In this podcast episode, we interview Thomas Voigt, founder ofThe CS Academy, about the importance of customer success in organizations. Thomas shares insights on how to establish a customer success function, the value it brings to revenue growth, and the evolving role of AI in enhancing customer success strategies. He emphasizes the need for alignment between customer success and revenue goals, the qualities of effective leaders in this space, and the significance of understanding customer segments and journeys. The conversation also touches on future trends in customer success and the human element that remains vital in building meaningful connections with customers.

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TO get in touch with Thomas, you can reach out to him or sign up to his Newsletter on Linkedin or visit his website here: https://thecsacademy.net/

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Takeaways

1. Customer success is not just a cost center; it can drive revenue.

2. Understanding customer segments is crucial for prioritization.

3. AI tools can enhance efficiency in customer success roles.

4. Effective customer success leaders must understand financial metrics.

5. Alignment between customer success and sales is essential.

6. Customer feedback is vital for product and service improvement.

7. Investing in customer success leads to better forecasting.

8. The human connection is key in customer success roles.

9. Experimentation with AI tools is necessary for growth.

20. Customer success will play a central role in go-to-market strategies.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Customer Success Consulting

03:02 Understanding the Value of Customer Success

05:50 Aligning Customer Success with Revenue Goals

09:03 Qualities of Effective Customer Success Leaders

12:09 Implementing Customer Success Strategies

14:51 The Role of AI in Customer Success

18:00 Future Trends in Customer Success

20:54 The Human Element in Customer Success

23:49 Conclusion and Resources

Keywords

Customer Success, Leadership, AI, Revenue Growth, Consulting, Business Strategy, Customer Retention, Go-to-Market, Metrics, Efficiency

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Transcript

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Alex Berry (00:01)
Hi, and I'm very pleased to launch this first podcast episode with Thomas Voigt, founder and CV of TV Consulting, a company that consults various different organizations on customer success strategies and leadership. Thomas, great to have you here. Thanks for joining and we'd love to hear a little bit about yourself.

Thomas (00:24)
Absolutely. Thank you very much, Alex. I'm very excited to be here. As you said, I basically consult CEOs and revenue leaders, and in particular on everything customer success. So basically starting a customer success function or department, making sure you do the first steps right, the basics, but then also making sure you scale and you connect.

your customer success starts with the rest of go-to-market. My focus is on CSA, CSB companies. So if money is there and you as a CEO potentially have hired your VP of sales and now want to really look at the customer success side, then I'm your man because I can help you doing this, bringing in the knowledge very frequently and particular look at

The new trends that we see at the moment and customer success, which I am very excited about, which is not only about AI.

Alex Berry (01:22)
Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, okay, that's great to hear. And so you've worked for great companies, Nielsen, Sky, Discovery, et cetera, before moving into customer success in your first instance at GWI. What got you interested in customer success in the first place?

Thomas (01:40)
Well, think the original motivation for me is basically connecting with humans. mean, we all do this, but I'm quite curious to understand human connections in particular. my background really is having studied psychology and marketing and communication, but then you're really using this and diving into

the research side of things. So at Neils & Ola Discovery, I was heading up research departments and I loved understanding how people watch content or how they consume. And I think moving forward, I discovered how you can create businesses by understanding your customers properly and by listening to them and by having different perspectives on them and learning from them.

That was for me the next step to connect both and to become a farmer and go to the customer success site. And then as we moved along, I found it really exciting to not only where the farmer sat, but at Efficiency and see how we could do this. And now I'm basically consulting companies because I get bored quite quickly, to be honest, and I really like to jump into different cases.

and really spread out my knowledge that I have and that I've gained over the last couple of decades.

Alex Berry (03:08)
Great, and that's one of the reasons why we wanted to have you on this episode because of the different experiences that you're going to bring from the companies that you've worked with. Now, you've just talked a little bit about the potential and value of customer success. In a lot of organizations, that's actually quite difficult to justify to the leadership. Or we see, you know, lower investment than potentially might be optimal. How do you help people understand the true value of customer success when you come into these organizations?

Thomas (03:38)
Yeah, that's a good question. First of all, there's no common understanding of customer success. I think when we think about it, you you might just think about customer service or you might think about customer success as the cost center. But I think that all has changed. So my first approach is really an educational approach and to showcase

your CS department can be a revenue driver. So of course, you know, how can we do this? Most importantly, know, customer retention, because we all know at some point that a new customer can be as much as eight times more expensive to acquire than really making sure that your existing customer renews and stays with you. That's quite important, right? So that's no brainer. So recurring revenue, obviously, is what you're aiming for. Because if you do have recurring revenue,

you can then take this and develop this even further and spread this. And this is much more cost efficient. And as I said, eight times or even nine times, 10 times more efficient than this. But further than this, you not just want to look at the funnel as such and look at the one product that you've got, you really want to think about expansion, upscale, cross sale. And you want to think about new products, new services, you want to think about partnerships and so on. And maybe you don't know now,

moment, know, are the next steps are, but you want to focus on your customers to really use them as a revenue driver. And finally, think customers are the source of truth. They are the single source of the truth that gives you information about how to set up not only your CS function, but also the wider go to market function like marketing, like revenue, like sales, like product and like, you know, engineering, and so on and so on, because

This is the source of your validation of your products are they land of how you really kind of serving this idea of a product market fit. Are you getting to the right pain points or not? So and this is I think what you need to do first for you.

Alex Berry (05:50)
it's incredible that so many organizations, especially in the B2B space, they have, you know, relatively lower understanding of our kind of unified view of their customer. so organizations are sometimes operating in a lot of cases in these silos, right? That's what we've seen a lot from our conversations over the last 24 months. And, you know, obviously there's a lot of things out there which are changing very, very rapidly. We'll talk about that later. One thing I wanted to touch on when I spoke to you last time, you have a fairly, what I might call kind of, I think,

modern view of customer success, very clear one, right? We need to move away from the uncertainty. You think customer success should carry revenue. And we need to move away from, especially in the B2B space, we need to move away from this kind of account management versus customer success uncertainty. Can you tell us, our listeners a little bit more about your views there?

Thomas (06:41)
Yeah, absolutely. think originally, as I said, we had these differences between the ones who like to make sure that the customers are happy, are being well looked after, the customer service side of things, and then we got the ones who basically got the contract in. And I have seen a lot of companies who still have these kind of different, almost different sub-functions in revenue.

The most important thing is to have an alignment. And this alignment can be by choosing, for example, aligned KPIs. So you need to make sure you both work towards one commercial goal. That could be NRR, that could be the net dollar retention, as I said, or it could be any other kind of commercial metric that really aligns you. Maybe it's just a target number that you've got. That's the most important thing. Formally, customer success

customer service, folks were really measured by NPS. But as we all know, we moved on NPS is great to understand the wider appreciation of your services, but it's not really good to define, you know, go to, you know, define specific follow ups for your team. So you need to make sure you've got really metrics in place that drive your revenue going forward. So for me, customer success today is

a view where you need to commercialize all your team members. And when you come into a company, customer success can look different, right? Because you can in a different stage of the company, you could have different products and so on. You need to really understand what is your common denominator? How can you really work towards a common goal? And as I said, having this as a goal defined, having this written down in OKRs, that's a first step.

Alex Berry (08:18)
for shopping.

Yeah. Yeah. I think from my experience, right. What I've noticed, especially in very, in a pure software play where there's very little kind of what I call real world operational work, then I I'm strongly biased towards having one, one function, customer success, right. To help that adoption and to also own a network of your retention. When you get into more complex service delivery methodologies, I think potentially there's a justification for, different types of roles, right.

even a kind of post sales solutions engineer. Sometimes you can see a more technical products, but in general, think, you you're, you're, you're right. You really need to assess the stage and the type of business that you're working with. And, know, one very important factor, right. Especially for CEOs in series a and series B is, you need to bring in someone who is experienced, who can understand the nuances. And so I, I'm wondering, like if you're series a series B.

It's been tough 24 months, right? And you're beginning to think about rolling out customer success. What are the qualities of that leader? What type of leader are you bringing? How do you assess that? Maybe you could share that for us.

Thomas (09:49)
Yeah, totally. think the leader in CS is going to change and there are a couple of things that I really see. The first of all is why should you invest in CS? You need to invest in CS because you want stability in your forecasting at the end of the day. So the problem that we see at the moment is yes, you need to make more with less basically and we know

There are difficulties sometimes to hit your goals, but what helps is if your forecasting is more accurate and you will reach this by basically having leaders in place who are first of all, I think a great student of capital. So you have been trusted as a CS leader with taking some money and spend this wisely. So you want to get your head around, you know, not only just to go in and spend these days are over, but you need to spend very, very effectively. You need to understand.

numbers and you need to understand what it means. So you need to know what an NRI is, for example, what the GRI is, you need to know this. And you need to also have an alignment on these numbers and how they've been pulled in our with your CFO, your FOP departments, and of course, you know, with your board, because at the end of the day, as a student of capital, you are going to tell the story of your success. And you ideally use all these kind of aligned numbers.

but you create a story of how you efficiently have scaled up or will you scale up your company. It's the first one. The second one is you need to be a kind of system architect. And what I mean with system architect is you need to look at your funnel that you've got, but you can't just focus on the CS part, like the post side of the funnel. You need to look at basically on the entire funnel, your best friend.

Alex Berry (11:33)
Okay, yeah.

Thomas (11:39)
is the VP of sales or your chief revenue officer. Because what you can gather here is valuable information from the onboarding, from the buildup of your customer base, the buildup of the trust that you can feed back to your sales teams and to your reps. So basically, you are a source of learning, a lot of learning. So you can go back and basically

you know, reevaluate your ICP, you can talk to the sales reps and say, well, listen, this is what we've seen when folks really are onboarding. You know, this is what we need to do. If you do have discovery codes, focus on this, because that is the function that really resonates quite well. And this is the main pain point and so on and so on. So you see a leader needs to kind of come in and foster this culture, right? You can't just sit there and decide that. Also, you need to be a peer player.

As a leader, peer player basically is a team leader, but your first team is your peers and you go to market. So you need to talk obviously to your CFO or to your VP of sales. But do not forget your marketing folks, your marketing leaders, your product leaders in this case, because you really need to make sure you connect this. And finally, speaking up and educating.

If I really take it further, I would say that's a great chance for you to actually flip this funnel. You know, if you think about the bow tie, flip this funnel and start with the end bit of, know, taking all this knowledge off your customer and distribute this back and not only to your revenue folks, to your go-to-market folks, but to everyone. So when you are going to speak up in your all hands,

Alex Berry (13:23)
Yeah.

Thomas (13:38)
in your town halls or whatever, make sure you bring customers, showcase them the entire story, show them the bad bits, the good bits, know, become a storyteller, but also encourage your team to do the same. You sit on so much information, do not silo, speak up and really distribute it all. And I think if you do these basics first, with this leader mindset, you're going to excel much quicker.

Alex Berry (14:05)
Yeah, I think, you know, for anyone listening, right? think a couple of the key points you've made there. Once you get to, you know, senior director VP, you really have to understand the revenue metrics, the OKRs, the financials of your organization to be really successful. That's one of the big learning curves from people who go from managing just a single team to taking maybe a regional or a global remit. Completely agree with you there. And of course, putting the customer front and center of the organization critical. Easier said than done.

In some cases, I've definitely been there myself. When you're drinking from the fire hose, sometimes it's hard to get. You there's great customer stories out there, but it is so critical for the other functions to be able to really see what's happening on the front line.

Thomas (14:50)
Yes. But... Yeah, go ahead.

Alex Berry (14:51)
So, and so now we brought the leader in. You have a few simple steps in terms of how you roll out a strategy in an organization like roughly series A, series B. I think it'd be very interesting to hear just a short little summary of kind of how you recommend people approach that.

Thomas (15:12)
Mmm.

Yes, absolutely. There two things to start with. The first one is the customer segmentation. So depending on where you are, so let's assume you've got 10 clients or 15 clients or whatever, you do have some information about them, about the region, about their habits, they like, industries and so on. So start with this because if you do not understand your customer segments, you will not be able to...

prioritize in the aftermath. So you need to focus on your ICP at the end of the day, right? But before you do this, you need to understand how does your customer base look like. So segmentation is great. And depending which stage you are, which kind of growth stage you are in, which industry you work in, it depends on how deep you want to go. So there are different models, but I think that's the first one. The second one is, well, client journey mapping. What is that? So you basically look at

post-sales process. You start with the time basically when there was an agreement, you've got a closed one opportunity and then you need to look at what are the now from now on, what is the mapping, what are the touch points of your client with your company going forward and you go through onboarding, you touch on

Alex Berry (16:30)
And one question there Thomas, so you when you're going through that client journey mapping, how important and how tightly are you working with the product team and the engineering team? Because obviously it's very tempting to think that you can buy some solutions that a lot exist now to help structure that process. A lot of it can be quite handheld. But at the end of the day, we're trying to build a very slick software onboarding experience. What are the things you've seen working with a collaboration between Post-Sale

and product.

Thomas (17:02)
Yeah, think you need to have very clear swimming lanes in place. So I think when you do set up an onboarding process, it's quite important to really make sure, you know, if you've got a system in place where you do look at different segments and onboard them appropriately. But of course, you you need to also make sure you feed back information to product, but also to marketing.

Alex Berry (17:22)
Okay.

Thomas (17:31)
Onboarding for me is a great way to explore the time to value phase, where you can learn a lot from the very first instance, where you can be acquainted to new pain points that they haven't known before. So that's great, but it doesn't stop there. If you go further through the mapping, you will discover further pain points or further important information. All of that needs to be gathered and feedback to other departments.

And we will talk about AI and how you can use tools to do this. And that's quite important because it's tedious. It's great to have this idea of looking at a map. Fantastic. But what you need here in particular in terms of efficient work is, well, you need a tool, tools, to gather all that, put AI on it, and make sure you condense that and distribute this to the right next level.

and make sure you have your learnings from this and become even more efficient. That actually is the end goal. So as I said, segmentation is number one. Number two is this mapping and number three is AI and automation. So that's absolutely key because 2023, think, a time where 24, the early stages where AI companies, I think, were a little bit in beta. And I think now we do really see

products that increases your efficiency massively. And if you do think about these segmentations and client journey mappings, these are the basics for me. They need to be done. But these days, can do it quicker. And the good thing is, you get far more out of this. And if you do align with everyone and go to market, that's amazing. That's a great start.

Alex Berry (19:15)
Yeah, I completely agree with you right at 42 AI, we're looking at our segmentation ICP at this stage all the time. know, your ICP is more of a hypothesis. There are so many moving parts and variables. And I think even still at series A, potentially series B, obviously things are going to be a lot more formalized. You definitely have a good understanding of what your initial ICP is. But going beyond that, right? There's a lot of experimentation.

There's a lot of patience. You can go down some dead ends, right? Some things can look very lucrative and then you get sometimes some rather unfortunate regulatory obstacles which prevent you from going after a particular vertical, particular segment and those take time, right? I suppose that's where the famous kind of crossing the chasm really comes from, from that second, third ICP as you begin to kind of potentially, if you are trying to move up market. And you did also mention a little bit about AI.

I completely agree with you. The launches that we've seen from both privately held startups and now probably held incumbents as well as probably a little bit lagging is our public companies in their launch bar. A few of the kind of well-known brands that we're all familiar with. So, you know, how are you seeing it infiltrate into organizations that you're working with?

What are the tools that you're excited about? And are there any real world applications that you've seen being successful? I'd love to hear what your view is right now on a very dynamic space.

Thomas (20:52)
Yeah, we touched upon this. now, basically, in Q4, we see the brickwork there for AI tools really come to fruition going forward. So, I've seen companies working with isolated AI solutions. I think there's still a little bit of hesitation, to be honest, and a bit of confusion because

AI for all of us, independently of running a business, is basically with us now. And we need to move from being fearful and not knowing really what it is and, you know, and might take roles away and jobs away and so on. And what it will do with private policies and so on so on to a stage where we really can see, that is great because it will help us to outsource tasks that we don't want. It makes us more efficient.

And actually, there's something in for all of us individually. So that's quite important. So what I see is isolation, kind of isolated use cases of AI. Of course, everyone knows JetGBT or Gemini and all these kind of tools, and we all use that. I think there are some tools that really now come into fruition and that we all use more and more. So like AI Note takers, there are many out there that we all know.

Alex Berry (22:09)
Yeah.

Thomas (22:21)
But if you connect the note taker, for example, with JetGBT and bring this all together, then you could ask your AI tools or your JetGBT, not only what is the summary, how can I use this going forward to help my client? What are the next opportunities here to grow? So this is fantastic because it's not only a note taking and a summary that you can send out to your client much easier. We know this.

you get actually much more information out of this because you look towards the future and opportunities going forward. This is what you want, right? Because you want to expand. Further than this, we know there are some former bots that are now AI supported from these big players and they are getting great again because they are more personalized. They can change the tone of how they speak with customers depending on what you do and so on. That's great.

What I'm excited about is tools like Loom, for example, or Hey Gen, where you can just record yourself or create avatars and then use the opportunity to speak to your customer segments in a different way with a different tone, tonality, and so on. So that helps you to, first of all, in this human space. Have your face be presented.

What I've seen at the moment, for example, by just looking at Hagen or I've checked it out for myself, I'm stunned by the quality that we see now. So fast forward maybe, I don't know, half a year, six months, maybe 10 months, this will change dramatically and this will be fantastic. So if you open up for this and take this as an opportunity to build trust and to go to your different customer segments and use this more in efficient way.

for yourself, but also for your customer. That's a big, big win-win going forward. And I think these are the new parts that are coming out together where I think we all need to be open. But for us in CS, it's a great way of just being the ambassador of this journey and just taking it with you away and just showcasing what it can do.

Alex Berry (24:24)
Definitely.

Yeah. And I don't know what you think, but from what we see right now, I'd say we're kind of moving out of purely AI being used as an add-on that someone is manually engaging with to execute tasks. And the next phase, which is coming out of both small startups and mainly, and also the large incumbent private health organizations is essentially integrated AI.

So that's where it's being embedded either through APIs or directly into the product. So you're beginning to see these workflows, which where, you know, there's no longer that manual element to it. It's a completely seamless experience. And, you know, but it's still at this stage in my view, mainly human in the loop, right? There's still that inspection element. There's still the requirement to have someone guide prompt and potentially, you know, re-request.

a task to be executed. And so, you know, we've seen so many advancements in, you know, in LLMs, but also now in voice and video. So you do begin to wonder at what point it's going to, you know, that we will realize a moment where you can completely automate these tasks. And I think for organizations to be ready for that, from my perspective, right, you need to have, you know, a well integrated tech stack. think that's really important, right?

You don't, I'm not sure that very, very, you don't have, I don't think your data has to be absolutely pristine. I think that there are ways around that. And I think that you can start, we spoke a couple of days ago about starting smaller with some of your applications of AI. Good integration, reasonably good data are gonna help you here. But I think there's gonna be a lot more tools that are gonna come out to help companies really.

Thomas (26:10)
you

Alex Berry (26:37)
take advantage of this wave. And the big thing we've seen now is customer success managers, let's say for example, spending a lot of time between these different applications, moving data from one place to another, doing these mandatory tasks. I think that's the initial opportunity, right? But then I don't know what you think, maybe six, 12, 18 months time, I think the fully automated use cases are gonna begin to come through. And just to kind of conclude my point there, Bessem Ventures I saw...

presentation, right? It's no longer going to be ops supporting humans, but it's actually going to be humans supporting the ops. That's kind of a little bit more of the direction that we're moving towards.

Thomas (27:18)
It is, is. I think we need to understand that AI is going to help us big time. This is what I said. I think the human aspect that we still bring at this emotional fear that we have, it needs to be dissolved. And I hope it will be dissolved because we all will learn very quickly, you know, how AI is going to help us. And you mentioned different use cases like for CSM.

If I look at, you know, customer success managers, what they don't like to do, it's very simple, take a piece of paper, write it down, what are the things that really are creating pain points? And you will see these are the areas that you can really sort out, you know.

Alex Berry (27:55)
Okay, now I'm interested.

Yeah, okay, so do you have example? What do we think customer success managers don't like doing? I'd probably say filling in manual spreadsheets about all the things that are going wrong with their customers for one, but.

Thomas (28:11)
Yeah, but they are far more. So for example, a lot of CSM do prep time. They do prep time for the clients. They do prep time for the managers going forward. And also what I discovered after this, know, filling in information about your, you know, the last touch points that they had with your customers in, you UCM. People hate this.

Not everyone is good at this. And this is, for example, a great area of just, you know, making sure you can use AI because you can use AI to capture all these different touch points that you have. And you mentioned this data integration is quite important. It needs to be come together and being really sourced in your CM, whatever you use, but it needs to be there. needs to be a central source of truth because that's then been used to forecast.

further things to look in the future, to look at opportunities going forward, to create cheat sheets for your managers. So ideally, you want to have everything in there. And you also want to have this connected to other go-to-market tools, basically. So think about the sales tools that you can use. Think about other tools that you use, intelligence tools, for example, about the markets, you You want to have ideally one stop shop to go in as a CSM.

as a leader and actually get everything you want to know for your specific client, your segment and so on. So ideally within a couple of minutes, you are prepped, you know what to do. So we free up a lot of time for what? For basically having headspace to focus on what really matters, which is your connection with your human on the other side, you know, your client, your peers or whatever. So this is important.

So you see AI is taking all these pain points away from you to enable you to actually grow. And what I said before is you need to become, you know, somebody who's going to really focus on your client, because if you don't do this, if you don't listen, you're, you're not going to perceive and you're going to end up in a silent situation. And this is what we've seen throughout 2023, 2024 going forward. And this is the

great benefit of AI going forward. So if you come to this mindset, then you see like, wow, if that's really something that we can use, fantastic. But I agree with you. You can't just say, here's the system going forward. You need to start where the company is, the data. If you just have 10 clients and you start to do your customer success with Nexus spreadsheet, you just don't invest in a holistic new big AI tool or system.

you need to experiment. And this is what I see for 2025. It's going to be a lot of experimentation time. So it's not like that companies will over invest and over commit in one or two tools. I think it's going to be checking, having trials, and basically understanding what's good for their clients, but also what's good for their members. And it needs to be just not only for

the tech company or for the tech department, who's basically a power of ops, who's deciding on the tech sack, it needs to be good for everyone. And that's quite important. AI as well as sales folks, as well as, you know, your revenue leader, and ideally the board. So if you connect all this and you make your groundwork here, and try to understand how help could look like supported by AI, then it's a great starting point. And I believe while you move then along, maybe nine months or so,

you might be happier or you know, might be open for more investment.

Alex Berry (32:03)
So that's a nice segue onto my next question. And I'm probably one of my last. You've mentioned this future state, right? And a little bit about the trends for 2025 onwards. I'm wondering, you know, with all this investment, what do you think the new efficiency metrics and the new performance expectations once you've implemented this technology, what do you see the

the trends may be in rep to account ratios in your cost efficiencies versus the expansion revenue that you're producing. of like how quickly a leadership is going to start really beginning to want to see gains from this and where do you think those numbers might go?

Thomas (32:52)
That's a good question. I think there's no single answer to this. I think for 2025, what's going to remain is that you need to grow efficiently and everything what you need to do, this is going to stay. think, as I said before, start with a metric that you want to measure that everyone has bought into that is not going to change. That's quite important.

There's an opportunity for me to see that CS will take the center stage of go-to-market. this is, if CS is clever, then, or CS leaders are clever, they will see the opportunity here. And as I said, if you look at the end of the funnel, if you turn this around, and if look back, you have so much power to influence your peers, your go-to-market with data. In particular, if you source things out with AI or help,

with AI solutions, you can now really focus on what's really important on achieving an accurate forecast and fostering a really customer centric culture. That's important. that hasn't really been, this hasn't been the role or the skillset of a CS leader before, but this is an opportunity going forward, right? So there are new leaders out there. And if you look at LinkedIn as well, I see there's a community now coming up.

of folks who like to share, like to experiment, but also laser focused on how you can change the perception of CS away from this cost center thinking to basically someone who is driving not only revenue but driving the culture of your company and that's quite important these days as well.

Alex Berry (34:42)
Yeah. Yeah. I think from, what I've seen, right. Your customer success is without question, always the hardest working team on the GTM team. Right. And sometimes I, that you can get really bogged down in the immediate requirements of your customers in what burning. and in some cases, I look, I look at some of the ratios, some companies today, right. Heavily weighted towards account executive versus roles like customer success.

And so there has also been a little bit of under investment, I think in some cases. So I think what you're saying is really wise. And one of the things I think is really important now is kind of which customer success leader are you working for? Because there is going to be a change into how teams get set up as a result. So think you need to be very, very clearly, right? I think you need to be in the right team. Great to go to a company which is leading on the change and dogfooding their own product, so to speak.

But there's also going to be a lot of organizations out there who are being really innovative. And I think for customer success manager, that's where I'd want to be for 2025 onwards because this is a seismic shift in how people do things. And I think it can really accelerate customer success management.

Thomas (35:57)
Yeah, one thing to add is the human aspect of why we all doing this, right? And it's great to talk about AI and how we can see that tech is helping us. But at the end of the day, it's about finding value and finding meaningfulness in your work. And if you get rid of noise, get rid of stuff that was really a burden for you to connect with your customers, you are opening up to

really connect your values with the company values and what you want to achieve for your customers. So it's almost like freeing up a little bit of space in your brain and your emotions that enables you. And that for me is the key, right? Because if you look back into what really matters in a human connection is being able to really focus on what matters, what's good for the other person. And this is where we need to go back to. And that's the main important thing. It sounds very simple.

And again, we talk again about AI, but if you look at this way, then we can almost see there's a future for reconnecting with ourselves and our connections to make sure we drive businesses going forward.

Alex Berry (37:11)
100%. I think that's, I think that's a great opportunity and I think it's a very good point to end on. Thomas, people listening, how do they get in touch? How do they consume some of your thought leadership? Please, we'd love to know.

Thomas (37:29)
Yes, absolutely. I am on LinkedIn, I say no, and I'm assuming we will share the link. I'm active on Axe as well. But most importantly, I do write every week. I do have a newsletter at the moment on LinkedIn, where I share my thoughts about everything CS that starts with how leaders need to be these days, what my trends, predictions are for next year.

Alex Berry (37:36)
show.

Thomas (37:55)
what I think about AI, where to start and so on. So as I said, I'm focusing on CEOs, the moment in particular, so I'm quite specific. But if you do have any other questions or want to chat with me, please do this and you will find all this information now to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Alex Berry (38:14)
Great, Thomas, thank you very much for your time today. It's a really brilliant conversation. See you soon.

Thomas (38:19)
Thank you very much, Alex.

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