Your Shopify Support Data Is Worth Millions

24 Aug 2026 · 52 min · 26 chapters

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In short

AI customer support as a company-wide “intelligence layer” that turns Shopify support inbox data into real-time insights for product, marketing, retention, and operations—rather than just cutting support headcount.

Guest backgrounds

Andrei Negrau, co-founder and CEO of Sienna AI. Sienna builds agents that use large language models on customer conversation data; the flagship support agent has been running for over three years. He also discusses Sienna’s internal “Ask Sienna” intelligence tool.

Key claims

Winning brands treat AI as a philosophy and operational system (“AI native”), not a chatbot experiment. Sienna filters “signal from noise” in messy support data and enables one-to-one win-back campaigns and dashboards. Most Sienna customers use both AI support and intelligence; some start with intelligence while support deployment takes months for complex stacks.

Notable examples

A CPG brand used support conversations to identify demand for product samples and launched small sample-size versions for millions of units. Sienna can list cancellation-request customers by reason and generate tailored win-back messaging via existing tools (e.g., Klaviyo/OmniSend).

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

The Value of AI in Customer Support

0:45 to 2:47

Exploration of how brands can leverage AI beyond cost-cutting to generate revenue.

“You can ask it to Finding the Newland and the Haystack.”

The Value of AI in Customer Support

2:53 to 4:20

Exploration of how brands can leverage AI beyond cost-cutting to generate revenue.

“Last year, I went to Commerce Roundtable in San Diego and it was so good.”

AI as a Growth Tool

6:20 to 9:50

Discussion on how merchants are shifting perceptions of AI in customer experience.

“or, hey, let's build a chatbot, let's put a chatbot on our side.”

Innovative Uses of AI in Customer Support

9:50 to 12:20

Overview of how brands are creatively leveraging AI for customer support and marketing.

“and improve operations or improve their marketing, their product, like any other besides, okay, answering tickets is one thing, but what are some other ways they're using it?”

Creating Personalized Win-Back Campaigns

12:20 to 14:01

How AI can streamline the process of developing personalized win-back campaigns for customers.

“is we've built a whole pipeline that allows us to filter and only gives you the real signal that matters based on what you care at that specific point in time.”

Tailoring Winback Campaigns

14:01 to 15:00

Learn how to create personalized winback campaigns using customer data.

“And there's truly no limits in terms of what you can do.”

The Importance of Customer Experience Data

15:01 to 16:01

Discover the growing significance of CX data in driving business growth.

“But I think we're at the stage where this really is a reality.”

Introducing Sienna: The Customer Support Agent

16:02 to 17:05

Understand how Sienna operates as a customer support tool for various channels.

“of connecting all those things together.”

Comparison with Shopify's Sidekick

17:06 to 18:07

Learn how Sienna compares with Shopify's Sidekick in customer interaction capabilities.

“This particular tool that I was mentioning, we call it Ask Sienna because you're asking Sienna something.”

Integration with Existing Tools

18:08 to 19:10

Explore how Sienna can integrate with existing marketing tools for better value.

“The best way to think about jobs to be done and which AI to use for what, it's, I think you can reduce it to the, what context does the tool have access to?”
Show all 26 chapters

Leveraging Customer Feedback for Product Changes

19:11 to 20:50

See how customer feedback can lead to significant product decisions and changes.

“make changes to your store and do something a little bit more in that web app kind of experience.”

Creating Effective Messaging for Winback Campaigns

22:07 to 23:24

Learn about the messaging strategies for effective winback campaigns using Sienna.

“So if you created, let's talk about like the Say the Winback campaign, how does Sienna do some of the like messaging?”

Case Study: CPG Brand's Success with Sampling

23:25 to 25:38

Understand how a CPG brand used customer insights to create a successful sample program.

“The only caveat here is sometimes these tools, you know, I don't want to call them legacy tools, but let's call them pre-AI tools.”

Using Dashboards to Analyze Customer Insights

25:39 to 27:08

Discover how to utilize dashboards for analyzing customer interactions and trends.

“And this is all because they saw in the data that, hey, people are outright asking us, hey, can I try it in a sample?”

Surprising Trends in Customer Interactions

27:09 to 28:00

Learn about common surprising trends merchants discover in customer interactions.

“bad shipping or questions about order timing or whatever, you can see where the majority of the tickets are and then potentially dig into that and more.”

Understanding Merchant Blind Spots

28:00 to 29:40

Learn about common blind spots merchants experience and how data can reveal insights.

“Like you might think, I don't know, sometimes we have blind spots as merchants and we overlook things or we get blindness to the same questions.”

Key Questions for Customer Data

29:40 to 31:30

Discover essential questions brands should ask to leverage customer data effectively.

“And when you look at it in that dashboard, you're like, okay, now it's real.”

Finding and Engaging True Fans

31:30 to 36:20

Explore the importance of identifying true fans and leveraging their insights for growth.

“What are some of these like high leverage questions that you can ask?”

Integrating AI in Customer Support

38:40 to 39:39

Understand how brands blend human support with AI for enhanced customer service.

“And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo.”

Integrating AI in Customer Support

39:45 to 42:06

Understand how brands blend human support with AI for enhanced customer service.

“And that's because somewhere in their leadership, somewhere culturally, they made this decision that, hey, we want to be as lean as possible and we want to be as smart as possible with what we do.”

Understanding AI Support Agents

42:06 to 46:19

Learn about the capabilities and deployment processes of AI support agents.

“So sometimes I'm being asked, how long does it take to launch C &O?”

Hexclad's Success with AI

46:20 to 48:00

Discover how Hexclad effectively increased automation and customer experience through AI.

“And there's obviously an owner that oversees Sienna.”

Video Processing and AI Insights

48:01 to 50:31

Explore how AI can process video inputs for better customer service.

“They, of course, the pens are highly, you know, they're very tactile.”

Future of Sienna and AI Integration

50:32 to 53:38

Discuss the exciting future developments planned for Sienna and AI capabilities.

“What are you most excited about for Sienna for the next 12 months?”

Getting Started with Sienna

53:39 to 56:00

Understand how brands can begin integrating Sienna into their operations.

“brands listening want to look into Sienna?”

The Importance of Starting Early with AI

56:00 to 57:04

Learn why adopting AI in customer experience now can provide a competitive edge.

“And we have this knowledge and we have this experience of seeing all across the board what works, what doesn't.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:08Most brands think AI customer service is about reducing headcount. The brands that are actually winning with AI, they're using it in a different way. It's actually a philosophy of running their company. It's not just like a cute project or let's build a chatbot or how can we run as a company on AI.

0:22Andrei Negrau:Andrei Negrau is the co-founder and CEO of Sienna AI, the platform turning your support inbox into a real-time intelligence engine. Brands using Sienna aren't just answering tickets faster. They're making product decisions, launching win-back campaigns, and generating millions in revenue, all from the data hiding in their customer conversations. In the old world, that triggers some Klaviyo flow or, Jay, I saw you cancel your subscription. I would like to offer you a discount. You can ask it to Finding the Newland and the Haystack. Give me a list of customers that reached out to cancel their subscription, but categorize them based on the reasons.

0:54If you have like 100 customers, owls, you have to manually go and like export customers, go see what they said. Probably more like days. It's like an oil well. You can dig for oil and oil comes out of it. The question is, how do you make this oil actually useful? Can it detect if it's an AI created video? Because apparently everyone's just making images and videos of their products broken to get a refund. If a human could, the AI could as well. Sometimes maybe even better.

1:20OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? And it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you and the insights are legit good. And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend. Just go to the show notes. There's a link there.

1:51Or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now, they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo. And on average, they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills. If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed.

2:27It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong, and now AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1percent.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us. Links in the show notes too. Last year, I went to Commerce Roundtable in San Diego and it was so good. I'm going back again this year. It's September 21st and 22nd. And honestly, you should come to. It's the one e-commerce event that I recommend to everybody without blinking.

3:07It's not a trade show. There's no booth demos. It's really just operators on stage sharing what's actually working in their stores right now. and it's basically a room full of all founders. I was actually scrolling through my camera roll from last year and I have over a hundred pictures of slides from people's talks. It's, I learned so much. It's that kind of an event. Now I have five passes to give away for a 30 % off ticket. It's first come first serve. So if you're interested, email me jay at shopify1percent.com and I will hook you up. They will go fast. So email if you're interested. And if you're going, come say hi.

3:42Let's grab a coffee or a drink during happy hour. I'd love to meet you.

3:48Most brands I talk to, they think AI customer service is about reducing headcount. How can we put in AI to have less people on our support team, less cost? But the brands that are actually winning with AI, they're using it in a different way. They're using it as real-time intelligence on their products, how their customers talk about it. It's actually becoming a bit of an intelligence layer that's changing how they run their company. Not just product decisions, but inventory, marketing copy. It's all driven by what the AI is hearing in support conversations. And this is something that I think not enough people are talking about, which is why I wanted to bring my guest on today.

4:29He's the co-founder and CEO of Sienna, which is, some people say AI support, but it is so much more than that, which is what I'm excited to dive into because I think I know probably 95 or more percent of the brands I talk to are not using AI as much as they could be. So Andre, thank you so much for being here. First of all, I want to give a little quick background on you and Sienna and then we'll jump right into it. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for the invite and super excited to dig in. So we had Lisa from Sienna back on the podcast about a year and a half ago. And so a lot of people listening right now may not have heard that episode.

5:08It was actually episode number one. And it was awesome. It was I don't have the rankings up, but it was one of our top episodes, probably because it's the first one. I think a lot of people go back and they listen to the first episode in the series. But it just feels like the world of AI is changing so fast. And already I remember things we talked about in that episode. It feels like a lifetime ago. And I know so much has changed with Sienna since then. But what's the biggest shift you've seen in how merchants think about AI and the customer experience from what a year and a half ago till now.

5:42A year and a half ago sounds like a year to two years ago. It just sounds like a decade ago. I know. So it's really interesting what we see happening. It's almost like a pretty pretty big division in terms of companies. And you know you probably heard this term AI native. let's just use AI Native for the purpose of this podcast. AI Native doesn't just mean the usage of tools. It's also what we see is actually a philosophy of running the company. So in the last year and a half, I think the biggest shift happened on a more philosophical slash structural slash operational level where it's not just like a cute project or, hey, let's build a chatbot, let's put a chatbot on our side.

6:23But really, we see brands, irrespective of their size, become a lot more intentional about the way they think about AI in the general sense of deploying AI in the company. And that's been incredibly exciting to see. A year and a half ago, you can imagine this diffusion, I think most recently people call this like the diffusion layer. How do you embed AI in different parts of your business was quite immature. Again, very limited number of use cases. You can think about content creation. It was already quite there or support automation. But now we're seeing more as a, can we run as a company or how can we run as a company on AI?

7:02And then by asking that question, then as a Shopify brand, as a brand, as a company in general, it doesn't really matter what you're doing. As long as you exist in the digital realm, right? You start thinking about different avenues of, or like different ways you can embed AI in your workflows. And I think that's the biggest shift because the tools are here. Like we've seen a massive wave of tools being created. The models get better. Although the model, if you're like following, you know, the latest models, the progress, I want to say stop, but it's definitely a lot slower than it was two years ago or a half ago where you have like new models almost every month.

7:35Yes, there's models out there, but we have today's models are already quite good for most tasks. So it's just really a question of in a company who assumes ownership over AI in general. And then how do you create the culture where people are excited about AI? So I'm always excited about seeing this firsthand by talking to our customers, by talking to brands, by seeing what's on their mind. But it's really exciting because the folks that come to us and want to partner with us, they know they have a pretty good idea of what they want to do. And obviously they're treating AI as a real thing, not just like an experiment.

8:08So that's changed quite a lot in the last year and a half, just philosophy about AI. Yeah. What percentage of stores would you say that you talk to are still treating AI as a cost cutting tool versus a growth tool? Like where's the breakdown in that? I would say that in the beginning phases of AI for customer experience, most companies see it as a cost-cutting tool. Or as in, maybe it's not cost per se, but it's an efficiency gain. Because what we also saw, we have some pretty fun story with brands that joined and implemented C &A, let's say, when they were doing$25 million a year. You know, just on that upward trajectory.

8:50And now they scaled to hundreds of millions in the span of a year. So they didn't really come to us to cut costs per se, but they came to us because they wanted to not having to grow their teams and their processes and their overhead linearly. So we see a lot of folks do that and they do it really well. And I think that's one of those misconceptions where, hey, you know, customer service AI, it's like replacing or, you know, it's cutting jobs. I think that, you know, thankfully the brands that we work with are growing really fast. So we rarely see someone just go from, you know, you pick a number to cut 90 % of their support.

9:21it's really the opposite which their support team stays but they stay intact because their business grows. So it's more of an offset mechanism that allows you to just move so much faster because now you have AI that's you're not running, you know, 60, 70, 80 % of your support interactions or even more. Yeah. So tell me about what are some of the best brands? How are they using AI with customer support? Not just for answering tickets but what are some of the exciting ways they're using it to grow their company and improve operations or improve their marketing, their product, like any other besides, okay, answering tickets is one thing, but what are some other ways they're using it?

9:59Yeah. So there's an ecosystem of agents that we're building. There's the agent that resolves customer conversations. That's our flagship customer service agent. We've been running this agent for more than three years now. We've been, I think, the first company to build an agent using a large language model. So that's one agent that already works really well. it's scalable, works in the enterprise. And the other agent that we're seeing now, brands really leverage. And just before this podcast, I was here in this room with one of our brands and we're brainstorming ideas. How can we use the data that CNA already has with this new agent?

10:36So this other agent is part of what we call CNA Intelligence, which is our up and coming platform. If you think about cloud code for CX, that's what Ask CNA is. So a lot of novel ideas or a lot of new use cases are spinning out by using this additional, like the second agent of ours called Ask Sienna. So just for those of you that are new to Sienna and hearing it for the first time, it's basically an agent that sits on top of your, starting with your support data. So all your conversation data, your reviews data, your social media data, your Shopify data. And now we're bringing more data sources like subscription data.

11:12So we really are building this brain that's all powered by, of course, the best agent, the latest model. So the question that we've been just discussing an hour ago with this brand is what are some of the things that we can do to retain our customers? Because Sienna has already, we already know how many customers reach out to cancel a subscription, for example. Sienna knows that. You can easily ask Sienna, hey, give me a list of all the customers that reached out in the last seven days to cancel their subscription. And then - Through a support ticket. Through a support conversation, yeah. And what's really interesting is, of course, there's various different agents doing various different tasks.

11:51In today's day and age, you can even ask probably Cloud Code to connect it with your Zendesk or to connect it with your help desk. But the challenge there, or the thing that we solved with this product is we've built a pipeline that allows us to essentially filter or thread the signal out of the noise. In customer service data, it's one of those things that it's really messy. If you think about any given, take any brand, most of the conversations are either repetitive or there's just a lot of noise that bears the signal. So what we've been able to do is we've built a whole pipeline that allows us to filter and only gives you the real signal that matters based on what you care at that specific point in time.

12:27For example, AskTena is really good at finding the needle in the haystack. So you can actually ask it, hey, can you go and check out who are this customer? Give me a list of customers that reached out to cancel their subscription. But you can actually get quite creative because then you can say, but categorize them based on the reasons. so imagine you can do anything once that data is there you can ask it to do anything and one of the cool things that we've been discussing about just recently was the idea of creating win back campaigns that are one to one personalized for that customer so think about the old world is something someone cancels a subscription and if we're talking about a bigger brand we're talking about probably hundreds or even thousands of people cancels subscriptions every given week because it's just like a lot of new customers churning and so on and so forth And in the old world, that triggers some Klaviyo flow or, you know, that triggers some sort of an SMS flow.

13:17And then, but it's something like, hi, Jay, I saw you canceled your subscription. I would like to offer you a discount if you want to come back based on some sort of a, you know, variable, hi, first name. That's like the things. So what we see now customers, and this is not like an, this is, we see other brands do this with Sienna. you can literally ask Sienna, hey, can you find those customers? Look into their entire conversation history with each individual customer. Look into their Shopify orders. Look into their subscription, which we're building now, subscription integration, and create a win-back campaign.

13:50And it's going to take a little bit of time. That is, think about it, in a non-Sienna world, if you don't have Sienna, that's probably going to take you if you have 100 customers. Like you have to manually go and like, you know, export customers, go see what they said. probably more like days than, you know. And so because it has access to the ticket and the reason they canceled, you can tailor a win back campaign like if they thought it was too expensive or if they said in the email, I don't need this whatever product anymore, maybe it offers a different one. Is that the idea? Like it's tailored by...

14:25It's 100 % tailored. And there's truly no limits in terms of what you can do. Because again, we're talking about, let's say mental challenges, like mental tasks and they can like compute and do the good work. But yeah, overall, you will see some pretty incredible things. Like I was just reading some of those examples of Winback campaigns. It, by the way, it also automatically knows the channel that this conversation happened over. So it's going to automatically create it for SMS. So it's going to be short. It even adds, without me even prompting it, stop, you know, stop to, you know, stop to cancel that legal language based on what previous conversations and so on and so forth.

15:01this all looks like a human has written it once you read it it's like there's no way we can go back at like the old of like high first name that's right i think that world is going away and in the realm of cx data i feel like this whole idea of oh cx is a growth channel or cx data is or like customer data is the most important data that yeah that's kind of like an aphorism that existed for the past 10 years since even when i was running my own brands many years ago it was like CX data is the most important data. But I think we're at the stage where this really is a reality. Like you can do things with it.

15:35What I love doing is really sitting down with brands and really sitting down with folks that are already so good at understanding how the data fits with an LM. And it's all a matter of prompting and it's all a matter of creating these processes. So that's what I'm spending a lot of time most recently. It's okay, we've built an agent that can do support really well. And that is something that still needs a lot of like, work to make it even better over time. But this new generation, what I think, you know, whether we call it CX marketing or marketing in general, or just growth, that's going to happen as a result of connecting all those things together.

16:08I think it's going to be a wave that won't happen overnight. It's going to start slow. But once you unlock that, once you let the genie out, it's going to be impossible to go back at, you know, very basic flows. Right. So this, is this live yet right now, or this is something you're experimenting with brands? Depending on when the podcast goes out. We're live. We're live with customers as we speak. Okay. And so this is primarily, is it also a tool that merchants can ask questions to about their customers or is it, you give it a task and it does it? Like, is it merchant facing or is it customer facing, I guess is primarily the question.

16:53So Sienna, Sienna, the support agent is customer facing. Correct. Yes. That is available across all the channels, including voice, including social media, SMS. This particular tool that I was mentioning, we call it Ask Sienna because you're asking Sienna something. That is an internal facing tool. Gotcha. So that's something that you as a operator in any department can interact with Sienna. And it's going to answer questions. It's going to create reports. it's going to generate charts. It's really, yeah, the best way that I explain it to someone who's new, it's like cloud code, but for CX. Yeah.

17:30And even more than that. And so for a Shopify brand, the reason why this is probably more valuable is it has, like Shopify's got its Sidekick, but that doesn't have access to customer interactions. Like that would be a big data layer that's missing. Is that correct? Yeah. Yes. And I know Sidekick is quite limited. you can just ask it queries about your data and stuff, but it doesn't, like the example you just gave, create this win back campaign. I don't think it would do that. Where does Sidekick play in this? Is that, as it's starting to come up more and more with merchants, is do you draw a line anywhere of, okay, this is a good job for Sidekick, this is a good job for Sienna?

18:11The best way to think about jobs to be done and which AI to use for what, it's, I think you can reduce it to the, what context does the tool have access to? Right. The underlying agent or the underlying model, probably most of companies producing or building these agents today are using a combination of ChargPT and Gemini. Maybe some of them use some open source models. So the underlying models are, I would say, roughly the same intelligence level. Yeah, sure. There's different frameworks of how to construct these agents, what tools to give them and so on and so forth. But roughly, they all work in similar fashion and similar tools.

18:49The only thing that really matters is the context that it has access to. Right. So I think Shopify's side-tick is incredibly useful for anything you need in Shopify. If you need something in Shopify, that's your go-to. I think it would be unwise for a company like Sienna to build something that directly or tries to replace what side-tick is doing. It's sure at some point we could build some tools that allows you to maybe make changes to your store and do something a little bit more in that web app kind of experience. But for now, we're looking for, we really started with Ask Xena as a way to first solve the hardest problem, which is this conversation data piece.

19:25That is by far the data that is in abundance. There's a lot of it, but it's really hard to find a way to make it useful without blowing up your tokens. Again, you could export technically, you could hook up cloud code to your Zendesk or your help desk, export millions of data points and then ask it to run something, but that will probably cost you a lot of money and you don't really know what's going to give you back. Yeah. Truthfully, it took us quite a bit of time from the whole idea of AskSena to actually having it seen in production, you know, providing useful responses and inaccurate, very important, accurate responses to the users that it interacts with.

20:06And it's a lot of, it's a lot of heavy work that happens behind the scenes that you don't know about. So for someone who's, for someone who's thinking about, hey, how can I get smarter by understanding what customers are saying. I think we're the only company or CNA is the only product that can do this today in a way that's connected to your ecosystem. Continuously, and again, this is a very much new product and it's up and coming, but the power that we're seeing with the first version is pretty incredible. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, it is, as far as I know, it's the best product for it as well too.

20:35I don't think there's anything else really. I know different tools like Zendesk has their own version of some insights, but we use Zendesk, but it's very primitive. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility. Your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it.

21:17With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, etc. Nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products. Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything. A bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store now. I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what.

21:54If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify 1 % dot com slash rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes.

22:11So if you created, let's talk about like the Say the Winback campaign, how does Sienna do some of the like messaging? Does it, you have to have it connected to Gorgeous or Zendesk or Intercom or some tool or what does that look like? Yeah, so we're building some of those channels natively. You'll see some channels being available inside Sienna in the coming months. And for those that are already using a help desk, we can already reach out via the existing, pre-existing channels. Yeah, Gorgeous or Zendesk. So it's going to be a model where we're designing. First and foremost, compliance is important.

22:46So if you're talking about something that becomes more of a marketing thing, then that's a separate conversation. That's a separate, let's say, motion, CX motion that we're looking to design. And then the channels will have to be, of course, we'll have to look at the marketing and send and all those things. I guess also like Klaviyo or OmniSend or other tools like that as well too, potentially. Yes. Depending, yeah. So from the beginning, our philosophy as a company was leverage the tools that already exist. So if we can generate this campaign and then push it to Klaviyo's or Omnisense or Attentive, you name it, then that's going to be our preferred way because that's the fastest time to value.

Read the full transcript

23:23Our goal is not to rebuild something that exists for many years unless we can do it better. The only caveat here is sometimes these tools, you know, I don't want to call them legacy tools, but let's call them pre-AI tools. some of these pre-AI tools they may have actual physical architectural limits that does not allow an agentic or an AI first tool like CNA to run its course and you know do these let's say the one-to-one personalization so as long as we can accomplish the delivery through a third party we're going to do that like we would much rather connect hook up to your existing stack and do that when we hit a limit we're going to be like finding ways to build this natively just gotcha that makes sense what's something I mean you talked about like this idea that the support inbox is basically a focus group for learning about your product your brand what's maybe the most surprising business decision you've seen a brand make because of some cx interactions there's there's quite a few of them and because we work so closely customers we get to hear about them one of one of those decisions that I always get back to it's quite fun it's a cpg brand that got on got onto even before C &I Intelligence, we built our early concepts and early prototypes.

24:39So they've been an early adopter from the beginning of all the various iterations of our product. At some point, they made this decision to build, so they sell CPG products and the products are not super expensive, but they're not cheap either. What they saw through C &I by looking at the support conversation data is that customers were either abandoning their carts, churning or requesting, actually like making requests for smaller samples of their product. They were just selling regular, you know, regular size products that it wasn't like it's prohibitive, but also people just want to try it.

25:14Especially if it's a CPG product, you just want to try it. You just want to sample it. You maybe don't want to pay full price. And that little nugget right there led to them a full, basically they made this product decision to build for each one of their products, a small, like think about a sample size version of their products. and they generated, this was happening a few months ago, back in 2025, and they generated millions of those samples, that's sample products, not including the people that upgraded from sample to the full product. And this is all because they saw in the data that, hey, people are outright asking us, hey, can I try it in a sample?

25:49And what's amazing about Sienna, it actually is able to even quantify to some extent. Okay, so there's 500 people asked this in the last 90 days. What if their LTV is this much or this time? Okay, this is the investment. So yeah, that's a real example that happened by looking inward at what customers are saying. So what does that look like? Is there a dashboard of insights or do you ask Sienna for details? Do you ask it questions or does it find some of this stuff on its own and surface it? Or what's that experience look like for a merchant? So we have a few options to interact with your data.

26:26one of them is your traditional dashboard so we do have things like trend on the explorer so you can see different trends for example you're able to take a look at top we do on the back end automatic topic and subtopic clustering so in you know in the old world you'd have human agents label a ticket you know this is a cancellation request and the reason is this you know you'd have to spend time and mental energy doing that plus it's not accurate most of the time so we're doing all that But that data is available for anyone to see in a very simple dashboard. So you can see the different trends.

26:58You can actually see resolution rates. You can see what are the topics that are being automated the most, what are the topics that are not being automated. So it's a hybrid between your full CX picture plus... So basically like themes, like if there's people have like breakage in a product, bad shipping or questions about order timing or whatever, you can see where the majority of the tickets are and then potentially dig into that and more. Exactly, yeah. Is there a specific theme? Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, we do it at two levels of fidelity. You do it in a bigger theme, as you said, and then you can actually go for each theme.

27:34We do some topics so we can go even deeper. So let's say you see a spike in refund requests. So refund requests could be a theme or a topic. And then, hey, this week or this month, we're seeing a spike. Then you can click on that, double click, and then see exactly why. What's the reason? because Sienna was smart enough to figure out there's multiple reasons or there's multiple kind of like. Yeah. Is there any things that merchants find using this topic explorer that is always shocking? Like you might think, I don't know, sometimes we have blind spots as merchants and we overlook things or we get blindness to the same questions.

28:10Like we talk about this all the time. Like when you're in the weeds of something, you don't see it through a new set of eyes, right? Is there any like themes that consistently surprise merchants? when they go into them? Yes, there's always this reaction when we look at the themes and you can look at it for seven days, 30 days, you can go more than that. And then they look and see some sort of a spike or they see some sort of... And let's say that we're doing this live, we're looking at the data live with someone who works in CX. It can be from a support agent to a VP of customer experience and they're looking at this dashboard.

28:47And sometimes we see these reactions like, That makes sense. We knew about that, but there was never, the data was never there to support that argument. So it's almost like sometimes in a pre-AI world, what happens is for CX teams, they see some behavior, they see some trends, but they don't have the data to quantify it. So they could be spending weeks or even months trying to prove something out, but no one is really going to take weeks or months to actually track tickets, like tag them and put them in spreadsheets. And so what this gives them, it's probably like in five seconds, look at that.

29:18Like we knew that returns are increasing or we knew that returns requests have been increasing. And now we can see why. So you can go deeper. And in one click, you can go from that dashboard to actually asking Sienna, hey, can you tell me more what's going on here? So that's always an aha moment where you can quantify something that you maybe felt or your team has anecdotally reported to you. Hey, we're seeing more cases of this product being mentioned or something like that. There's no real way to track it. And when you look at it in that dashboard, you're like, okay, now it's real. We can share this report with our operations team or our product development team.

29:51So say I'm a supplements brand, average size, doing 5 to 10 million a year or something. What's a question I should be asking Sienna of my data? For sure, I should be asking. It doesn't have to be a supplements brand, but can you give some advice on what the best? Because often it's asking the right questions is the key, right? Like you can have data is not the problem anymore. So what are some questions that brands should be asking it? There's levels to this. So that's a great question. And there's levels, right? You can start off with pretty generic questions. One that I always like is take a look at my data.

30:28And of course, we have ways to build prompts in a more robust way. But just riffing here, I always like the idea of, hey, look at all my happy customers. So I would always do almost like a workflow based. So look at my happy customers. What do they love more about them? what they love, what do they love most about our products and why. So give me a summary. Then I would go into, hey, what's some constructive feedback? So look into what are they not liking as much? And then eventually I'll say, what are the business, what are some of the biggest business opportunities for us? And you know, you can replace business with what are some of the biggest product opportunities.

31:01So often like we've seen brands use CN Intelligence as a way to do product development thinking, hey, okay, so we see these many customers asking about this. This is interesting. Oh, like Like, we never thought that we could actually just do this. So anything that, you know, think about it, you have access to this, all of a sudden it's a gold mine. It's like an oil. So you can, you know, you can dig for oil and oil comes out of it. The question is, you know, how do you make this oil actually useful? If it just sits there and you look at the oil, it doesn't really do much. So you have to make, you have to transform into energy.

31:30What kind of questions can you ask? What are some of these like high leverage questions that you can ask? I would start with, what are we doing well? What can we improve? what are I also love this question you know often you grind hard you work hard and you kind of forget hey you have an amazing community that is behind you and people love what you're doing and this is I think quite challenging for many folks that are working in customer experience customer experience for the lack of a better word sometimes equals just like people complaining not always but you reach out to support because you have a problem very you know very limited I guess like the pie chart of people reaching out because they love the product is smaller.

32:07But I also love to show what's possible when you ask Tiana to give you reviews. Hey, show me some positive reviews or another use case that I love. And it's really helpful. And you can, by the way, you can, what's something really cool about this process, you can run it automatically. So you can just schedule it and run it once a day, once a week, once a month. So you don't have to manually always like type in what our customers say. You can just develop your prompt and then that can run on your own schedule. So one of them can be, hey, can you create a list of some of the best testimonials or reviews that my marketing team can use?

32:43And can you give me also the angle that my marketing team can use when it comes to that? So the cool thing about it is the system will know a few things. So it will know what products they reference. It will know the actual customer. It will know the review itself because it looks at review. And by the way, when I say review, it can be a social media comment. It can be an email. It doesn't necessarily have to be a review channel. It can come from anywhere. And it also knows the brand itself. So now you basically have given this AI a task to create a campaign based on customer voice or customer data.

33:17And that's also something that I highly recommend anyone. Hey, what are my loyal people? What's my loyal audience saying about our products? And it's really hard to have a bad day once you see that, hey, we have a lot of customers that love our product. Here's who they are. Here's how much they spend. Even better, you can ask Cina to create a personalized outreach campaign that focuses on something like, hey, you're a loyal customer because X, Y, Z, and then you ask Cina to create that. So the whole idea of hyper-personalization, how I call it, and in the past it used to be personalization, but now you can truly have these concierge type of experiences that you create for your most loyal customers because you know who they are, you know what they care about, you know what they said.

33:57and it's all through a simple chat interface. You don't have to go between tools, stitch data together. So it's all in one place. Have you heard of the, probably have of course, the thousand true fan concept? Yeah, like when you start a company and like all you need is to reach. There's that. It's a little bit different. So the, yes, there's the first get your thousand true fans, but there's this concept. I forget the, if you search it on YouTube, it'll come up with the guy that came up with the principle, But what a lot of brands do, this is what comes to my mind when I think of Sienna. Like a lot of brands, they try to solve for everyone.

34:34It's like people have different complaints and they try to solve for, oh, I don't know, say you sell a dog bed or whatever. And some people complain about one thing. Some people complain about another. And you try to solve for anyone. But anyways, his philosophy was that find your true fans. And so you go to the super users, like the people that are leaving five-star reviews, the people that are going to bat for you on social media. If someone says something bad about your brand, they're the ones backing it up. They're the ones posting pictures. They're the ones referring friends to buy. Like you find your best customers and then you interview them.

35:12So Sienna can maybe help with this, but his approach is maybe you only have 17 of these customers. Maybe you have five, maybe you have 50, but everyone has some super fans. then you interview them and you learn everything you can about that customer you learn why they bought it exactly how they're using it because why do they love it so much why have they referred 10 people why are they raving it about on social why have they left five-star reviews what are they how are they using it differently what settings are they using the product in like why are they such big fans understand them and then go out and find more people like them versus trying to fix it for everyone and you end up kind of with this bland product.

35:53And then you get this, it's a little bit more of a narrow focused product, but it solves a very real problem for a certain segment. And then those fans become your growth engine, right? So my mind goes to, maybe there's learnings you could get about, if you could find your true fans, so find all customers that have ordered more than a certain amount of times, have left positive reviews, have done certain actions, tell me everything you can about these customers because I want my marketing to get more of those types you know what's your thoughts on that to me that seems like that would be something I'd love to try would I assume that would be possible yeah I mean you're my my wheels are spinning now because I'm just thinking I'm literally thinking how much of this is already doable with what we could call it the true fan module yeah because that's what you want to build on top of you always I'll put the link in the show notes to that video.

36:46It's about a 10 minute video. I wish I could remember the person's name who came up with the concept right now, but I'll make sure it's in the show notes. But they look at all these businesses and the healthiest businesses are always built on top of their true fans, not trying to fix everyone's problem. And it becomes a mediocre product versus a cat bed for people who have a certain type of cat or whatever. And it's like the best in the world at that or whatever the product is, right? At the top of the show I mentioned, OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds.

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38:49Something that goes through my mind as I'm hearing all this is it feels to me like even if I have people doing customer support, like humans, I might still want to use Sienna because of the insights I'm getting from it. Like how are most brands using it? Is it a blend of human slash AI? Do you have any that are doing like, humans are still doing the support, but Sienna is this data layer that they can learn from? It feels like you're not trying to say switch your whole support to AI. It doesn't feel like that. Like how are brands, what's that mix look like? Yeah, so we're seeing a wide range of models when it comes to how brands use Sienna and all of our different agents and all of our different products, there's biggest, by far the biggest chunk of our customers are using both.

39:40The support experience is powered by Sienna and now the intelligence is powered by Sienna. And that's because somewhere in their leadership, somewhere culturally, they made this decision that, hey, we want to be as lean as possible and we want to be as smart as possible with what we do. That allows kind of, it's almost like you're building the foundation or that you're building, in this case, a plane. You want everyone to be on board, fly the plane and go really fast. It's not just, hey, we're going to build one room and then the rest is kind of like outside. So they love the idea that they can do both.

40:09And one operating principle that we share inside, like in Siena, and I always say this, one plus one equals three. So if you're really serious about running on AI, like becoming an AI native brand, it's of course easier and best to use both. But there's also, we also work with brands that have very complex systems in the backend where deploying these agents take a little bit of time. So it can take months until you actually reach a level of CNA really being productive in your support experience. So with those, what we see is they already start leveraging the intelligence piece from day one, and they take their time to launch the support experience because, again, you have to connect different tools.

40:57Some tools are available out of the box, like your typical stack, your subscription providers, and then obviously Shopify is available. But a lot of enterprise brands, they have very bespoke setups. So with those, they would kind of like stagger. So first, we do intelligence because it's available day one, and then a deployment will happen over the next few months. And we do have a handful of folks that are using just CNA intelligence for the time being, and they see value because their point is this intelligence layer that sits on top of what you already have. So we see a wide range, but the pie chart with most of this lean towards use both the support agent experience and use Sienna intelligence.

41:37Gotcha. Okay, so you mentioned when you were setting up, you said something like as you get more comfortable with Sienna. So is that the typical on wrapping? You have Sienna answering 5 % of tickets, then 10, then 15. Is that how it? It's a great question. One of the things that is unique about, I think, support AI in general is it really mimics the philosophy and the processes and the tool stacks of each individual brand. So sometimes I'm being asked, how long does it take to launch C &O? It's really hard for me to give like a, like, of course, we can look at the average, but the average may not apply to you.

42:15So we've seen brands go live and have a productive agent that already resolves more than half of the support conversations in two weeks. And it's doing it better and more consistent in terms of quality than human agents. That's another thing that's available and possible with Ciena Intelligence to spin up a QA agent. So not only have your support agent, you can spin up and use Ciena QA as a way to QA not just Ciena, but your whole team. And then you can see reports. how is Sienna doing against humans and how are humans doing amongst themselves? So we're replacing, we're completely replacing these pre-AI QA tools because everything is integrated.

42:53So that is very important when it comes to AI. The fun thing that it's like an interesting perspective is there's two types of agents in general. There's human in the loop and there's fully autonomous agents. Human in the loop, Cloud Code is a perfect example, or it's an agent, it's an LLM that does some work, but at some point comes back to you and asks you, okay, do you want to continue? What do you want to do? So you're always constantly prompting that agent. The other type is fully autonomous. AI agent for support. If it's running on large-end model, it's in practice fully autonomous. What that means is once you configure it in a specific way, once you train it, you give it tools, you give it access to what it needs, it will carry on the task fully autonomously with no human intervention.

43:38And for that, it's really important that when we deploy the agent, it really works well. So we have extensive testing happen. We have built a lot of AIs and systems internally to make this deployment as fast as possible and as good as possible. But accuracy and making sure that the AI is doing the best work possible is incredibly important. And that's why, you know, in the beginning phases of AI, there's a lot of companies trying to do AI for support. This is back in like 2023, 2024. There's so many different players trying to do this. And if you look around, there's not that many that are still around because it's actually quite complex.

44:15So deployment can be a matter of days or weeks or it can be months. It can be truly months. And then there's another variable, which is how big is your operations in the backend already? Like how many different tools? How many different agents do you have? How many systems? How many brands you have? That's another thing. Like you have multiple brands. So all these, it's almost like different complexity knobs. Now, you know, when someone comes to us and we start a process, we start a deployment process together. there. We already have a pretty good understanding complexity. We can estimate, okay, this is probably going to take a month, two months.

44:48Internally, we're quite aggressive around building more and more tools, more and more ways to make this process more seamless, more easy. But it also requires a lot of human judgment on the brand side. That's why one of the things that I always share as an advice is try to set up your goals, try to set up your structures so that it aligns incentives with deploying an AI and having an AI run in your company. If something like Sienna, it's just like a cute pet project for someone and doesn't really have any real tangible goals or anything like that. We've seen these deployments fail in the past because no one really cared.

45:25Oh yeah, we use AI. We have a chatbot. It's okay. It is a very different mindset versus now we need to reach this percent of automation rate in the next 90 days. Who's responsible? How do we work as a team to get there? And then everything works better once you have that sort of mindset. Speaking of which, I saw, I think this was a case study somewhere, Hexclad increased automation 65%. I don't know if this is like outdated, maybe it's even higher now. But they, and they cut tickets to humans by 20 % in 60 days. So they seem like, obviously Hexclad is an amazing brand. They do a lot of things right.

46:01What did they do that was so great to get these results so fast that maybe other brands skip? It all starts with the operating team, who's in the driver's seat for getting Sienna up and running. And specifically with HexCloud team, they have an incredible team. And we work really close with a few folks there. And there's obviously an owner that oversees Sienna. But their whole team is bought into AI. And that made it, it's almost like a domino. If the team and everyone is bought into Sienna, is bought into AI, everything runs so much smoother. versus if there's friction, if someone out there doesn't really believe in AI or feels like AI is just a crutch or it's just like a whatever trend or it's not going to work, you're never going to see incredible results.

46:47You're never going to see full deployments happen. So in the case of HexCloud, they have really good team, incredible product, and they really care about both customer experience and AI. Those are, of course, the results of various different work streams and various different things that lead to that. plus they're very good with sharing feedback. Back when, a few months back, we, Sienna, are video processing. So we're able to process videos. Not only text, not only images. Sienna can actually, you can send it, upload the video and Sienna will know what's in the video. Yeah, I saw you post that recently on LinkedIn.

47:22Or you or Lisa posted it. So I understand. So a customer, if they're having a challenge, they can record either a screenshot of something on their website or can they record a video of the product? Like it's broken here, this doesn't work and then send it. 100 % And Sienna can understand what's happening in it? Yes. Amazing. So you can think about replacement. You know, let's say you, you know, let's say, you know, you got this glass, you ordered some glasses and it's broken here. Instead of just sending a picture to say, guys, hey, you know, I got this. It's like all over the place. Send that.

47:53And then Sienna will, just like a human, interpret that video and make a judgment call. And that's another reason why Hicks Live was able to increase their automation rate. They, of course, the pens are highly, you know, they're very tactile. You have to, you know, you have to show, hey, there's a little bit of a scratch here or whatever, you know, something's happened here. So video has helped them and us quite a bit with just making it even more powerful. And then I guess the million dollar question, can it detect if it's an AI created video? Because apparently everyone's just making images and videos of their products broken to get a refund these days.

48:28I imagine they can, is there ways to detect? the best way to think about image and video processing is if a human could the ai could as well sometimes maybe even better sometimes maybe even better there's no i mean not today there's not like a built-in watermarking system or something like that but who knows in the future i would say you know high likelihood that the ais will get better at understanding if the video is generate with AI. We do see Sienna working really well with fraud cases. Maybe in this case it's not a video, but it's an image. Someone generates a fake image of a product that's broken.

49:06I don't want to betray the AIs, but you could quite easily do that. We've seen customers use it and they don't have problems. You can absolutely catch some of those. Does Sienna have any insight if a customer is a bad actor on one store and then on your store, do they have any intelligence in that or do you keep a fine line? So that's a great question. Another intelligence layer with the new product that we're building that will have, if you use that product, you will automatically enroll your customers in this cross brand, of course anonymized, but it will be almost like a watch dog. So you'll be able to see, hey, if a customer has submitted 17 returns with over here.

49:46Yes. And then we actually see a lot of input signals from brands trying to find ways to combat fraud by either telling Sienna, hey, look at if they initiated multiple returns. Look if they used in the past multiple addresses, right? Because what they do, it would always change their addresses or like use, you know, Shore Street or N.Shore Street. So there's all these things that people got really creative with. I think the good news here is you'll be able to do a lot more with AI than you can with humans just because AI has infinite attention. You know, it just works in kind of like it can work in parallel with millions of customers if it happens.

50:25So, yeah, we're looking at ways to bring these sort of inputs like fraud detection and stuff like that. It will be more and more important. Yeah. What are you most excited about for Sienna for the next 12 months? If I have Lisa on again in 18 months or so, looking back, like what are you of what you can say? What are you excited about for where Sienna is going and what the future looks like? you know there's this point in time where we realize that we can really our constraints our actual constraints as a company have almost disappeared overnight and this wasn't the case a year ago we had many constraints we still have constraints we specifically don't want to raise a ton of money or we don't want to go the path of just keep raising for the sake of raising so we have constraints but in terms of what we can build and where we can go and where we can take our customers it almost vanished and then what really what there's a few really interesting projects that keep me up at night and get me really excited.

51:20One of them being the whole idea of building your brain inside Sienna, like building your company brain inside Sienna. We're about to launch, depending again when the podcast goes out, we're building Sienna Docs. And what Sienna Docs really is your brain inside Sienna. Not only your brain, but everything internal, your SOPs, your documentation. So think about replacing your Google Docs or your notions or gurus of the world. And on top of it, you're also building a help center inside Sienna. So it's a single place to have all your data. And why this is exciting is because for the first time an agent like Sienna or multiple agents in this case don't exist in an external world where hey, you just spoon-feeded a little bit of data here, but in fact it will sit on the data that your team runs on and we're planning integration with GitHub.

52:12So we really lean 100 % into how do we make Sienna the first true operating system for CX. That's connected to your cloud code, it's connected to your data, and everything is in one place. That is incredibly exciting. And if you're familiar with skills, what you're building is a repository of skills. So you can now use old use cases that we talked about in this podcast. You can basically package them, put them in a skill, put them in a playbook, and have your whole team run on it. That's pretty exciting. It opens up the world for so many new things, even things like, hey, we're launching a new market.

52:44Hey, Sienna, we're launching a new market. Can you check our current policy? What's our current returns policy? Hey, so it's going to check your website. It's going to check your internal docs. It's going to check the actual agent guidance. So it's going to say, okay, this is where we're at. Can you now create a policy for the UK or for Europe? So everything is in one place. You don't have five systems that are not talking to each other. They just live in a complete silo. Everything is now unified by CNA in the back end and in the front end. And that's really exciting because it means you can get even more insights.

53:14you can do even more with AI. And it opens up a platform, essentially, to build on top of Sienna. So that's quite exciting among all the things that we're building. Amazing. And I imagine as you expand to different, internationally, Sienna can interact in different languages and you can maintain your docs and SOPs in one language and it can then interpret however. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Just before we end here, is there, like, brands listening want to look into Sienna? Is it for, Do you need to be a certain size of store? Do you recommend it once a store is at a certain level? Is there a path for anyone to get started?

53:50Or where would you recommend stores start with Sienna? And how do they get started? So how to get started, Sienna, I-E-N-A dot CX. So single N, Sienna dot CX. Book a demo, get in touch with our team. We pride ourselves in just trying to learn as much as we can about you and see if it's a good fit, if we can help you. Where Sienna starts to make sense for a brand, we have different agents. So first of all, we have different agents that do various different things and more agents are going to come online. But generally, if you look at your customer conversation data, so not just support tickets, but this includes social media, this includes reviews.

54:23If you're already processing over$2 ,000 a month, probably it's a good time to think about it. And it also depends on how fast you're growing. If you're growing incredibly fast and you project that you're going to 10x or 10x reach out as soon as possible because that's the success story that we've seen with this brand. they reached out when they were growing. They're not as big as they are today, but they're growing. So it was just the right time as they were on their growth trajectory. So yeah, if you're growing fast, yeah. Probably something to be said for if you are getting a million tickets a month, it's a lot harder at a certain, on a growth trajectory, it might be better to get ahead of it early and then scale with Sienna versus bringing it in later.

55:04I would imagine that's an accurate statement right it does it not it can be but not always not always because with the tools that we have in place right now even if you're doing a million tickets a month or a million tickets a year we can see what those tickets are fair enough and then we can kind of like practically we can be one step ahead we don't have to back in the day you have to manually swift through tickets even for us when we launched you have to manually like check what people are saying just because there was not enough fidelity of data. But now we can just ask Ciena, hey, run an analysis over the last 30 days.

55:38What are the main topics? And then, you know, you start training the agent as more like you're working backwards from the reasons that people reach out the most. So yeah, tools are here. We're excited to work with brands that have strong opinions about how they think CX should look for them. But also we're here to share what we see other brands do. We work with brands that are doing billions in dollars and we work with brands that are doing$20 million a year. And we have this knowledge and we have this experience of seeing all across the board what works, what doesn't. And the one constant that doesn't change is the faster you start, the better.

56:12And it's a mindset. It is totally a mindset. Also, it's important to start, but truly try to go all in versus just try an AI. And it didn't work, but we're here and we're excited to learn more and share about automating your CX, but also building your intelligence layer. Yeah, amazing. I think, in my opinion, in five years, maybe sooner, because things move fast, maybe a few years, this will be the norm. I think every brand will be augmenting CX with AI or fully using AI in some way. So I just think for brands listening, get ahead of it now. Like now is an opportunity to move faster than your competitors.

56:53I think when new technologies come out, it's always great to jump on them because it's a competitive advantage now that might be table stakes in five years, but now it's a competitive advantage. So Sienna is, I think, probably the best platform I know to do this. So definitely check them out. Sienna with one N, because I have accidentally typed in two Ns many times. Is that domain for sale? Can you buy it or someone, they won't sell it? We have a host of domains out of which I think, I'm not sure if Sienna would double N.CX. I actually have to take a look. Okay, but we'll make sure it's Sienna with One X.

57:28Check them out. Andre, thank you so much for your time. This was a ton of fun. Thanks, Jay. Excited. Shopify.

From the publisher
Can AI customer service actually grow a Shopify store?

Andrei Negrau, co-founder and CEO of Siena AI, told me about a CPG brand that kept seeing the same thing in its support conversations. Customers were asking for smaller sample sizes. So the brand built a sample version of every product. Andrei says that one pattern generated millions in sample sales in 2025, before counting the people who then upgraded to full size. No survey. No focus group. The answer was sitting in tickets they were already closing.

So if you're asking yourself "how do I use AI on my Shopify store for something other than answering tickets?" or "what is my support data actually telling me?", this episode is for you. Andrei has been building autonomous CX agents since 2023, and Siena works with brands doing $20 million a year all the way up to brands doing billions.

💡 KEY TAKE-AWAYS:

- The CPG brand that found one repeated request in its own support tickets and turned it into millions in new product revenue. - Why Andrei calls Ask Siena "Claude Code for CX", and the kind of question it answers that Shopify Sidekick can't. - Siena's HexClad case study shows automation up 65% and tickets routed to humans down 20% in 60 days. Andrei says the software wasn't the reason. - The single question that tells you which AI tool to use for which job. It has nothing to do with the model. - What happens when a customer uploads a video of a broken product, and whether AI can tell they faked it to get a refund. - I pitched Andrei a "true fan module" live on the mic. He started working out how much of it Siena can already do.

⭐️ Support these amazing sponsors who make this show possible 👇 REWIND

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OMNISEND

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

PLUS, you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

🚨 Listeners (YOU) get an exclusive 30% OFF 3 MONTHS: http://shopify1percent.com/omnisend  🛠️ RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED IN SHOW:

- Siena AI: https://www.siena.cx - Andrei Negrau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/negrau - Siena AI on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/siena-ai - HexClad customer story: https://www.siena.cx/customer-stories/hexclad-customer-service-automation - Our first ever episode, with Lisa Popovici, co-founder of Siena AI: https://www.shopify1percent.com/why-isnt-every-shopify-store-using-ai-for-customer-service/

Andrei's advice on getting started: book a demo at siena.cx and his team will tell you straight whether it's a fit.

It's siena.cx with one N. I have typed it wrong more times than I want to admit.

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