Hey {{first_name | CS Pro}},

Last month I did something we had never done before, I brought the Customer Success Pro community together in person in New York for our first ever live panel.

If you couldn't make it on June 25th, this recap is for you. Three CS leaders sat down to talk about what they are really running with AI, not the LinkedIn highlight reel, Cassie Vaughn from Clay, Chad Horenfeldt from Avoca, and Malin Skoglund from Planhat.

Almost everyone in the room came in half-convinced they were behind. The best part of the night was how simply the panel told us all to start.

So maybe start by watching what they had to share…

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Malin, who runs growth and strategic deployment at Planhat, said the thing I wish more people would say out loud:

Her team started with a crawl. For big enterprise implementations, their implementation managers used to write a status email every Friday, this is what we did, here are the blockers, here is what's next. So that is the one thing they automated first.

The agent now pulls from call transcripts, emails, and support tickets and drafts the whole thing, and the manager just logs in and gives it a quick check.

That saved a few hours every single Friday. One small piece of one process. That is where she sees Planhat's own customers actually succeed, they build one thing, and a month later they build another.

Chad had joined Avoca about four months before the event, walking into a company that went from two million to twenty five million in a single year.

Instead of trying to coach a fast-growing team by himself, he built a coaching tool.

It looks at every rep's calls and calendar, shows them where their time is going and whether it is landing on the right accounts, scores the call against his own criteria, and slacks each person a three bullet summary every week with a link straight to the moment they can improve. He basically outsourced his coaching.

Cassie, Global Head of Growth Strategy at Clay after six years leading CS at Monday.com, took it a level further with what she calls a family of agents.

Not one giant brain, but a group of smaller ones.

The first she was building is a renewal ride-along that handles the tactical, administrative side of a renewal, the quoting, the scoping, looping in deal desk and legal, so her team gets that time back for real pipeline work.

Here is the part nobody wants to hear.

Malin said it plainly, AI without context is trash, and she means it enough that Planhat will sometimes disqualify a customer whose data is too messy to build on.

Cassie's team had just gone through a huge, mostly human audit to create one real source of truth across Salesforce, Snowflake, and their other systems, because the same contract value was showing up three different ways in three different places.

And Chad was just as blunt, do not trust how your data sits in your CRM, pull it out, look at it, find the outliers, and go fix them. If you do not believe your own data, you cannot build anything on top of it, and you certainly cannot coach anyone else on good data hygiene either.

Pick one repetitive process this week and automate exactly one piece of it. Not the whole thing. One piece. Maybe it is the weekly status email you keep rewriting, or the handoff notes you retype after every single call. Chad's rule makes it stick, always start with an objective, the actual problem you are trying to solve, or you will fall down a rabbit hole of tutorials and build nothing. Crawl first. You can walk next month.

One more thing that made the whole night reassuring. All three are hiring faster than they can keep up, not cutting their teams. As Malin put it, people work with people, and the relationship still decides the renewal.

Couldn't join us in New York? You didn't miss out completely.

We will be having more events later this year in London, Amsterdam, and hopefully NYC again soon! Stay up to our events here.

Have a listen to the full panel on YouTube, including their quick-fire takes on the most overrated AI promise in customer success, and let me know what you end up building this week.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.

Cheers to your CS success,
Anika