The Chief Customer Officer Podcast

Jay Nathan & Jeff Breunsbach
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Conversations about digital experience and AI. 

  1. 4D AGO

    EP016: Launching Uncommon

    Jay and Jeff debrief last week's AI Show & Tell — 150 customer leaders watching four real builds in production. A custom CS platform in Claude Code. A sales reference agent. Renewal workflows that adapt to customer health. Plus the launch of Uncommon, a new community for AI-forward customer leaders: https://www.chiefcustomerofficer.io/uncommon Join us live for AI Demo Day on May 27 at 2pm ET: https://luma.com/i3kbo9m2 KEY TAKEAWAYS Build, don't buy: A CS leader stood up her own CS platform in Claude Code in two weeks. Her token costs are already lower than the SaaS subscriptions she replaced.The data layer is the moat: Whether you centralize via a data lake or wire connectors through MCP, your data architecture is the foundation everything else stands on.Every department needs a builder: Instead of departmental software, every team needs an ops person — or a manager — who can build with AI.From soft to hard agents: Most early use cases just surface information. The real lift comes from agents that draft, schedule, and act on your behalf.Renewal workflows that adapt: A 90-day renewal flow that reshuffles tasks based on customer health markers beats any generic checklist.Skills belong at the team level: Stop emailing markdown files around. Treat skills like internal products with owners, evals, and version control.Company-as-code: Balboa OS lives in markdown, distributed via GitHub to OneDrive to every team member's machine. Update once, push to all.Humans are still a moat: Automate the prep, but human relationships and judgment are not getting commoditized any time soon. CHAPTERS 00:00 - Welcome and morning chaos02:32 - Why we ran an AI Show & Tell04:30 - A custom CS platform built in Claude Code08:20 - Data security, privacy, and the engineering layer12:50 - Every department needs an ops person who can build14:52 - The data layer as the real foundation16:50 - An AI-powered sales reference agent19:17 - Jeff's Fathom-to-PlanHat task automation23:54 - A renewal workflow that adapts to health markers27:27 - Skills, coaching, and enterprise-wide sharing30:14 - Balboa OS: turning your company into code33:20 - Why evals matter as models change35:00 - Launching Uncommon for AI-forward CS leaders42:10 - Why "Uncommon"? Bold decisions create the advantage About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.ioJeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

    42 min

  2. APR 30

    EP015: Why CS Teams Are Building Their Own Stack

    Jay and Jeff swap real examples of building custom AI tools instead of buying software — a $1K brand video that beat $750K agency quotes, a content planner built in 35 minutes, and a renewal digest that surfaces customer context weekly with zero manual effort. Plus: why the CS platform category is stalling, and the difference between a service blueprint and a customer journey. KEY TAKEAWAYS AI collapses the agency middle layer: A CEO got $500K–$750K quotes for a brand video, spent $1K in AI credits instead, and got 70% of what he wanted in a weekend. The agencies only offered 10–20% discounts when asked to use AI themselves. Fewer people = faster output: The Mythical Man-Month principle applied to AI: every person you add to a project adds communication overhead. The real superpower of these tools is reducing the number of people in the middle of a problem. Build your content system, not just content: Jeff built an AI-powered content planner in 35 minutes — 9 posts/week, post-type by day, 40-idea backlog, status tracking, and a draft button that fires his LinkedIn writing skill. MVP in a morning. CS cockpit over CS platform: The question isn't which CS tool to buy — it's whether you can build exactly what your team needs. Jeff's team built a weekly renewal digest from support tickets, emails, Slack, and call recordings in one day. The CS platform category is stalling: The layer of workflows that's truly common across software companies is thinner than vendors want to admit. Domain-specific, product-specific nuance is where the real work lives — and that can't be bought off the shelf. Service blueprint vs. customer journey: Service blueprint = what you need to do to interact with a company. Customer journey = how customers mature and get value. CEOs want to hear about the journey. CSMs need to stop confusing the two. CHAPTERS 00:01 - Raleigh, end of quarter, baby incoming02:43 - $750K agency quote vs. $1K AI video build05:15 - Building exactly what you need: Jay's HubSpot pipeline dashboard07:28 - The Mythical Man-Month and reducing communication layers with AI09:15 - Paying for expertise, not pixel-pushing10:24 - Jeff's AI content planner: built in 35 minutes on Cowork15:56 - How the draft button and LinkedIn skill work together17:46 - Hosting the planner: Cowork vs. Claude Code21:12 - The CS cockpit idea: custom workflow hub for CSM teams24:50 - Junction's interactive onboarding demo environment25:53 - Why the CS platform category is stalling31:41 - Service blueprint vs. customer journey33:28 - Team AI day: CS team builds a weekly renewal digest35:51 - "You just described Staircase AI" — and built it in a day37:44 - Why PlanHat over HubSpot40:59 - Slack account pulse bot: ping for an AI-written account summary Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.ioJeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

    41 min

  3. APR 23

    EP014 Killing the CSM Role: TAMs, Forward-Deployed Engineers, and more

    Is the CSM role actually dead? Jay and Jeff unpack Chad Hornfeld's viral Avoca post on replacing CSMs with Technical Account Managers and forward-deployed engineers — and what it means for how Jeff is hiring at Junction right now. Plus: Jay's weekend-built HubSpot dashboard, why Claude is winning B2B, and rebuilding onboarding around the patient journey. KEY TAKEAWAYS The CSM role is splitting in two: The emerging model pairs a Technical Account Manager with a forward-deployed engineer. Commercial motion moves elsewhere — deep technical fluency and account growth are hard to do well in one seat.Hire for technical aptitude, not claims: Jeff is screening CSM candidates on what they've actually built with AI and whether they've read Junction's public API docs before the interview. Reciting the tagline is the wrong answer.Onboarding should follow the customer's journey, not the product: Junction is flipping onboarding around the patient journey — mapping when customers should hit specific endpoints to prevent misconfigurations that quietly generate support tickets downstream.Internal apps are replacing dashboards: Jay built a live, two-way HubSpot pipeline dashboard in a weekend with Claude Code — no incremental HubSpot spend, no BI tool. The open question: how do you deploy these safely across a team?Security is still engineering: Roughly 45% of code written by Claude ships with significant security vulnerabilities. A central "AI center of excellence" isn't optional — it's how you put guardrails on what everyone is suddenly building.Claude is winning B2B: Clear naming (Chat, Cowork, Code) maps to different user types, and early investment in Claude Code made it the default for technical work. OpenAI is optimized for B2C scale and running on investment, not flywheel.Jevons Paradox vs. doomerism: Telephone operators vanished — but long-distance unlocked a much bigger economy. Expect AI to open product and engineering roles in non-technical industries that never justified them before. CHAPTERS 00:00 - Kickoff and a Friday AI hackathon03:10 - Building a HubSpot dashboard in Claude Code09:19 - BI tools, security, and Centers of Excellence12:55 - Why Claude is eating the B2B market20:41 - Killing the CSM: Chad Hornfeld, TAMs, and FDEs23:18 - Hiring technically-minded CSMs at Junction26:00 - Solutions engineer vs forward-deployed engineer27:35 - Rebuilding onboarding around a patient journey35:04 - Monthly hackathons and AI show-and-tells About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.ioJeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

    37 min

  4. APR 16

    EP013: Building AI Infrastructure That Actually Works

    Jay Nathan goes solo to share what his team at Balboa is actually building—a call intelligence system, Claude-powered skills, and a company operating system called Balboa OS. He also shares the top themes from 90 days of SaaS conversations: broken CSM ratios, the AI sidekick-to-agent gap, messy data, and why onboarding is still the highest-leverage retention moment. KEY TAKEAWAYS - Call Intelligence Over Raw Transcripts: The real value comes from extracting transcripts into a structured, security-layered database with semantic search—so the entire team can query insights across all conversations, not just their own. - The Context Harness Problem: Giving everyone Claude or ChatGPT isn’t enough. Without a centralized context repository, every team member operates in isolation. The winners are building shared knowledge infrastructure. - Balboa OS: A central folder of Markdown files documenting everything—roles, processes, the employee handbook, team roster. It auto-distributes to every teammate and connects to Claude via Claude Cowork. - Autonomous Agents That Self-Improve: Jay has an agent scanning call transcripts to update skills, surface best practices, and build a company wiki from thousands of calls—without anyone having to write a document. - CSM Ratios Are Breaking: Companies are drawing lines at $100K–$250K ARR before assigning a dedicated CSM. The answer is digital CS and one-to-many engagement models that scale what CSMs know. - The Agentic CX Loop: Leading teams are building autonomous loops that sense signals, decide on actions, execute, and learn—continuously improving how they engage customers without manual intervention. - Data Mess Is the Real NRR Problem: At Pendo’s conference, nearly every SaaS leader said the same thing: our data is a mess. A simple product tenant-to-CRM mapping would put 90% of companies in a fundamentally better position. - Onboarding Still Wins Retention: Jay’s team helped a $300M company improve retention over 10 points just by fixing a broken onboarding program. With consumption-based models, activation is now a direct revenue trigger. CHAPTERS - 00:00 - Intro (solo episode, Jeff on vacation) - 01:27 - The Balboa call intelligence system - 06:34 - MCP server and centralizing AI context for the team - 08:06 - Claude skills + call data in practice - 09:22 - Autonomous agents and the self-improving wiki - 11:21 - Balboa OS: the company operating system - 16:50 - 90 days of SaaS industry insights - 17:34 - Theme 1: CSM ratios are broken - 20:54 - Theme 2: AI sidekick vs. AI agent - 21:45 - The autonomous agentic customer journey loop - 24:12 - Theme 3: Data mess as the core NRR limiter - 29:36 - Theme 4: Onboarding as the highest-leverage retention moment - 30:08 - The $300M onboarding case study - 35:06 - Wrap-up and Pulse conference About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: - Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io - Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

    32 min

  5. APR 9

    EP012: How CarParts.com Replaced Their Entire Support Stack w/ Aurelia Pollet

    Aurelia Pollet, VP of Customer Experience at CarParts.com, led a small team that built a fully custom AI chatbot and ticketing system from scratch in three months. She shares how they did it, what went wrong when their AI agent Harper made promises it couldn't keep, and why the real value of AI isn't cost-cutting — it's creativity that was never possible before. KEY TAKEAWAYS Build vs. buy is a real question: Off-the-shelf tools were bloated with features they didn't need and missing the ones they did — building from scratch gave them full control at lower cost.Start with one small thing: The chatbot led to the ticketing system, which led to email automation. One use case compounds into the next.Guardrails are the hardest part: Their agent Harper promised customers she could cancel orders — she couldn't. Too few guardrails and AI goes rogue; too many and you've just built a robot.AI enables proactive CX: With 50,000 orders/week, proactive outreach was impossible before. Now they're building toward monitoring every order and surfacing problems before customers call.Insight without action is noise: Aurelia doesn't want to be the "Chief Complaint Officer." Her job is to tie customer insights to company strategy and act — not just report.Maintaining AI is a full-time job: Agents need ongoing updates just like human employees — new policies, new products, new questions. The build is the easy part. ABOUT OUR GUEST Aurelia Pollet is the VP of Customer Experience at CarParts.com, a publicly traded e-commerce retailer shipping ~50,000 orders/week. A mechanical engineer by training, she spent 15 years in luxury goods before moving through B2B and nonprofit roles. She led CarParts.com's AI-native rebuild of its entire support infrastructure. Connect with Aurelia on LinkedIn CHAPTERS 03:46 - Welcome and introduction05:42 - Aurelia's background: from mechanical engineer to VP of CX07:05 - What "end-to-end CX" means at CarParts.com10:09 - Adding value at scale: the win-win framework12:26 - Building an AI chatbot from scratch in 3 months14:34 - From chatbot to full AI ticketing system16:51 - How AI frees humans for empathy and complex cases20:08 - Gathering customer insight across the journey24:50 - Insight as action (avoiding the "Chief Complaint Officer" trap)26:50 - The build vs. buy decision32:57 - Hard lessons: Harper's promises and the guardrail problem38:54 - What's next: stabilizing and scaling the AI stack43:23 - Advice for leaders who haven't started yet About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.ioJeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

    36 min

  6. APR 2

    EP011: Team-Wide AI Adoption

    Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach break down what 50+ CS leaders are actually doing with AI — and what most teams are still getting wrong. Jeff shares fresh takeaways from a Planhat-organized event in Boston, and Jay goes deep on the Claude skills his team has built to scale coaching, standardize deliverables, and rethink how prep calls even work. No hype, just real strategies in the field. KEY TAKEAWAYS We're still in early adopter territory: Jeff attended an event with 60 CS leaders and walked away realizing that even among leaders who talk about AI daily, widespread team adoption is far behind what the tech echo chamber suggests. The majority of companies are still evaluating — not executing.You don't know your processes as well as you think: Before you can automate or augment a workflow with AI, you have to actually know what that workflow is. Jay and Jeff agree: most teams haven't documented or visualized their core processes, which is the real bottleneck to AI leverage.Top-down mandates don't drive AI adoption: "Just use AI" from the CEO doesn't work. Real adoption requires demonstrating behaviors at every layer of the org, giving teams specific problems to focus on, and creating regular show-and-tell moments where people can see and iterate on each other's work.Call transcripts are your most underutilized asset: Jay calls Fathom call recordings "the most valuable thing we have in our company." Claude skills as a team force multiplier: Jay built an executive readout coaching skill in Claude that replicates his own feedback patterns, so every team member starts their deck review at a higher baseline. The future CSM is a technical account manager: Multiple CS leaders at Jeff's event flagged this shift — the CSM role is evolving toward one that requires real technical curiosity. Forward deployed engineering is closer than you think: Jay makes the case that giving CSMs a local build of your product — and the ability to generate a feature-based pull request from a customer conversation — is entirely possible today. Build a center of excellence, not just a mandate: Sustainable AI adoption at the team level needs a few dedicated people vetting standard tools, scheduling engagement touchpoints, and measuring outcomes — not just an org-wide Slack message to "go use AI." CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro & Jay's flight back from Seattle01:29 - Jeff's takeaways from a Planhat AI event in Boston03:15 - Crossing the chasm: where is AI adoption actually at?06:59 - We don't know our processes as well as we think09:21 - Driving team-wide AI adoption: what actually works11:43 - Measuring AI impact: KPIs and the multi-attribution problem17:47 - Individual vs. team AI adoption — why standardization matters18:39 - Jay's executive readout coaching skill in Claude22:52 - Jeff's product marketing skill: Notion to branded one-pager26:28 - Call transcripts as the ultimate knowledge source27:15 - Automating product feedback with Fathom + Linear PRDs29:42 - Forward deployed engineering and voice of customer at scale33:28 - The future CSM is technically fluent35:07 - What to look for when hiring CSMs right now39:17 - Building a center of excellence for AI adoption42:00 - Jay's website glossary and partner portal (show & tell)46:08 - Wrap up

    41 min

  7. MAR 19

    EP010: You Can't AI Your Way Out of Bad Data

    Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach get into the foundational data problem most SaaS teams are ignoring — and why it's about to become a crisis. If your data is siloed, your AI agents will be siloed too. Plus: Jay introduces "Company as Code," a markdown-in-GitHub system for building personalized outreach and landing pages at scale — and why the same playbook applies directly to customer success. KEY TAKEAWAYS Start with a customer master record: Before any AI agent can help you, you need a deduplicated view of your customer outside your CRM. Jay spoke with companies from 150 to 3,500 people this week — they all have the same problem.Company as Code: Jay is documenting personas, ICP definitions, and outreach styles as markdown files in a GitHub repo — one canonical version that every AI tool pulls from, updated by anyone on the team via pull request.Siloed AI = siloed data with a new wrapper: If your sales AI only sees sales data and CS's AI only sees CS data, you've rebuilt your silos with an AI layer on top. Fix the data first.Personalization is now just token costs: Custom landing pages, personalized emails, interactive surveys — what used to require massive investment is now a few tokens.Existing customers need outbound too: Just because someone's a customer doesn't mean they understand your product. Use the same personalization playbook to re-engage and educate your base.ABM belongs in Customer Success: Jay shares the "Spreading the FLU" story — a field-level understanding program that educated every influencer at top accounts. CS teams should run the same play.AI-powered upsell prioritization: Use Fathom recordings, emails, and Slack signals to surface the top 10–20 customers most ready for a new product — before sending a rep in cold.The CSP question is getting louder: "It's 2026. Do you need a customer success platform anymore?" Jay is hosting a webinar with two practitioners who built in opposite directions. CHAPTERS 00:01 - Weekend updates03:45 - Unifying customer data at Junction with BigQuery and Metabase07:00 - Building a customer master record outside your CRM10:10 - Why siloed AI is just siloed data with a new wrapper11:48 - Company as Code: markdown files in GitHub as a single source of truth14:45 - Personalized landing pages for prospects — and customers19:00 - The risk side: when custom-built tools fall short23:45 - Using Claude Cowork to research private companies via public comparables27:00 - Applying outbound personalization to your existing customer base29:00 - AI-powered upsell prioritization using call recordings and signals33:00 - Spreading the FLU: account-based marketing applied to CS35:00 - QPR as an interactive landing page for top accounts36:45 - Webinar preview: Do you still need a CSP in 2026? About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.ioJeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

    35 min

  8. MAR 12

    EP009: Sitting Ducks and Fortresses: How to Read the AI Landscape

    Jay and Jeff are back with another hosts-only episode — and Jay builds an AI vulnerability matrix live on the call. They cover how to stand out as an AI-first job candidate, the three biggest AI go-to-market mistakes leaders are making right now, and the heated debate over whether the CSM role is really being replaced or just transformed. KEY TAKEAWAYS Prove you're AI-first before the interview: The best candidates aren't submitting resumes — they're building things. A candidate for Jay's team built an app in Lovable and sent it unprompted. That's how you get noticed. Loom videos, written walkthroughs, anything that shows you've done the work.Centralize AI where it touches systems of record; let everything else run organically: MCP-connected tools that touch your CRM or customer data need governance and controls. Departmental tools like Gamma don't. The mistake is treating all AI adoption the same.The three go-to-market AI mistakes: Automating bad processes at scale, building on generic best practices instead of your own call data, and prioritizing internal efficiency over the buyer experience. These aren't new problems — AI just makes them impossible to ignore.Know which quadrant you're in: Jay's AI Vulnerability Matrix maps companies by solution complexity vs. replicability. Sitting ducks (low complexity, easy to replicate) need to move fast. Fortresses (high complexity, hard to replicate) have time. Knowing your quadrant should drive your entire strategy.The $700K ARR per employee benchmark: AI-native companies are hitting $700K–$1M+ ARR per employee. The old benchmark was ~$200K. If you're still staffing like it's 2019, a competitor is already disrupting you.Humans stay in the CS loop — but the role changes: Agent-to-agent purchasing will happen first for simple products. For complex enterprise software, the relationship still matters. But the job shifts: less task management, more being so embedded in the customer's business that you know their next move before they do. CHAPTERS 00:01 - Welcome + why Balboa runs a February fiscal year02:34 - The job candidate who built an app to stand out04:16 - Three ways to prove you're AI-first as a candidate09:01 - Kyle Norton: centralize AI adoption or let it happen organically?12:16 - Why you need both — and Jay's internal AI show-and-tell at Balboa17:53 - Kyle Lacy's three go-to-market AI mistakes21:50 - Your call recordings are your best practices23:27 - Jay builds the AI Vulnerability Matrix live on the call25:32 - The four quadrants: sitting ducks, protected niches, targets, fortresses33:19 - What AI-first companies actually look like (Jason Lemkin)35:00 - The shift from CSM to forward deployed engineer36:12 - The $700K ARR per employee benchmark36:40 - Jeff's counterpoint: humans stay in the buying loop longer than we think41:15 - Agent-to-agent PLG is already happening45:54 - Wrap-up About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.ioJeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

    45 min
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About

Conversations about digital experience and AI. 

Information

  • Creator
    Jay Nathan & Jeff Breunsbach
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    16
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jay Nathan & Jeff Breunsbach
  • Show Website
    The Chief Customer Officer Podcast

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