I’m Dickey Singh, CEO and founder of Cast.app, where we develop purpose-built AI Agents designed to help customer-facing organizations grow and preserve revenue across all segments without increasing headcount.
Today, I’m excited to welcome Percy Rose, an Executive at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, who serves as the Head of Digital Customer Success & Strategy for their HPE Greenlake Business Unit.
HPE Greenlake, a billion-dollar business, is among the several groups at HPE utilizing Cast AI agents to enhance revenue through our 'direct to customers without intermediaries' scaling model that outperforms
This blog post is based on our insightful conversations over two sessions, lightly edited for clarity.
DICKEY
Percy, welcome to this conversation. We have been planning this for months. Thank you for agreeing to share your insights, vision, and feedback.
PERCY
Thanks for having me, Dickey.
DICKEY
Please share a bit about you, your background, and your role at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Accenture. What essential experiences have shaped your career in customer-facing teams?
PERCY
I'm Percy Rose, the Head of Digital Customer Success at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I previously led CS strategy at HPE before I decided to focus my efforts primarily on digital. My passion lies in crafting strategies that focus on delivering measurable business outcomes to our customers. I wanted to carry that intention into digital CS, because I think it’ often overlooked that our job of driving value for the customer remains the same, regardless of what method we choose to engage the customer. I report into our Customer Success and Lifetime Value global organization, led by our VP, Simon Creasey.
I began my career at Accenture, where I spent nearly 13 years managing complex global SAP supply chain programs.This experience taught me the importance of strategic planning and robust project management, skills that have been essential throughout my career.
In 2010, I joined HPE as a Digital Transformation Executive and spent the next decade leading large-scale, company-wide technology transformations.
One of the most significant was a 350-member multi-year global Salesforce program, which standardized and brought automation to legacy service delivery processes globally.
As the Head of Customer Success Strategy, I focused on designing our go forward CS approach for high touch accounts in our $1B+ As-a-service Greenlake portfolio. During that time, I introduced Customer Journey Mapping and developed an executive interview program and a business outcomes framework to better understand loyalty and satisfaction factors. This strategy allowed us to address internal inefficiencies and develop services that directly addressed consumer challenges. Naturally this lead to us establishing new internal processes and playbooks to better support customers in achieving their desired outcomes.
Now, I bring all of that experience to my role as the Head of Digital Customer Success, where I am responsible for expanding our customer success approach across our entire customer base for the HPE Greenlake business.
Outside of work, I enjoy fishing, swimming, boxing, and practicing Muay Thai martial arts. These activities keep me balanced and energized.
DICKEY
You've mentioned that you are passionate about outcome-focused customer success strategies. Can you elaborate on your approach and how you integrate Outcomes and Customer Experience (CX) in your Digital strategy?
PERCY
Absolutely, Dickey. I prioritize customer outcomes and experiences to help customers and partners achieve their goals and enjoy their partnership with us. This approach reduces their inclination to switch vendors and fosters long-term loyalty.
In Digital Customer Success, I focus on personalized, one-to-one interactions tailored to every persona and account rather than relying on many-to-many communities and one-to-many content sharing like blogs, webinars, and videos. It's clear that a CIO or a CFO will have different outcome expectations than individual contributors.
We start with strategic customer journey mapping to understand each customer persona's unique needs. Then, we move on to detailed internal process mapping, which helps us determine what tasks need to be done internally to enable the experience we want our customers to have.
The approach helps us provide the most appropriate value at every touchpoint. We also use voice of the customer insights to make data-driven decisions, ensuring our strategies align with what our customers truly value.
AI plays a significant role in our efforts. It allows us to scale personalized interactions and proactively address potential issues, ensuring every customer gets the attention they deserve.
We aim to create a seamless and rewarding experience that drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, enhancing our renewal and retention rates.
DICKEY
From your experience, how effective are traditional CRM and CS products that rely heavily on team members to engage and influence customers? How does this compare to your experience with AI-driven solutions like Cast?
PERCY
When we first integrated AI solutions like Cast.app, we were utilizing a prominent customer success (CS) platform. However, due to the platform's low adoption rates among our customer success managers (CSMs), our leadership decided to discontinue its use because we weren’t getting as much value as expected.
As you can imagine, I was afraid that this decision would completely derail our digital customer success efforts. Interestingly, we found that we could still effectively leverage AI agents by integrating data from several sources, including Salesforce.
This experience highlighted a significant insight: whether or not you have a dedicated CS platform, you can still leverage some of the latest digital technologies to engage and influence users and executives.
For HPE Greenlake, Digital Customer Success sets the foundation the support all segments: High Touch, Medium Touch, and Low Touch, significantly enhancing our ability to drive business outcomes and maintain strong customer relationships.
What I appreciate about the modern AI-driven approaches is how they can engage with all our segments, in a comprehensive way
It’s not just about connecting with active users and primary executives. We have two versions, one for Directors and VPs and another detailed and operational one for individual contributors and director-level customers. Digital reach also involves keeping inactive users and other decision-makers, like the CFO, in the loop with updates and reviews.
Engaging a broad set of users has significantly increased our impact, giving us a much better return on investment compared to relying solely on traditional CRM and CS products.
DICKEY
You provided a wonderful testimonial for Cast, after your team asked C-level HPE customer executives about the value Cast provides to HPE Greenlake customers. Cast received a 9/10 'Exceptionally Valuable' score. Which HPE customers provided this rating, and what feedback did they share? By the way really impressive customer list! You should have told us you were doing a back-channel check on Cast.app!
PERCY
Ha Ha Ha. We always cross-check on new technology vendors in which we make a significant investment.
We surveyed several high-profile HPE customer executives, who gave us important feedback, highlighting that the information shared in the GreenLake Business Review created via Cast, was "extremely valuable" to their business needs.
The average score was a 9/10, with many customers appreciating the detailed insights and personalized content.
We work with several vendors, and a high score like this is a great result, with so much more improvement to come.
DICKEY
What advice would you give to businesses that use a CRM and may or may not use a CS platform? How can they benefit from integrating AI agents like Cast.app?
PERCY
HPE is a large company with several business units. You mentioned you have three projects with my business unit and 12 more with other units. We all use Salesforce as the CRM, but not all units use a CS platform. We've used CS Platforms and could potentially do so in the future as well, but I truly appreciate that Cast can work with any data source our customer-facing teams use, even spreadsheets. This gives us a lot of flexibility in how we go forward.
My advice would be to, as always, understand first and foremost what is valuable to your customer, and then determine how you want to convey those insight to your customer. Afterwards, I would suggest to start AI efforts and solicit feedback from your customers regarding the type of content they are receiving.
One of the big challenges we have had (which is probably not unique to us) is data cleanliness. We have definitely had our own data challenges and cleansing is a huge undertaking.
Perfect data isn't a requirement that should hold you back. At HPE we have done some work on our side, but Cast’s data cleansing and readiness solution has certainly help facilitate the process to make it easier.
Since Cast provides connectors for several databases and products, we were also able to leverage its data correction and refinement capabilities.
DICKEY
Finally, I always ask for transparent feedback. What part of Cast could be improved? Could any features or functionalities enhance its value for customer-facing teams?
PERCY
I would say that the translation capabilities still need improvement.
You have good AI translations on generative content in English, which is great. However, we are a global company, and we want to expand a standard approach across the world. So my question would be, how are you improving the product for non-English personas?
DICKEY
You answered a question with a question. How very smart.
We have tested and currently use several non-contextual AI translation services, including Google Cloud Translation, Microsoft Translator Text API, IBM Watson Language Translator, DeepL, Amazon Translate, Yandex Translate API, and modern contextual LLM services, including the usual suspects OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini. We also have access to unreleased future alpha versions of these LLMs, although they have yet to be available to us in API form.
Using current technology, we struggle with translating sentences like, "In Orange County, I enjoyed an orange smoothie made with fresh oranges while using my Orange iPhone to capture the vibrant orange sunset."
Non-contextual AI services are still better than LLMs, but you cannot specify the context.
We are experimenting with a "context injection" method for non-contextual AI services, but it is still in the early stages. For example: "In Orange County (the location in Southern California), I enjoyed an orange smoothie (a type of smoothie with orange fruit as the primary ingredient) made with fresh oranges (the fruit) while using my Orange (the mobile carrier) iPhone to capture the vibrant orange (the hue) sunset."
PERCY
Yes, we would like to see improvements to AI translations. Think about "overrides" to translations. For example, if the AI is not succeeding, allow a human to intervene and correct the output of an AI translation. It would help if you did more work in French and Spanish.
DICKEY
That is a great idea; let me consider how to scale this suggestion.
Finally, thank you for your time, Percy. I always enjoy talking to you about your business challenges and your vision.
PERCY
Thank you, Dickey.
