The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook Season 2 Episode 48 - Joydeep Sen Sarma - Supporting Customers in Their Perferred Workspace

• Kevin Metzger • Season 2 • Episode 48

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In this engaging episode of the Customer Success Playbook, Joydeep Sen Sarma, CEO of Clearfeed, dives into how B2B customer support is evolving towards chat-based platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. He talks about how today’s support teams are adapting to meet customers right where they work, offering practical tips on how to implement and scale these new solutions while keeping service quality high.

Here's a deeper look at some of the key takeaways:

Shifting Support Paradigms

  • Moving from transactional support to building true partnerships
  • Embracing the generational shift towards chat-based communication
  • Transforming support from just a cost to a real growth driver

Challenges and Solutions

  • Integrating new tools with existing ticketing systems
  • Keeping response times consistent across all channels
  • Finding the right mix of automation and human touch
  • Using AI to make responses faster and more accurate

Business Impact

  • Making support more accessible and engaging for customers
  • Cutting down response times, with some teams now offering 15-minute guarantees
  • Differentiating from competitors through a standout support experience
  • Opening doors for deeper partnership opportunities

Looking Ahead

  • AI-powered support that helps teams respond faster
  • Blending structured and unstructured data for richer insights
  • The evolution of knowledge management and automatic documentation

Joydeep brings a fresh perspective on how B2B support is changing and what companies need to do to stay ahead. It’s a conversation packed with insights for anyone looking to modernize their customer support strategy.

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Roman Trebon:

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the customer success playbook podcast. I'm your host, Roman Trebon here with my co host Kevin Metzger before we get started a quick reminder to our audience. Please rate, subscribe and share the show so we can reach a broader audience and keep bringing you the guest and content that you want to hear. Kev, you must be. I see that smile's a little bigger this morning. for our guests listening to the podcast, I'm wearing this very orange very nice, actually, very comfortable. Clemson Tiger shirt. On our last episode, Kev in case you didn't listen, Kevin's an alumni of Clemson the Tigers. I'm from Pittsburgh. I'm a big Pitt fan. They played this weekend on the football field and Kev, you won. I'm wearing the Clemson. I'm not even upset about it because I'm, you know, you got me a great sweatshirt. I'm looking good here with it. So great game and congrats on the big win.

Kevin Metzger:

Thanks. I mean, orange looks good on you. I think you ought to consider adopting it. Man, what a game though the last quarter, I mean, up to the last quarter, I think it was I told you I fell asleep for some of it, but woke up right at the beginning of the last quarter and it was quite an exciting last quarter to watch.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, it was a great game. and hey, if I'm going to lose, I'd rather put a sweatshirt on than have money out of my pocket. So a good wager to have and a lot of fun. So Kev speaking of game changers, we got a great topic today. We're going to talk about How customer support is evolving, right? we talked about this in some previous episodes, but really how support teams are evolving to meet modern customer demands, especially in this digital workplace. Kev we're going to talk a little bit about tools like Slack and MS Teams I'm assuming you're pretty familiar with these.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, yeah. Use slack quite regularly. Use teams regularly. the idea of being able to integrate into these and be directly in front of. Users as they are encountering problems, and being able to provide support right then and there is a huge benefit to just in time delivery of information as it's needed.

Roman Trebon:

yeah, I'm excited. Selfishly, I have a big teams thing behind me. We do a ton of Microsoft Teams deployments. We're actually not offering support teams today. I'm very curious on on our guests. How they're doing it, recommendations he has, etc. So, with that said, we're thrilled to welcome Joydeep Sen Sarma, CEO of Clear Feed to our show today, With over decades of experience in B2B customer success particularly in the SaaS industry, Joydeep has been at the forefront of meeting customers where they work. He's helped transform support experiences to integrate seamlessly into platforms like Slack and MS Teams, Today, he's going to share insights into why modern customers increasingly prefer support in their everyday workspaces, and how companies can adjust to the shift. And I think that's big, how they adjust. Joydeep's gonna share strategies for integrating this support into your regular operations. He'll come up with real world examples he can share with our audience and talk about what he's learned from his time at Clearfeed. Joydeep, without all that said,

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

welcome to the show. Thank you, Roman. Great to meet another Pitt fan, so I don't think we discussed this prior to the meeting. I actually went to grad school at the University of Pittsburgh. Oh, my goodness! So there we go.

Roman Trebon:

We should have shipped out an orange Clemson. A good thing you weren't part of the bet, Joydeep. We'd all be wearing orange today.

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Unfortunately, I don't have my Pitt t shirt on today, but, glad to join the crew,

Roman Trebon:

I love it. So Joydeep, let's start here. at Clearfeed I know that you and the team have seen firsthand how preferences for customer support have evolved, with this growing shift towards these, alternative channels, like Slack and Teams, et cetera. Joydeep, why do you think customers are now gravitating towards these platforms over some traditional platforms in terms of how they want to get supported from their partners?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

So I think this is, particularly happening in specific parts of the industry, particularly B2B, SaaS, and deep tech products and more complex products. I think there are multiple drivers for this. You know, one is, of course, generational, you know as sort of people age and the new generation comes in, they are used to working out of chat. they're sitting on slack and Microsoft teams all day long. that creates a demand for, changing the interaction between your partner teams your vendor teams and yourself. the huge driver for this Is the SAS industry is not like selling toasters and appliances. it's about land and expand growing usage growing your customers and growing your revenues. we are coming from a world where, support was a cost center and you wanted to keep your support costs down as much as possible. And the lower the number of tickets, the lower of number escalations. You know, the better it was and was what I call transactional support, whereas now, you know, support is at the front lines meeting customers every day, and you want to grow your customers, grow their usage, you, you know, care about the satisfaction, you care about getting referrals from them. And it's much more of a partnership, than, selling a toaster and just walking away. So I think that's the other side of the equation where. Companies, I think, even without realizing it, are realizing that, hey, I can use these mediums to stay in closer touch with customers, help them resolve problems faster, and not just resolve problems, but really be a partner for them and help them grow usage. And that sort of ends up reflecting in my revenues and all the metrics that I track. So I think there are at least these two major, factors that I see

Kevin Metzger:

Do you see what's the type of usage like when customers start interacting in teams and slack? Is it question answer? Or is there more? Is it more conversational usage that you see when they get into teams and slack and how as a company are you supposed to position to leverage and build on that? Build more partnership into it as opposed to just a question answer thing.

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, actually the most common usage of these platforms, I feel. It's actually during onboarding. I know of several firms who may not continue, on a chat medium over the longer horizon, but they would certainly, do the onboarding and the POC there. naturally, this is a period where there is a lot of back and forth. And, speed is of the essence. The customer has a lot of questions. They are trying different things out. And if you had to file a ticket for every one of those interactions.

Roman Trebon:

it

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

would really slow you down. So I think almost every company selling any kind of product that requires a little bit of handholding during the onboarding phase, I strongly suspect, you know, they're on some chat medium, you know, whether it slack teams, could be discord, could be something I don't know. in the developing world, WhatsApp,

Kevin Metzger:

there's

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

I've also heard of telegram, I'm not familiar with telegram users and that ecosystem as much, but it is something like that, right? After that, I think it starts wearing, as I mentioned, some companies draw a line there and say that, look, I'm gonna stop it at onboarding. A lot of them continue to provide these kind of tool channels to at least their premium customers. So that is another thing we have seen is that. many companies segregate their customers into the premium ones and, the ones that are getting 60 70 percent of the revenue and they would offer these extra channels of accessibility, you know, to those customers. There are others, who broaden it, and I'm sure we'll talk about that. Now, in terms of, what happens on these? I think a couple of observations, as you guys have mentioned a couple of times, Slack and Teams is where you work already. So when you ship from, your internal project channel to an external project channel, it's a very seamless switch. I think the user behavior changes unconsciously. hey, I'm chatting with my colleague inside my workplace versus, I suddenly start chatting with my colleague. Outside my workplace at my vendor, it's a very seamless switch. I think you can imagine that the tone becomes much more informal. You are likely to approach your vendor or your partner much more frequently. You're no longer restricted to request response paradigm. to give examples of other interaction patterns, support is typically not seen as a way of doing outbound communication. Although support tools do support outbound communication, but I would say that's a secondary sort of a. You know, feature or usage pattern, whereas we do a lot of outbound communication and so do our customers. for example anything related to status, downtime important product features, events, wishing people on holidays, you name it, And a lot of the times, there's an inverse pattern of initiating the conversation from the vendor side and then, customers responding back. we make product blasts on our channels and we immediately start getting responses. Hey, I want to try this feature. I want to try that feature. That's not a support interaction. It's a very different kind of interaction. One of the most pleasant surprises I've had is very recently and I posted this on my LinkedIn handle. One of our customers after using us for some time, actually pinged us over Slack and said, Hey guys, I just love your service. What can I do to help you guys? I want to make some referrals. it's very informal. It's even hard to categorize all the kinds of interactions that, you're having. We never asked that question, you know, what are the five different ways you interact with your colleagues over Slack? It doesn't make sense. And so I think, it starts becoming a little bit like that. Of course, you know, there is a lot of questions. Of course, there are actually problem tickets. as we go deeper, we can discuss how to handle them better. But there are also a lot of these informal Patterns of greetings announcements and referrals I love this. So Jordi,

Roman Trebon:

you're talking about, proactively putting messages out there, holidays coming up and next week is Thanksgiving here in the U. S. I want to learn more about how clear feed helps organizations get this off the ground or help them operationalize it because I hear this and I'm like, Oh, how great is it that I could be in teams or slack? I don't have to leave my channel. I don't have to go to email. I don't have to go to phone. I can just do it in there. But the first thing, I can't get this thought out of my head, I need you to help me, is they're going to bypass my support process. they're just going to chat individuals on my team and it's going to blow everything up. So help me overcome this. talk to us about how to do this.

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Great point. just to reinforce the point you're making, I hang out on community forums like Reddit and that's one of the first responses I hear, a lot of people come and say, hey, I want to do this slack thing. Do you guys think it's a good idea? And you get a blast of responses. With five people jumping and saying, no, never do it. It's a really bad idea. For all the reasons you said so, and that's true. Framework to do this. Some thought process. Some kind of a strategy. This can easily blow up. And as you guys know, I'm sure you guys have been knowing the support arena so well the only thing worse than sort of doing something is to, disappoint your customers, offer them this kind of a channel and then they come, Drop your message and then you never get back

Roman Trebon:

yeah

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

That's worse than having that email ticketing system at least, you know, the expectations were well set there, right? So yeah, so I think your concerns are very valid I would say the answer to this is in two parts. one is as a company different companies have different strategies. to what extent do you want to use this? Like I mentioned in my previous reply, some people just use it for onboarding. Some people use it for conversational stuff, but they still have a ticketing system. Some people like ourselves, we are all in, so we don't even have a ticketing system. We do everything here. So one of the things we first try to understand when we work with our customers is, Hey, How do you want to approach this, What is the use case for this medium for you, And then we figure out a solution. a few things that I think we, generally speaking, help with while, some of the specifics differ by customer. I think the number one thing is making sure that you're responsive. Because once you have a large number of channels, it is almost impossible to track that right? And to make a claim that, maybe I don't have as good SLA as in my ticketing system, but I'm going to get back to you, right? I'm going to get back to you in a day, And how do you say that, Because there's no system to track that, so the way clear feed works basically is, it sits on top of these channels and it monitors every conversation and it creates sort of a internal tracker for them. There is a hidden ticket, the customers just chat, but inside the system, there is a hidden ticket, which the agents or the support team or the engineering team, whoever is working out of these channels, can see one of the first things we help people do is we help them make sure that everything is. Responded to everything can be closed. There's internal statuses. We have a great alerting system. That's one of the things we are very good at, and that's how we started. a lot of this is configuration, but you can easily set up policies that say, if I get a customer message and I don't respond within 10 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever is your sweet spot. Send me a notification. And these are all like things you can control, right? You know, is there a cascaded notifications, who it goes to, where it goes to so on and so forth. So I think the number one thing we do is help you be responsive and close everything out. The second thing we find very popular is. As you mentioned, almost everybody at scale has a ticketing system. we've worked with a lot of large companies that have a ticketing system, that have a support team, working out of Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Salesforce, whatever, once we've taken care of this basic stuff, the second question comes up we can tell customers whatever we want, but They're going to come and report problems here. So we've got to create tickets from it, right? And we've got to get our support people who are sitting on that other tool patched into this. it took me a little while to realize that while, you know, For many of us particularly myself, you know, Slack is the center of the world, but for support agents, like their support ticketing system is the center of their world, they want to work out of there. Everything has to come there. that's the second thing, we frequently find ourselves helping our customers with bridging these two worlds. there's a lot of configuration, a lot of options, how you want to do it and so on. But the bottom line is, your customer is on Slack. Your agent is on the support platform, whether it's Endesk or Intercom and we connect these and help bridge those gaps, right? That means, bi directional things. It means making forms available inside Slack. It means a whole bunch of things, you know, so that's the second thing we do quite commonly. Now, you can also use us as a ticketing system. we offer that option as well, but we also realize that, you know, There's a lot of ticketing system out there. Those guys have been there for 10 years. They are more sophisticated than we are. for a small company, we might be a great solution to take care of their entire support stack. But definitely for larger companies with enterprise ticketing systems, we help them bridge these worlds. The third thing goes back to, the observation you made if I open this up, I'm going to just get hit with God knows what, everybody's going to come and ask all kinds of questions they have, So it's kind of the dual of the number one point I raised is that how do I keep some kind of SLA? And also like, how do I, Temper the volume and so on. So yeah, I think that's another thing that I think is a strong focus these days is AI. So we do have a very nice answer bot and we are able to suck in everything that you can throw at us. So whether it's external documentation or your knowledge bases inside zendesk and intercom or internal documents like confluence even your slack chats we can ingest all of that into a platform. And then depending on how you want to configure, you know, we can help you sort of auto response to customers or you know Have an assistant like an ai assistant for your agents so so we offer these kind of things and they help a lot, you know, again, you know, it depends You know how people want to use it like different people have different ways of working Most of our customers have been very interesting. You know, we kind of launched this. I think maybe a year back and obviously, you know, we've been adding capabilities and I've seen a very nice, smooth adoption. most of our customers have started using our bot. as an, AI assistant and I can't work without it. if I get a customer problem, I immediately get a assistant respond that look, you know, this may be a good response, these are the links and you know, all that's good stuff coming in, right? So by the time I'm trying to respond, I'm already off the ground, And I'm a veteran here. I've been here for day one. I know my product inside out. And I still find it so useful. It saves me time. I can only imagine that the people who are now joining our team as new support personnel, how useful it would be for them. So I would say, maybe these are the three main ways. Of course, as you can imagine, any product has lots of features, but I think it will get pointless beyond a point, discussing all of them.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, so you brought up. I've got questions as you're going through talking about the different integrations and a lot of it has to do with how you're gathering the data. So as you were talking about using the different channels and you actually are having support questions come in. That's all data that you want to be able to gather, for the AI to learn on and to continue to improve your ability to respond when it's being gathered into a system in a very structured way, that's easy to do. Compared to when it's coming in an unstructured format. Now you've got to throw it through the processes to understand what's coming in as unstructured and you're, Probably having to train different systems to understand that versus going into the structured format that comes in. So when we're looking at using an unstructured platform for communication. How are you managing that workflow so that you can recognize it's coming in and it can go into a structured format so that you gain in the efficiencies of how it's coming in, but also how you're processing it on the back end. Is it through recognizing it and putting it through integrations? Or is it through saying? I'm going to take this in. Let me process it into the knowledge base. I'm just interested in how you're optimizing.

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Yeah, that's a great question. And let me just start off by saying that our product is a work in progress. a lot of the things you said I want to do but we're not there yet. let me tell you what we have been able to do so far. we are able to index Slack and chat mediums A support organization can bring in their structured data. As you said, the documentation and the knowledge basis typically. And they can also bring in slack. One of the challenges we have faced is that while your documentation and knowledge bases are typically the gold standard, you try to keep them up to date and, they are the source of truth. But your chat degrades rapidly in quality, or it can. your recent responses to customers are probably pretty accurate, but the old responses, could be invalid. They could be superseded by documentation. Not an easy problem to solve. So what our system does is it tries to merge the knowledge from both of these. It understands that slack is a chronological Data set, which degrades rapidly in quality, whereas your documentation is your gold standard. it is always assumed to be good, and so it sort of deep prioritizes older. chats as a source of answers and also tries to these AI systems a little tricky. You know, it also tries to make sure that documentation gets a good shot because otherwise what happens. is that these chat transcripts tend to take over as support personnel, while it's great that you can find a chat transcript related to what I'm doing. You also want your gold standard documentation to show up if possible. we're still a work in progress, but we've tried to adopt some strategies to merge the knowledge from both sources it continues to be a work in progress. We continue to find issues, but that's something that we work on. I think the point you mentioned, and we have heard this from many prospects is they want to control this process. They don't want to leave it up to AI to do this merging and Waiting they want a different workflow where they flag some of these chat conversations and send them to documentation. This is where I think, you know, we need to do more. Ideally, I think this should be done through integration, like if we had an integration with Zendesk KB system and we could take a chat transcript and say, let me find, if it needs a new KB or it can be inserted into an existing KB. But we are simply not there yet. we've done this sort of custom project with some companies, but not as a self service product. What we have been trying to do off late is at least start to flag these conversations. So all the chats happening in slack. Our AI system categorizes them and one of the categories it puts is feature requests. Or how to questions and so on. we've got a bunch of categories which sort of commonsensical makes sense to support people and you can go to a dashboard filter and find everything. For example, that was a how to question we would identify and show you and at least it would help you get started. so the other thing I forgot we have a very nice board that can also do summarization and so on. So you can just instructed. Hey at bot. Create me a FAQ entry based on this chat. we use a lot of off the shelf AI systems and they are amazing as you, as we all know. So this is all like, you know, GPD stuff behind the scenes, but it works fantastic. we just feed it the slack thread and it spews out a beautiful summary. we can help you identify the conversations that. are likely to be good candidates for documentation and KBs. We can help you quickly summarize it. But right now, we leave it there. beyond this, you have to take it and add it. Of course, like any other structured system we have fields and so on. what I would advise people is to have a field that says, documentation required or documentation done use that to track whether things that need to be pushed into documentation have been pushed into documentation I would love to do more here and I would love to get into more automatic paradigm with human supervision. Hopefully, you know, someday in the future.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. Looking forward to seeing what's happening, right? You guys are just scratching the surface and Joydeep. Love it. I love this conversation. Gets me excited to hear kind of how we can support customers and it's like slack and teams, etc. Also makes me super nervous because if I have customers. with other clients, that use a clear feed and they're getting supported in teams and slack, then they come to us where we don't have it. I feel like we're like dinosaurs, I don't like that feeling of being left behind.

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

tell you a small story here that your viewers might enjoy. it is very hard to quantify the benefits of this, I cannot claim that, some customer of mine had a 100 percent revenue bump after doing this. I don't have that data. But I'll tell you a very interesting anecdote. A few days back, I was on Reddit. I frequently try to interact with, people who are users of these systems and try to help them. I found that one of our customers had posted a very interesting thing on Reddit. I don't think they knew that we were reading it. I don't think they cared. this company, I won't take their name, but they are in the MSP space, sort of, it, it service what is it called? ISP slash MSP kind of space. Yeah. And one of the things I did, I, I believe they do is they take complex software from software vendors and provide it as a service. And I don't fully understand this

Kevin Metzger:

stuff

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

or,

Kevin Metzger:

like a reseller.

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Yeah, there's some kind of a complex security software. What I was blown away by was that, they were just chatting with somebody else on Reddit. And they said, hey, you know what? We offer support on slack and we guarantee we'll get back to you in 15 minutes. And that's one of the reasons why we got the right to provide the software on

Kevin Metzger:

our

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

platform.

Kevin Metzger:

So that played into their partnership is what you're saying? Yes,

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Unfortunately, it's hard to find these anecdotes. But as you said, it is happening throughout the industry.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. And the more and more teams kept, you know, the more and more teams that adopt this. If you're not offering it, it's like, Oh, you know, I don't do email. I don't do chat. You're like, well, what is this? it's 2025. What are we doing?

Kevin Metzger:

in 2009, 2010, 2011, when social was really starting to emerge, people were asking a lot about ROI and where it is. One of the analogies I heard a lot at that time is social's like the new telephone. If you don't have it, You're not going to be able to be in all these channels and all these places where people are having these conversations and participate. So you've got to be able to participate. And I think we're at that same place with AI. A lot. And honestly, I think there is ROI. I think it's easier to show ROI than to show AI. In on AI than it is in social, although costs are hard to predict with AI as part of the problem because of how messaging and things like that go, but still the, the AI piece of, especially in customer success. Your customer support. Rather, I think it's one of the fastest areas of adoption it's looking at existing data that is structured relatively well compared to other data in the organization You really are able to look at all of the information, understand the question and the format of the question and say, how does this best index to a piece of data that I already have? And there's good data for training on it. There's good data for looking at it and then. It's it's it's definitely one of the faster adoption areas in AI in how it's being used. it's one of the better returns quickly and being able to look at the data. Bots are relatively good. I think they're going to get exponentially better over the next. Year I think it's going to be an exponential growth curve and how the bots are working. As we're able to better train the models, the LMS that we're, we're working with. Right? I mean, it's 1 thing to do it just on, it's one thing to do it on the big, language models, but when you can start taking smaller models and training them specifically and start integrating the models together, you're going to start seeing better responses, faster responses and really growing your opportunities. And I think that's where a lot of the opportunity is. It's a nice position to be in support with where you're at. So have you had direct feedback from customers? You know, that was a good example of something where you saw it from Reddit. But what's kind of the best use cases you're getting from your customers?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Are you talking specifically about the AI subsystem?

Kevin Metzger:

let's go in general because you've got a broader product than just the AI piece, right?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Yeah, I mean, like I said, we get very positive feedback as I mentioned, you know, it was a surprise, you know, one day we got this offer to refer, that's come from multiple people the thing we hear in general is. It allows people to scale. in any product, it's always hard to get buyers and users who don't want to use your thing. it's very hard to drag a horse to the water like they say, Most of our customers and users. Are invested in this idea. I think I think what they appreciate more than anything else is that we make it possible for them to scale almost endlessly. sometimes it's hard to demonstrate, the benefit without demoing the product. But imagine that, you guys are on Twitter and Facebook and all these things, right? And you've got customers everywhere. slack is the same way. we've got hundreds of channels. we bring all of those conversations into one place. that fundamentally changes the way you work. You know, you're no longer worried about the fact that I have a hundred customers. It doesn't, whether you have a hundred or 200 or 500, it doesn't really matter. All of it is coming in one place and you've got all these features that we talked about. I would say that's the main benefit we see that, people are able to scale and they're very happy for that. a few other interesting observations, I would say, is that simple thing like filing a ticket from Slack. It's not a big deal, right? I'm just being honest here. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had our customer come and tell us, thanks for enabling this. This is such a lifesaver. obviously, there's a lot of engineering behind it, but on the surface, it's a very simple thing. You put an emoji and you start talking to the support person. That's basically the experience, What I've realized, as engineers and builders, I think sometimes, you know, the human psychology is sort of something, you know, although surprising when customers are in a medium like slack and they realize that they are able to create issues that somebody is tracking, they feel very happy about it it's surprising, because, we're all used to ticketing systems, but Bringing that into a construct like Slack is a positive surprise that a lot of people appreciate. Yeah, those are the two quick things that come to my mind. Obviously, there's more contextual feedback about individual features and it can kind of, it's a long topic, but yeah, this is great.

Roman Trebon:

Joining Kevin, I think we've come To the rapid fire section of the podcast kevin any any last questions on For joy deep before we start giving them the the hard stuff

Kevin Metzger:

let's lean in and go into the hard questions. Good. All right.

Roman Trebon:

Are you an early bird or a night owl? You get up early, you staying up late? Where, where, where are you sitting on the spectrum? NightOwl. Night owl. Okay. All right.

Kevin Metzger:

And are you a foodie? Do you like to cook? where do you sit in that spectrum?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Yeah. I like to cook. I think it's a good stress reliever. Would love to invite you one days. You know, I, I, I, I make a great. Part of I don't know if you guys had, like, there's an Indian dish called biryani. I make a pretty, pretty killer biryani. So maybe someday we can meet.

Roman Trebon:

Very good. Maybe in a future episode, we'll have the recipe in our show notes. We'll have to see, we'll have to see how we do the Twiddy recipe. Book recommendation. It could be a book around business. It could be a pleasure book. You got anything for us Joydeep?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

So many of them put me on the spot, but yes, I think I really enjoyed reading these old books, I really enjoyed reading you know, the innovators dilemma, the, the Clayton Christianson, and he wrote like a bunch of books. So I, I, I love that from the business one. The more personal side, maybe, you know, like the this book, the, again, I won't oldie, but goldie, you know, like the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Big influence on my life. So I think, yeah, a couple of them. Yes. That's great.

Roman Trebon:

Okay. And if you haven't read it, it's new to you, right? So they can be older books, but if you haven't read them, check them out. they're great books.

Kevin Metzger:

where are you located?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

I work out of Bangalore, mostly in India,

Kevin Metzger:

Bangalore, India.

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

Ah,

Kevin Metzger:

So if I come to Bangalore, where should I visit?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

You know, it's kind of like a working town. It's not like a tourist town. So give me a holler when you're here and I'll give you itinerary. There's some nice places outside the town. You know, mostly people just come here for business. They're like, it's full of softer people. And, you know Okay, so I'll tell you what I really like here. If you go out like a couple of hundred kilometers outside Bangalore, there's these amazing old temples and forts. It's just amazing. Mysore is well known, but there's lots of really amazing places around which are not that popular. A hundred kilometers from Bangalore in any direction, you'll find great tracks that lead you up to some hill, which has a thousand year old Ford or 500 year old Ford. Not very well known but great experiences, not the best maintained because they are not very well known, but for me, those experiences are really nice.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. That's awesome. Well, Kevin, we get to Bangalore, we have off the beaten path attractions. We got dinner at Joydeep's. we're all set, man. We're just a flight away. That's all we need here. Joydeep, so much for being here. Thanks so much for joining the show. I know I'll speak for Kevin. We've enjoyed the conversation. This is terrific I love talking about the yeah, thanks for having me,

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

I also really love chatting, And telling you a little bit about what we do. It's been great. Thank you.

Roman Trebon:

thanks so much and audience if you enjoyed our show, please subscribe like it share it with your friends and colleagues Joydeep, let me ask this, where can our audience find more about you and ClearFeed and how can they check out more of your work?

Joydeep Sen Sarma:

we are at clearfeed. ai, that's our website, you can reach us there. I'm Joydeep you can search for me on LinkedIn, You should find me

Roman Trebon:

awesome because he's watching a few on reddit too. So when you're posting on reddit, joy deeps listening. So be careful, you can also find us on linkedin at Roman Trevon. Find Kevin at Kevin Metzger check out our customer success playbook page on LinkedIn. We'll have clips of upcoming shows. You'll probably see Joy Deep and myself here on this upcoming episode, me wearing the Clemson orange. And, and again, reach out, connect with us. We always love meeting new people. I like you, Kev. As always, audience, we really appreciate you listening. And as always, keep on playing.

People on this episode

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Kevin Metzger

Co-host
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Roman Trebon

Co-host