Unlocking CX Efficiency with Claude, not ChatGPT: Co-Work and Skills Explained | Episode 103

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As I'm recording this in March of 2026, we're seeing a massive shift of users go from ChatGPT over to Claude.
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And so we're going to talk about that today, and I'm going to give you some cool resources at the end so that you can use Claude better if you are also one of those users.
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Stay tuned.
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Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast with me, Alex Turkovich.
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So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience.
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My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs.
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If you'd like more info, need to get in touch, or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it, go to digitalcustomer success.com.
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For now, let's get started.
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Welcome back to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast, the show where we talk about all things digital in CX.
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My name is Alex Turkovich.
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This is episode 103 of the show.
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We're going to do a little bit of an update show for you, one that's kind of relevant to right now, what's happening right now in AI, but also there's some kind of tangible long tail goodness here.
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Um, so those of you listening, not in March of 2026, you'll still get a lot of this show.
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But in recent news, you will have likely seen a pretty massive shift of people moving away from Chat GPT in favor of Claude for a number of reasons.
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While we're not going to get into the geopolitical aspects of why that is happening, it's actually not the only reason that's happening right now.
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Anthropic, maker of Claude, is just eating everybody's lunch at the moment.
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So we're going to talk about that a little bit and and and why.
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We're also going to spend a little bit of time just talking about LLMs in general and you know AI platforms in general.
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And then I also want to give you some very tactical, practical elements of Claude that if you're not playing with it today, I would urge you to go do that because they are on the forefront of where we're headed in terms of just agentic, true co-pilot, co-worker kind of situation.
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To start off with, though, um, I do want to take a step back here and talk about a question that I get a lot, which is what's the best AI platform?
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And my answer used to be a little less nuanced.
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My answer used to be, it's the one that you're using, because for quite a long time, um, many of us just weren't using these AI platforms on a regular basis.
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And I've seen that shift dramatically in the customer success summit in Austin.
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Over the past few years, every year I've asked the same question to the audience, which is you know, raise your hand if you're using AI on a day-to-day basis.
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And the first year I asked it was probably like 20, 25, 30 percent of the audience.
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Um, last year it was something like 70%, 75%.
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This year, everybody raised their hand, right?
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So it's it's it's not a it's not a thing anymore where it's like, especially in customer experience, customer success, and in SaaS in general, where you know we're urging people to use it, people are using it, right?
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So I do get the question a lot of you know, which one is the best for me?
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And so my answer used to be it's whatever one you're using, but it's a little bit more nuanced than that.
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I think if you're if you're talking about a corporate environment, the answer is still kind of that way.
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It's whatever your corporate environment allows you access to within the confines of their IT ecosystem.
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In other words, which one is locked down, which one you know isn't necessarily training models, which one do you um can you use with customer data and those kinds of things, right?
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So for a lot of folks, that is gonna be um Gemini because you're part of the Google ecosystem.
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Uh a lot of you are in Microsoft, so you're using Copilot.
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Um, a lot of you have corporate access to Chat GPT.
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That's you know, that's a pretty well, well-established thing.
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And now a lot of you are also or have already had kind of a corporate instance, so to speak, of Claude.
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Uh, in fact, engineering teams are you know using Claude code quite a bit just because that seems to be the forerunner, anyway, in terms of working with code.
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Now, if if you have the luxury of being able to use several different platforms in that kind of work environment, um there is some nuance that I think is worth digging into to where you might use one for one kind of task and one for another kind of task, right?
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So, right off the bat, Claude is not a great researcher.
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Um, Claude is not going to give you a really deep response on you know certain things that you want to research, right?
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So it's it's not necessarily going to be your quote-unquote Google replacement, which is kind of like the basic use case, but also it doesn't do deep research as well as some of the other platforms.
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For deep research, I'm still going to Chat GPT, and I'm actually using Perplexity quite a bit for deep research because that's perplexity's purpose built for that, right?
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It's it's meant to be kind of your deep researcher.
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Um, and ChatGPT is very good at deep research.
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I use Gemini quite a bit for a couple specific things.
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One is it's in the Google ecosystem.
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So, you know, it having access to Google Drive and you know all of your stuff is kind of a foregone conclusion.
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It's it's very good at that.
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And it also is superior in terms of image generation with nano banana.
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Uh, it does it does really, really well with image generation.
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So I use it quite a bit for that.
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For a lot of everything else, I have basically moved over to Claude these days, and it has done some amazing things for my workflows.
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And so we're going to talk a little bit about you know what that looks like.
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But just to answer the question, which one is right for you?
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It it depends partially on what you have access to with the data that you need to put into it, and it also depends on really what it is you're trying to do.
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Now, as a platform, Claude wins in a couple of different ways.
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Uh, Claude is definitely superior when it comes to coding and coding quality, but us in CS and CX aren't necessarily paying a lot of attention to that.
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The thing that I will say is that if you are using it to create files and documents and things like that, the kind of live preview element of what Claude does is is really superior.
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Um the way that it responds, in my opinion, is also superior because we've all gotten used to and kind of ridiculed ChatGPT for being overly friendly and overly like supportive, um, but not necessarily hyper-critical.
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Claude is a little bit more practical, a little bit, it's a little bit more kind of even keel, but it'll also call you out on stuff and it'll make suggestions on things that you might want to consider differently.
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So it's a much better kind of co-worker in that way.
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Um, as a platform, too, the consensus is that Anthropic as a company is a lot more sensitive and safety first.
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So they're they're a lot more focused on you know safety and guardrails and those kinds of things, right?
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That aside, functionality-wise, one of the big developments that have come out of anthropic is the release of co-work.
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Now, this is still early days.
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Um, in fact, the only way to access co-work is via the desktop Mac app.
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You can't get it on Windows right now.
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I'm sure it'll come at some point.
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You can't get it on the mobile.
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Um, but on desktop windows, you have access to cowork.
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And so you'll see if you're if you're logged into your cloud app, you'll see three tabs across the top.
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One is chat, one is co-work, and one is code.
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So chat is your you know, classic cloud interface, looks very familiar to just about anything.
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Code, on the other hand, is is what software developers and you know, even some folks that are more technically savvy have been using to actually you know help them write code.
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Um, cloud code can actually be used for a lot of different things, and I've delved into using it for a lot of different things too and building certain things.
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But cowork sits essentially in the middle where cowork acts as kind of a real language intermediary between chat and code.
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And so with co-work, I'll give you a practical example, right?
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Uh part of my remit at Belfry is running an implementation function.
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And so I worked with Cowork to build a staffing model for our implementation team that takes into account all kinds of factors from you know what we're implementing to how much staff we have to their existing, you know, availability to vacation time to you know all these kind of different factors.
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And I worked with co-work over the course of maybe two hours prompting back and forth to have it create this really sophisticated, very sophisticated Excel staffing model for the implementation team.
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This is the kind of thing I've built before, but it has taken weeks to build and months to perfect because you know you have to iterate on these kinds of things.
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Where I was able to iterate on these things because I basically knew what I wanted to build.
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I was able to build this in a in the span of a couple hours just iterating on it and working with Cloud Cowork to build this spreadsheet.
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So pretty phenomenal stuff.
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Now, the other two big things with Cloud right now is your ability to add connectors.
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Now they're they're continually adding connectors, um, and you can connect to other apps via what are called MCP servers.
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I won't get into the technical detail here, but fundamentally, you know, you can connect Cloud to your Google ecosystem.
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You can connect Cloud to things like Canva or Linear or uh you know any number of different tools that have these um these connections built into Claude or MCP servers stood up.
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And that makes it incredibly powerful because you can combine this um sophistication from a code and large data uh handling capability with your existing tech stack and in and ecosystem to work you know across those platforms in one console.
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It is just incredible.
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Now, the last thing that is a big unlock for Claude right now is what are called skills.
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In the next few months, we're gonna see skills basically as being a commonplace thing that exists across probably most models.
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Um, but with anthropic, they're kind of the first big player to market with skills.
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Now, what is a skill?
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Think of a skill as an action that you are taking.
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Okay, so put into the context of CSM land.
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A skill would be preparing an EBR presentation or uh preparing for an upcoming renewal conversation, or simple things like drafting an email, capturing things for a voice of the customer program, weekly account prioritization.
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Those are all different skills that you can essentially tell Claude to do.
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But there's it's it's essentially unlimited in terms of what kind of skill you give Claude.
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The fundamental way I would classify it is you know, is there something repeated that you do on a regular basis that you might be able to use a Claude skill for?
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And in Claude, you you essentially invoke these skills either on purpose with a command or with your language, Claude will automatically pull up one of these skills that you have installed in your Claude instance.
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So you do have to kind of you know find skills or create skills yourself and install them and those kinds of things, um, which is lengthy, I know, because I've built quite a few.
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Um, but um the time it saves you on the back end once you've have those skills installed, and more importantly, once you have those skills customized to how you're working, um it becomes a massive unlock.
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Now, because of what we're seeing with Claude and the and the big transition over into Cloud, I wanted to really jump on this skills thing and create some resources for all of you.
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And so what I've essentially done is I've created three plugins for customer success to use in Claude.
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Uh, the plugins are basically functional specific plugins.
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So I have one that's for CSMs, I have one that's for CS leaders, and then I have one for CS operations.
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The leaders one, for instance, includes, you know, a play a CS playbook creator, uh, a CSM coaching plan generator, churn post-mortem generator.
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Um, in the ops one, there are things like renewal forecasting models, onboarding process optimizers, sales to CS handoff.
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There's there's a lot of these.
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So I've created these three plugins.
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Uh, there's like uh I think there's 13 skills in the leader one, there's 14 skills in the CS ops one, and then there are 15 skills in the um in the CSM one.
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And I've bundled them into plugins that you can grab and basically install into your instance of Claude and run with them.
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Now you can go and customize them, literally just go edit the skill or have Claude edit the skill.
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But these get you 80% of the way there to actually using skills in a meaningful way for your gig in Claude.
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So if you want to grab those skills, I am gonna make the CSM plugin available for free.
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So if you're a CSM front-facing uh, you know, or you do a lot of customer-facing work, go grab that plugin, pop it into your cloud, and you know, let me know your feedback actually.
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So if you if you find some stuff that you know could be improved, I'm all ears at all times.
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Then I have um, you know, for leaders and and ops folks, I have bundled the CSM plugin, the ops plugin, and the leader plugin into basically a bundle of these three plugins.
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Uh, it's super inexpensive.
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Go to the website, grab it, download it, install it.
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This is going to be a hopefully a big unlock for some of you in terms of you not only using Claude, but then you know, really streamlining your operations.
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So if you want to go check that out those out, go to store.digitalcustomer success.com.
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Um, I'll put the link below.
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You can go grab yourself the free CSM plugin or the bundle of all three.
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And uh, you know, let me know what it does for you.
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Let me know if you've customized them.
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Let me know if it has inspired you to maybe create some other ones that we can include in the future.
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Let me know if you are one of the people that have actively moved from ChatGPT to Claude.
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Let me know if you're keeping both or if you're canceling Chat GPT.
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And if you have any other unlocks that you yourself have uncovered, I'd love to hear from you on what specifically has worked for you, has not worked for you, and all of that.
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So I hope this has been insightful and useful for you.
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Again, go to store.digitalcustomers.com to grab those plugins for yourself, and we will see you next week.
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Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast.
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If you like what we're doing, uh consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice.
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If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below.
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It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccess.com.
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I'm Alex Drogovic.
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Thanks so much for listening.
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We'll talk to you next week.