Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- Which AI tools are you using right now?
- How are you currently using these tools and AI in your role more broadly?
- How has using AI changed your role?
- What do you wish AI could do to help you in your role that it can't currently do?
- For someone in CS who hasn't started using AI at all yet, what advice would you give them?
- Where or how do you keep up to date with AI developments in CS?
Created time
Aug 2, 2024 02:41 PM
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Jul 22, 2024
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ai-in-action-cs-stories-dan-theuns-alteryx
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As part of our new “AI in Action: Customer Support and Success Stories” bite-sized interview series, we sat down withAlteryx’s Customer Success Manager,Daniel Theunsto talk AI, and learn how he uses it to summarize and generate notes from calls and why he thinks people need to be careful about jumping in too quickly.
Which AI tools are you using right now?
We’re using it currently very much in the support side of our business right now, with our own internal tools, so that's internal support, internal ticketing from 'hey, my access toTableauis down' to raising tickets through a chat interface without needing a triage step. Or including the triage step of 'oh, have you looked at this knowledge article or whatever else?’
How are you currently using these tools and AI in your role more broadly?
The real benefit we're kind of seeing at the moment is taking more or less handwritten notes and ideas and then formalizing that into structures using AI.
“The real benefit we're kind of seeing at the moment is taking more or less handwritten notes and ideas and then formalizing that into structures using AI.”
For example, meeting summaries whether that’s transcriptions or just ideas and themes, translating that into an email that can just be sent out to summarize the call or translating that into a one-month action plan to onboard or adopt software.
How has using AI changed your role?
The actual change hasn't been super impressive.
“The actual change hasn't been super impressive.”
We operate in a very high-touch environment that paid customer success environment where there’s high expectations of tailoring and personalization and being fairly hands-on.
In customer success situations where you have let’s say 200 customers instead of 10, AI really would help because then it’s like ‘here are the 10 playbooks that you’re following, here are the automated responses based on those playbooks’.
That’s where I imagine the benefit would be coming in.
What do you wish AI could do to help you in your role that it can't currently do?
I’d love an add-in toOutlookthat says: ‘based on this email chain, and based on your previous responses, this is a suggested answer.’
That would probably be the biggest timesaver.
Although in a high-touch environment if it looks like your emails are starting to be generated by AI, that’s a bit of a dangerous territory, I think.
For someone in CS who hasn't started using AI at all yet, what advice would you give them?
Be careful pretty fast and foremost, be a little bit cautious.
Setting the scene almost is really important. Your first element in the conversation in the prompting phase is saying you are expected to know things about X, and this is the person I’m wanting to talk to.
“Setting the scene almost is really important. Your first element in the conversation in the prompting phase is saying you are expected to know things about X, and this is the person I’m wanting to talk to.“
Take a few things that you want to test out and then always sense check what it gets back to you and almost never trust that.
In the situations of creating new things right in the sense of finding existing things, we can be a little bit less concerned, but we’ve certainly seen examples in support where the responses are AI generated but there hasn’t been a sense check from a human to say is that actually relevant and does that link actually work and so on.
Where or how do you keep up to date with AI developments in CS?
Probably family and friends to be very honest.
My brother and fiancée now have a start up in the AI space. Outside of work, my group of people is very AI heavy and tech-savvy, so that kind of conversation across lunch is a lot of how I get info and then just playing around with it myself, taking up tools likeChatGPTand other premium trials to see what we can get out of it. But very much the sort of loose interest rather than an active hobby.
