In the video “Transformers, explained: Understand the model behind GPT, BERT, and T5” Google’s Dale Markowitz explains how Google’s Transformer technology improved the understanding of text resulting in more accurate language translation.
CSMs are tasked with understanding the meaning of our customer’s words and translating our customer’s needs into success with our product.
This post will discuss how Google’s Transformer works and ways we can use the principles behind the Transformer to improve understanding of our customers.
First, let’s review how Transformers work:
According to Google’s Dale Markowitz, these are some main ways Transformers understand meaning:
- Transformers apply a method called “Attention” that helps understand the meaning of a word in the context of words around it.
- As Transformers are trained on large amounts of data they apply “Self-Attention” which helps the Transformer learn what words to pay attention to over time
- The Transformer makes multiple assessments of the words in a sentence as the Transformer references the surrounding text to capture the entire context according to “Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding.”
These steps result in understanding the meaning of words so a model can produce a more accurate language translation.
Let’s review how CSMs can apply similar Transformer logic with our customers.
Attention: As CSMs, we want to uncover the important words and phrases we should pay attention to from our customers. We can use listening skills to help us make sure we’re focusing on the right areas. For example:
- Summarize what we hear with our clients and pause for feedback to confirm understanding
- Ask follow-up questions on a topic to drill-down on specifics
- Playback key words to our customer so we can discover their importance
Self-Attention: As CSMs we can use our own experience and the experience of others as training data to learn where we should focus our attention. To leverage this data we can:
- Draw on our past customer engagements to understand a situation with a current customer
- Reference our colleagues’ experiences to inform our own situation
- Consult our success stories and other internal content as a guide to know where to focus in a customer interaction
Reassess for Context: Like the Transformer, CSMs will assess and reassess the words we hear from our customer against the big picture of the situation. We can ask ourselves the following:
- How does our customer’s business strategy relate to this topic?
- What domain knowledge can I apply to this situation such as best practices or a new approach?
- What product knowledge can I consult to help establish a use case with our tools?
CSMs can apply the principles of the Transformer so that we can find the best translation of our customer’s goals for use with our product.