data entry. Those are the ones that are from my perspective, prime candidates for, for AI usage.

[00:09:00] I’ll give you maybe two concrete examples. One would be, you know, like if, let’s say you, you have a account review coming up internally, putting those slides together, for your sales leaders, using the right tools. Another, and just, I want, I wanna also give, give that advice to anyone.

[00:09:17] Don’t be scared. Just, just try it out honestly. It is amazing what you can do out there. Open your check, GPT out, explain to check GPT what your problem is. It’ll point you towards the right tools and you can build amazing things even if you’re not a developer today. It is really, really, don’t be scared.

[00:09:32] And yeah, so if you, you can build an agent that pulls together, all the information, puts them into slides, and therefore gets your meeting prep cut down by a lot. That’s one of the use cases that is, very obvious and has yield great results for us and others.

[00:09:45] Similarly, if you wanna do an external business review with a customer, same principle applies. And then the other one that’s. For me, it’s obvious, but I’m just gonna phrase it here. Troubleshooting. So in support, I know we have a lot of tech technical support leaders listening here as well.

[00:09:59] A AI functions best, or, when I say ai, I mean modern, large language models, function best. The more structured a language is, and nothing’s more structured than programming language. So when it comes to, troubleshooting. Issues, augmenting that or even automating that through ai.

[00:10:15] Those would be the two use cases I would, focus on. Well, thank you for that. And then Florian, I know that you are stay up to speed on research and you know, when you look at what AI agents or AI technology. What do you see in this space, that is going to be like maybe more impactful over the next couple years?

[00:10:40] So, I mean, I’m not going to talk vendors here. I don’t think there’s a couple of solutions or many solutions out there. I mean, I mentioned Jet GPT, but I think they don’t require my endorsement with about 2 billion users, right now. Yes.

[00:10:51] But from what AI can do and where it can get to, and specifically, again, we’re talking about large language models here. The technically that we have today. There’s a concept out there that I encourage every CS leader listening to this looking into.

[00:11:03] That’s something that I personally also looked into. I’m fortunate that our CEO Barry Liebert is on the absolute forefront on ai. So he actually pushed me towards this. And this is the, best customer experience concept. So this means that throughout the entire customer journey, you have individualized next touch points experiences for your customers that are based on their individual journey.

[00:11:26] That is obviously a good north star that is not something that can be implemented, overnight or over a weekend, while you can achieve great things over weekend with ai. But this is not that. But this is basically where the next level of value generation for customers and companies alike, follows is I think this, almost context awareness, right?

[00:11:43] So, so from, from first looking at, at, at a homepage all the way to, I have now implemented your, your product successfully across my company at any point, AI can really help tailor. Like, like not here is the, here’s the documentation. But I know from research about your company, I know about what you told me, that this specific video, maybe that’s five years old, hidden somewhere on a YouTube channel that will help you uncover the value, for your company.

[00:12:10] So this, that, the concept of a. Very, very individualized journey for each individual customer. That’s based on context and understanding of context. That’s, I think, where, where we headed. That’s, I think, where the next unlock will happen. And, I’m very excited about it. This is, I’m, I’m working on this personally right now.

[00:12:25] It is not trivial, but, the good thing is on the way there, you also get, a lot of, incremental gains. As well. Absolutely. Wonderful North Star. Absolutely. So, Florian, let’s switch gears a little bit. During our initial conversation, you have a philosophy that I truly loved.

[00:12:43] So you said, and I’m, I pretty sure I’m coding here, is if you achieve outcomes that bring value, you could charge more. But if you don’t deliver value and those outcomes that we talked about and try to charge more, it will affect the price. Can you kind of dive deeper in into that philosophy? Absolutely.

[00:13:04] Again, I’m not taking credit for this. This is not my invention. This is, other CS leaders that I follow or talk to, have also instilled this into me. You have to create value for your customer. At the end of the day, that’s what any business is about, and especially customer success’s job is to make that value creation, more frictionless and, also quicker.

[00:13:21] Another elephant in the room is, even the title of this podcast, talks about, revenue generation. So not going away from pure retention, going towards revenue. Generation, which is. Expansion. And now if you want to have a expansion that feels good for the customer, they will happily pay you more if you provide them more value.

[00:13:39] Now, if you raise the prices for whatever reason. Without generating more value, then all of a sudden you get into discussions that you don’t want to have, and friction starts. And you probably will lose customers because they might not be willing to pay more for the same value.

[00:13:55] So increase the value. And I think, one of the stage leaders I used to work through, used to always say, create the value, the revenue will follow. And I think that’s a, that’s a very good mantra. It definitely is. So then let’s go back and, from the revenue lens, let’s talk numbers, right, and what you talked about with the specific metrics at the onset of this podcast.

[00:14:15] Your gross revenue retention, net revenue retention. These are exceptional numbers in SaaS, you know, looking at that level of data, how do you tie, those results to your customer success, your technical success, function. Yeah. Another, another great question. Thank you, Tracy.

[00:14:37] Again, this is also something that by now it becomes more and more, like a known fact. Customer success is. Really not a function within a company. It’s the whole company’s job, right? If you don’t have customers, your company ceases to exist. It is as binary as that. So while I own those outcomes and my team has a significant.

[00:14:58] It is very important to say that the entire company at Vem Q plays a big role into delivering that. It starts with great product. It starts with, great documentation. It starts with having the product market fit. It’s also a part, a part is, knowing which customers to serve and not serving the customers that you shouldn’t serve.

[00:15:15] These are some of the points why, other companies may struggle with some of those numbers, but then. To go back to what does my team do specifically, and how am I confidently, walking into our C-suite and telling them that I and my team own these numbers.

[00:15:27] It’s really about focus on outcome. Focus on value, and knowing your customer. Right? And this is something where I actually recently, grew and learned from, again, our CEO Barry Liebert is that, there’s a difference between knowing your user and knowing your customer, and both are important for the individual, especially the individual contributor.

[00:15:46] It’s very important to know your user and, what are they personally trying to achieve? Right? What, you know, how does this tie into project success for them? Will that whatever your product is, will this help them sleep better at night because there will be no more downtimes and they will be able to spend the weekend with their family instead of an on-call.

[00:16:02] That could be whatever that reason is, that’s important to know on the micro level. But on the macro level, you need to obviously really understand your customers in terms of the companies that you serve and understand. What is the dollars and cents value that you deliver?

[00:16:15] And if you understand that, you can work towards that. And again, as long as a product functions and delivers value, customers will use it and buy it. Definitely. And then from a revenue lens, did you get any help and support on developing out key metrics, key revenue, KPIs from your CFO?

[00:16:36] Did they provide any insight, as to maybe, you know, technical support, return on investment? You know, when we look at those, those revenue dollars? Yeah. So, I was fortunate to be very early on in the HighQ journey, so I got a good mix of. Having a green field, so to say, to play with in the beginning and building something out.

[00:16:56] And then later on, more experienced, executive leadership also came into the company that then also gave another look at things. And things have certainly changed. We’ve, you know, we we’re working with the OKR concept, which I’m pretty sure most of the listeners will be, familiar with.

[00:17:08] If not, definitely look into it. It’s the concept of North Star metrics that all other metrics within your teams, follow under. And we are not looking at support specifically as a cost center or that it has to provide ROI itself. We really, look, at support more so as a tool in the tool belt of the customer success organization.

[00:17:28] So, support. It specifically has satisfaction and time to resolution, and how quickly can we resolve a ticket within our first answer. So really their focus is on quickly, resolving, issues, which can then indirectly be tied to the growth, revenue retention, and to the net revenue retention.

[00:17:44] Specifically at Hive Q, where we run a. Infrastructure type software and if things go wrong, which they luckily rarely do because we have a great product, but if they do, things get very heated very quickly, like literal lives could be at stake, depending on the use case.

[00:17:58] And so, it’s very important that the customer has a trust that if things don’t go well, we can help them. So in our particular case, we don’t tie technical support towards, revenue dollars. But you are correct. You guessed it correctly. Our CFO.

[00:18:10] who was the first external, c level member actually that joined the company with the founders on the board. He did help, develop the right leading indicators, towards what were NR and JGR are. The, are the obvious, lagging indicator key, performance indicators.

[00:18:26] But the question is. How do you predict that? And, I’m fortunate that, that in my organization, devalue and the importance of customer success has never been questioned. I know that, that many, in similar positions struggle with that. And again, here’s the tip that I’ve picked up from others.

[00:18:43] Start owning revenue, and you will get the ears of, all the executives, as long as you can own and deliver revenue, you will be everybody starting. That’s an excellent quote. And from me being in marketing, that has really helped and supported the marketing return on investment, like showing that.

[00:19:00] So definitely when you look at. The impact of, knowing your customer or the customer journey and how you’re bringing that back to the organization. You’re definitely leading, with your background and experience. It’s very exciting to hear that you story and your journey, to bring some practical information back to our listeners.

[00:19:21] Knowing where you are today, if you had to start out again, what are those aha moments or those lessons learned along the way that could save some of the listeners some time, in their journey? So I’ll say two things that are hopefully broadly, 

[00:19:39] applicable for whatever industry you’re in, whatever, your target audience is. And if you have, if you’re on a similar journey, which many do, like, you start out as a support leader or maybe you’re the first support engineer on the ground and you start to build up a team, you can not overemphasize the importance of your first hires.

[00:19:55] At the wrong hire, especially at the beginning, can really slow down everything. Whereas the right hire can raise the bar immediately and speed up things. I’ve made this mistake throughout my career many times that I didn’t follow this advice. And the advice is if you’re hiring someone and your impression is not a hell yeah, it’s a no.

[00:20:13] Especially for team sizes under five. That’s the number one thing I would, tell myself, here’s obviously the caveat to that. Hiring is very, very hard and you’re gonna make mistakes along the way. So, give yourself some slack and there’s no other way of learning it other than doing it and going through hundreds of interviews.

[00:20:27] And eventually you’ll find up on your own intuition as well. But just if you’re not completely sure. Leave role open until you find the right person. So that will be number one. And then the second one really, ties into what we just discussed

[00:20:41] if you can learn about dollar impact, if you can learn to talk about dollar impact, that will make your life so much easier. That will unfreeze budgets that will. Lead to headcount, so we can go back to tip number one. So really whatever your role is, how does it impact the bottom line.

[00:21:00] That’s if you get that mindset and communicate that way and put that in your executive summaries of your documents and in your presentations, you’ll have a much easier time talking to executives. And hiring is, especially when you start out. The most important thing you do. Agreed. Completely agree with that.

[00:21:17] Florian, this has been such a valuable conversation. Where can listeners connect with you if they wanna continue this dialogue? I would assume LinkedIn. Yes, please reach out to me. On LinkedIn, it’s really the only, social media platform that I’m still using. My name is Florian Ula, and f Ashby.

[00:21:37] FPI is my short handle on LinkedIn. I’m sure that there will be a link, in the description of this podcast. I’m very happy to connect, with anyone in this space. Whether you are ahead of me in your journey or behind on me on the journey, I would love to connect, grab a digital coffee, just.

[00:21:51] A personal FYI, my wife and I are about to have our first child, so probably until around April, I will be unresponsive. Please don’t take that personally. No, that’s great to hear and congratulations again. Thank you. So that’s a wrap of today’s episode. If you found this conversation valuable, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your colleagues who are navigating their own AI journey.

[00:22:15] Contact, center Perspectives is produced by WOW24-7. I’m Tracy Weinger. Until next time, keep delivery exceptional experiences. Thank you.