[Un]Churned – The No. 1 Podcast for Customer Retention

In this enlightening discussion, Erica Kuhl, EVP at Gainsight and a key architect behind Salesforce's massive customer community, shares her journey from early employee to community innovator. She reveals how she built a peer-driven forum with limited resources, emphasizing community as a vital retention strategy. Erica discusses the significance of creating a unified Digital Customer Success experience and provides actionable insights on pitching community initiatives to boost retention by four times. Prepare to be inspired by her scrappy approach to customer engagement!

Colin Slade, Senior VP of AI Strategy and Customer Success at Cloudbeds, led a nimble team that transformed a struggling post-sales operation into an AI-powered powerhouse. They developed over 150 workflows in just nine months, automating 75% of repetitive tasks and saving 7,000 hours monthly. Colin discusses the initial fears of job loss among staff, the stepwise approach for AI adoption, and the importance of team structure. He emphasizes the impact of embracing constraints for innovation and fostering a culture of fearless experimentation.

Cat Valverde, founder of the Enterprise AI Group, specializes in helping organizations adopt AI effectively. She discusses the common pitfalls of enterprise AI projects and reveals her groundbreaking 15-Minute Rule for enhancing adoption rates. By focusing on human-centered approaches, she outlines a simple four-week framework to engage users and boost buy-in. The conversation highlights the importance of reducing cognitive load, using psychological insights, and leveraging social proof to achieve remarkable increases in AI adoption.

Mark Roberge, co-founder of Stage 2 Capital and former HubSpot CRO, dives into the transformative power of AI in sales and market strategies. He emphasizes the need to replace CAC obsession with a focus on optimizing customer lifetime value. Roberge outlines four phases of AI evolution in go-to-market tactics, predicting blurred departmental lines and the rise of autonomous agents. He also discusses the societal implications of AI, questioning whether capitalism can adapt alongside these advancements. It's a captivating look at the future of work and customer dynamics!

Jacob Bank, the founder and CEO of Relay.app and a former Google product leader, dives deep into the world of AI agents. With over 14 years of experience, he discusses how agents will soon handle nearly all tasks on computers. Jacob distinguishes between workflows and agents, stressing the importance of context over complex prompts. He highlights why small businesses adopt AI faster than larger enterprises and predicts that everyone will need to become an agent manager, focusing on training and supervising these digital teammates.

Omer Rabin, a General Partner at TLA Ventures and former Gainsight chief evangelist, teams up with Chad Horenfeldt, VP of Customer Success at Siena AI and author of The Strategic CSM. They discuss the meteoric rise of customer success from a fledgling idea to a billion-dollar industry. Omer shares his belief that the next wave of CEOs will likely emerge from customer success roles. They emphasize the transformative power of AI in regaining strategic focus and highlight the importance of aligning customer success metrics with organizational goals.

The best product leaders don't start in product—they start in customer success.Nick Mehta, former Gainsight CEO, sits down with PathFactory’s CPO & CCO, Venk Chandran, who built his product career from the ground up in CS. Venk reveals why working backwards from renewals changes everything, how CS teams can drive AI adoption with their customers, and why websites are dying in the age of AI agents. Plus: the art of asking better questions, the emotional differences between CS and product roles, and what we owe our customers in the era of AI.WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:- Why starting your career in renewals teaches you to work backwards from value- How customer success is fundamentally a financial business (and why that matters)- Why AI agents are replacing websites as the primary B2B buying experience- How to help customers adopt AI when they're used to manual workflows- The difference between outbound and inbound product managers (and why you need both)- Why is delayed gratification in product harder than the instant wins of CS- How to retrain yourself (and your customers) to ask better questions of AI---Check out the Key Takeaways & Transcripts: https://www.gainsight.com/presents/series/unchurned/---Where to Find Venk:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/venkchandran/Where to Find Nick:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmehta/Where to Find Josh: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/--- In this episode, we cover:0:00 - Preview & Introduction 1:10 - Venk's Journey From Radio Waves to Product Leadership 7:37 - How Venk Jumped From HR Tech → Sales → CS → Product (and Made It Work)10:32 - Learning at Salesforce: The Surprising Lesson Venk Learned From Renewals12:05 - Why CS Is a Financial Business First — The Real Definition of Customer Value15:19 - CS to CPO: 3 Game-Changing Skills That Make the Transition Possible17:05 - CS vs. Product: The Emotional Shift No One Talks About19:51 - PathFactory’s Big Vision — Connecting Content Directly to Revenue (With AI!)22:28 - Why Websites Are Dying — And What’s Replacing Them25:35 - Truth, Transparency & Trust: What We Owe Each Other in the AI Era26:51 - The AI Adoption Problem: Why CS Teams Struggle With Change Management31:35 - The Art of Asking Better Questions ---Referenced:Salesforce - https://www.salesforce.com/Perplexity - https://www.perplexity.ai/ChatGPT - https://chat.openai.com/

Customer success leaders share how they're handling massive renewal volumes, with Rockwell Automation managing over 100,000 renewals. They highlight the shift from time-based outreach to AI-driven engagement signals. Fleetio discusses using AI to automate CSM tasks, allowing them to focus on strategic advisory roles. Insights on effective change management and AI's role in analyzing customer feedback reveal essential strategies for driving retention and efficiency. The conversation also covers the importance of integrating data from various systems to enhance overall customer health.

"How Agentic AI Is Replacing Subscription Revenue"Chuck Ganapathi, the CEO of Gainsight & Brett Queener, Managing Director at Bonfire Ventures, who previously ran product at Salesforce and helped destroy Siebel, the company where he and Chuck first met. Together, they've witnessed every major shift in enterprise software over three decades, and they believe the biggest one is happening right now.In this conversation, Brett unveils his forthcoming thesis on "the end of ARR," arguing that agentic AI will fundamentally break subscription business models. When products finally achieve what he calls "product purity", actually doing the job they promise without requiring armies of CSMs, endless onboarding, and quarterly business reviews, the entire economic foundation of SaaS collapses. Chuck and Brett discuss whether this is an existential threat or the evolution the industry has been waiting for.What you'll learn:- Why the "friction gap" between product and value created the entire CS industry- What "product purity" means and why it threatens traditional SaaS economics- How agentic AI fundamentally changes the unit economics of software- Why usage-based pricing is inevitable once products actually work- The product marketing playbook that still matters in an AI-first worldCheck out the Key Takeaways & Transcripts: https://www.gainsight.com/presents/series/unchurned/Where to Find the GuestBrett's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettqueener/Chuck's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckganapathi/Where to Find Josh: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/In this episode, we cover:0:00 - Preview & Introduction1:18 - Meet Chuck & Brett3:30 - How Brett and Chuck met at Siebel 9:28 - Transition to Salesforce: destruction of Siebel as a goal14:11 - Changing Nature of Product Marketing in the AI Era18:00 - Systems of Record vs. Systems of Action21:13 - Databases as “lossy” representations of reality29:00 - Brett's thesis: "The End of ARR (And I Feel Fine)"34:28 - How should agentic applications be priced?43:43 - Future Outlook: Market paying premium for top agents47:17 - 10x CSMs enabled by AI agentsReferences:- Brett Queener's blog: https://queener.substack.com/

How Human-Centric AI Frees CSMs for Strategic Work at BMCLeading customer success at a global scale is never easy—especially after a company split. For Sofia Barbosa, this meant steering a leaner team while still supporting hundreds of BMC products worldwide. The challenge: deliver more impact with fewer hands. The solution: build Succedo, an AI platform that reimagined how her team worked. The results spoke for themselves—customer success stories accelerated from months to days, output tripled, escalations dropped, and CSMs finally had time to focus on the strategic work that drives growth.In this episode, Sofia shares the inside story of how she’s embedding AI across customer success at BMC. From value summaries and training path recommendations to support prioritization and statements of work, Sofia is proving that AI isn’t about replacing people—it’s about elevating them. She explains how she manages change, structures her AI teams, and why she believes experimentation (and even failure) is the only way forward.What you’ll learn:- How Succedo helped triple the output of customer success stories.- The role of AI in reducing escalations and improving customer sentiment.- How to build specialized AI teams inside a large enterprise.- Why “human in the loop” remains critical in AI adoption.- The mindset shift leaders need to drive AI transformation.Check out the Key Takeaways & Transcripts: https://www.gainsight.com/presents/series/unchurned/Where to Find Sofia: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sofiabarbosa/Where to Find Josh: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/In this episode, we cover:0:00 – Preview & Introduction1:40 – Meet Sofia Barbosa (CCO, BMC Software)3:15 – Sofia’s promotion and the BMC split6:53 – Why & how Succedo was born11:30 – The impact of using Succedo12:55 – Using AI to create value summaries15:40 – Creating personalized training paths with AI18:35 – AI for support: prioritization and sentiment analysis21:18 – Automating statements of work with AI24:35 – Building “Succedo Forge” and “Succedo Care” teams27:10 – Managing change and team sentiment around AI28:45 – Advice for CCOs driving AI transformationReferenced:- Sofia's post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sofiabarbosa_customersuccess-ai-bmc-activity-7366224818586685441-q74P