AI-powered Customer Enablement: From Ideation to Execution

September 20, 2024

​We're showcasing an AI-powered content creation cycle that goes from idea to polished product collateral in minutes.

​Perspective kickstarts the process by auto-generating content ideas based on customer feedback. Hexus then takes over, creating interactive videos and documentation in minutes.

​Join us for an exciting and insightful webinar where Hexus and Perspective come together to explore how AI-powered tools are transforming the landscape of customer enablement. Learn how to leverage product demos and surveys to create a seamless, personalized, and impactful customer journey.

Guy Nirpaz

LinkedIn
Guy Nirpaz is the CEO/Founder of Perspective, an AI platform to conduct quality AI-mediated conversations with customers and teammates to get their invaluable input. He was previously the CEO/founder of Totango, a Customer Success Software.

Guy Nirpaz: Good morning everyone, thanks for joining. I'm here with Shambhavi, and we're excited to share with you a super cool workflow that we came up with when we met a few weeks ago.

Just as a quick introduction, I'm Guy Nirpaz, CEO and founder of Perspective. Before that, you may recall that I was the CEO and founder of Totango, which I ran for a bit over a decade. Shambhavi, why don't you introduce yourself as well?

Shambhavi Mahajan: Hi everyone, I'm Shambhavi. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Hexus. Hexus is your AI artisan that creates product demos and docs in minutes with AI. Over the past year, I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of product-led and sales-led companies, and I'm seeing some really interesting trends in customer enablement and the space in general. My background is in UX design, so this particular workflow and talk about everything from research to design is everything to me.

Guy: Excellent. This is exciting, and it's the reason why I found this super interesting to talk about the entire workflow together. Just a quick background on Perspective, which is the new company I started and am working on with a few very talented folks. The idea is to bring quality feedback to scale. I think we've all learned through the years that feedback is critical for businesses to make decisions and take action, especially in design. The best way to get feedback is through conversations, but conversations don't scale. So we make them scale with Perspective. Shambhavi, why are we here today?

Shambhavi: Absolutely. Customer enablement is so important these days. Communicating with customers and knowing how to communicate with them is crucial. Delivering engaging customer experiences is on everyone's minds. Many companies are catching up to it. For example, they're starting with up-to-date help centers because onboarding and retention are critical pieces where customers expect self-service. That's where you can really drive retention with good visual content that guides users in their preferred formats.

But it's not just about customers; buyers are also expecting self-service now. A typical buyer usually engages with at least five pieces of content before they actually make a purchase. So creating really engaging and effective content is important. It's not just about creating videos, articles, and blogs; it's about knowing how to do that effectively. That's why I think your tool is also very helpful in the entire lifecycle.

Guy: Absolutely. From my experience, when we did the shift a few years ago with Totango, we switched from an enterprise model where people were driving a lot of the training and education for customers to a self-service model, which was an amazing success. Enterprise customers really liked it. It became super clear that we're not just in the technology business; we're also in the content business. A lot of what needs to support the technology is content and learning.

Because technology moves so fast, with new releases, new ideas, and new market needs, the content needs to support that. There are multiple ways to think about content, but you can see a clear connection between the quality of the content—which could be demos or documentation—and the level of enthusiasm and adoption of products and services. By the sheer fact that you can train a single person, but then they need to potentially invite other people in the organization, having supporting content is very valuable.

So, Shambhavi, when you and I talked, you showed me your amazing product, which we're going to see soon, about how you were creating great content. My question for you was: How do people know what their challenges are when creating content? Besides crafting the actual video or demo, what are some other challenges that you see when you work with all these amazing customers?

Shambhavi: Absolutely. So, the goal here is really to deliver content that converts or content that actually engages people. Creating is not enough; you have to make it available in the formats that users prefer, in the languages that people prefer. Language is often overlooked; it's hard to scale content. The reason for that is products are changing so quickly these days. Your UI changes, and especially visual content goes out of date so quickly.

Most of you must be familiar with video editing. It's so difficult. Recording something, editing something, publishing - all of that takes too much time, too many iterations, and too many tools. One of the challenges is teams want to scale their content, but it's just too time-consuming.

Guy: And I think as part of the cycle we came up with together, which is a very generic one that many people have seen, how do we know that we are creating the right content? What is the content gap? How do we know that we are creating the right content? What should be the storyboard for this content?

We capture all of that under the ideation: think about the content calendar, think about the content library that you were analyzing, think about also the storyboarding of that. Then there is the part in which you actually produce it, and it needs to be effective and deliver. In order to know if it's effective and delivers, you need to get feedback from people before you launch it.

I think it's pretty clear that although this cycle seems super simple, speed of iteration and being able to actually create effective content is key for being successful in this world of product-led growth, content generation focus, and so forth. And I think what I found super exciting is that we can take this AI approach that both companies are focusing on, which puts people in the center of the creation process, and be able to use Perspective to capture gaps, use Hexus to develop engaging content, get feedback, and iterate this super quickly.

Obviously, as both companies take friction out of the flow, we make the ability to create that high-quality content much faster. And I guess that's the demo that we would like to show you in a few minutes. But maybe you have other comments on this, Shambhavi?

Shambhavi: I mean, AI - you mentioned it - is great for scaling content, but you have to be judicious about how you're using it because you don't want to sound like you're talking to a robot or a chatbot. So I think the human involvement is still very real. Making those judgments, judiciously using AI is very, very important. And I think that's where our tools collectively come in. It's about AI assistance really, not about just offloading everything to AI. What do you think?

Guy: I think the key is amplifying the human voice and the human point of view and the human's perspective, and using AI as a form of advanced automation in order to get through the flow. It's just a new way to think about it. But I think the right approach would be, because we're creating content to be consumed by people, we need people to be part of the process, but not necessarily as an inhibiting part of the process.

If I'm creating content for people to consume, I need feedback from people, I need to understand what they're looking for, and I need to make sure that what I'm creating is actually impacting people. Maybe in the future we create content for machines, but in the meantime, I don't see this as our objective.

Shambhavi: I think what you said about amplifying human voices is so spot on. One of the things, one of the best practices, and one of the things we're seeing in the industry is that all go-to-market teams want to unify their content, centralize it. Because customers also expect the same thing - they just want to talk to the company. They don't want to talk to support teams, they don't want to talk to sales teams, they don't want to talk to marketing. They just want one consistent brand voice across the company. So that consistency in your customer journey or lifecycle is something that yeah, can supplement.

Guy: Absolutely. So I know that you've all been kind of waiting for the demos because we are in the AI world and demos are super cool. So here's what we're going to demo: we're going to start with Perspective. The use case is an organization that wants to create content for their onboarding program. We're going to start by seeing how we can capture the missing content for onboarding, creating it in Hexus, and then getting feedback on our recent creation with Perspective so we can keep on the flow super quickly.

Guy: Okay, so I need to show you Perspective for a second just so we orient ourselves. The key here in Perspective is first and foremost to come up with a question I want to get feedback on. In this case, it's a conversation which I'm not going to go through. It's already been done. I'm starting with defining what I'm looking for. I'm looking to get input on how to improve onboarding.

Perspective asks me a few questions. You can see it's asking for a little bit more context, who I want to interview, and at the end of it, what happens is Perspective comes up with what we call a research outline, which is at the heart of it, a guidance for the interview.

So, "How can we improve the onboarding?" These are our goals. As a result of that, there's a link that we can share with our audience that is basically going to take them into an interview experience. This is how it's going to look, and they're going to respond.

Guy: So we're seeing their interviews, which we can read further. We can go all the way in and read the entire interview script. But something which is very cool, we can ask, "What is the answer based on these interviews?" This is the answer based on these interviews, but in our context, in which we want to identify what content we want to build, let's jump into a new session and simply ask Perspective: "Based on these nine interviews, what are some content gaps that we should prioritize to build? And here it is. I can simply take that, highlight it, and share it. I'll copy the link, and Shambhavi can take that and continue from there to build amazing content that supports this gap that was easily identified.

Shambhavi: That's awesome because onboarding is constant optimization, and learning from your product data and your customer feedback is so important in creating a successful onboarding flow. So, if everybody can see my screen, I will show you how to create a multi-part onboarding guide for Calendly. Hexus is a Chrome extension that allows you to edit your screens and record them. What you can do with the editor is really mask sensitive data or just change page copy. Let me change my name real quick. I don't want to show that. And let me also update this URL.

Okay, I think my screens look good for capture, so I'm going to start recording now. We've designed Hexus so that you get the recording right the first time. Every time you click on the screen, Hexus takes a screenshot, and any of the in-between cursor movements are all gone. So you don't have to worry about making it perfect because editing is also super simple.

Once you've stopped recording, as you can see, it's cleaned up all the tabs in the background and added these hotspots with AI captions. You can click through these or you can play it as a video, and all of this is editable. You can make it very pretty in no time.

Let's change the color of the hotspot here to the Calendly blue, and let's add a background color. Let's change the captions real quick. Let me add a title here real quick.

There are a few other things that you can do, and it's super easy to explore. You can get as creative as you want, and once you're done, just hit publish. You can share this as a link, so you can email this to your customers directly, or you can embed it directly onto your Help Center or a Hexus-hosted page as well.

But that's not it. Scaling your content is important. Some people are visual learners, some people like to read, so you can just switch the template and convert it into a how-to guide instantly. We have some other templates as well.

Continuing our multi-part onboarding series, I've already created a few flows for Calendly. I'm just going to put them together in what we call a multi-flow playlist. I'll give it a name like "Getting Started" and select these three flows and hit create.

Now I can change this color real quick. I can add more flows here, remove some flows, and update it. Now let me share it with Guy. I will fill in that name variable that I previously added.

This is great for email, especially for your onboarding emails or for your marketing emails, using the personalization variable. You can click through it, watch the end of it, and really, the best part is you can skip ahead. These are - we recommend keeping it short, you know, under a minute, like I would say 10 steps or so, so that it's not too overwhelming. You can skip ahead just to improve content discoverability in general.

Guy: So now that we've created this amazing video, before we publish it, we may want to be able to get feedback from our team. Is it ready? Should we do anything about this? Let me just quickly start here with Perspective: "I'd like to get feedback from the team on the new onboarding video. Is it ready to go, or are there any glaring gaps?" That's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to ask Perspective for that. Then I'm going to answer a few questions. The first thing I'm going to do is take this video, copy the link, and put it here. Perspective is simply going to remember this. Now it's going to look at the metadata around this link. You can see it has it all. That's awesome. This is super beautiful.

And we have a research objective. We can see: "Is the new onboarding video ready to launch? Evaluate the clarity, identify any gaps." And you guys can all try it. I'll put the link in the chat for everyone to use it, and you can see for yourself. Once you answer, we have an answer from our team whether or not the video is ready to go.

Guy: I think what we were trying to show you here today is a full workflow. I don't know how long it took, probably 10 or 12 minutes or something like this. What we've been able to show you is the ability to identify content gaps, create amazing tutorials in multiple formats using Hexus. There was a question, Shambhavi, whether you can download that as an MP4?

Shambhavi: Yes, you can export it.

Guy: And then we got feedback by simply putting a link, adding some context which will learn over time so you will need to answer even less. And you got everything you need in order to decide: Am I ready to publish or what are the gaps so I can create a new iteration with Hexus and get this done. With that, I'll pause for a second to see if we have more questions.

[They address questions from the audience]

Guy: Shambhavi, any last thoughts?

Shambhavi: I think we got really good feedback from the comments here. Those who want to follow up with us and check us out can just go to our website. For Hexus, it's hexus.ai, and both of our tools are ready to use. You can sign up for free and get started. It's fully self-service.

Guy: Exactly, and we offer a special promotion of 250 extra credits for people that are on this webinar. So why don't you try it out and let us know what you think? Thank you for joining.