What was said
What this says
Current to 13 Oct 26Marcus Bell and Laura Penhaligon trained Gary Liddle, a Teesside account manager, on chat, search, saved pages and dashboards. He found it useful, but few of his team have logged in. A group session is to be booked.
What happened: The 2 Jul 2026 training call walked Gary through chat, search, saved pages and the dashboards builder. He built a customer review page with the customer name as a variable.
Customer view: Gary was sceptical of AI answers at first, then said the brain is mostly just asking. His pain was opening four systems before a customer call.
Commercial: Growth includes sixty seats and Gary assumed they were nearly full. Only he and one colleague in Teesside have used it, so there is headroom and an adoption gap rather than a seat problem.
Watch: Some colleagues are nervous about breaking something, and the dashboards builder had not been touched. Adoption now depends on Gary running the group session.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Who was there
BB-Demo
Them
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Gary Liddle to send Marcus Bell a couple of time options for the Teesside group session.
- Laura Penhaligon to share a short list of starter questions and the customer review page with the Teesside team.
- Marcus Bell to send a recap and book the group session once dates arrive.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- Only two Teesside account managers have used the brain, and the rest are waiting to see if Gary can make sense of it.
- Some colleagues are nervous about breaking something, which is holding a couple of them back.
- The Growth dashboards builder had not been touched by anyone on his side.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- A half-hour group session for the Teesside team, starting from Gary's shared customer review page.
- Sixty Growth seats leave plenty of room for the rest of the Teesside team to log in.
- Dashboards builder adoption, starting from the missed-collections chart Gary built live.
Transcript
- Marcus Bell NoneAfternoon, Gary. Can you hear me all right? I've got Laura on as well, she's going to do most of the driving today.
- Gary Liddle NoneAfternoon. Yeah, loud and clear. Bit of an echo, hang on. Is that better? I've plugged the headset in.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneMuch better. Hello Gary, good to meet you properly. I think we've only swapped emails so far.
- Gary Liddle NoneThat's right, yeah. You sent me the connector checklist back in the spring. Sorry, I've been late to the party on all this. It's been mad on the road this week.
- Marcus Bell NoneNo need to apologise. Honestly it's the best thing about today, you're the first of the Teesside account managers to sit down and do this properly, so you get to tell us what's useful and what isn't.
- Gary Liddle NoneNo pressure then.
- Marcus Bell NoneNone at all. Right, I'll share my screen quickly and say what I want to cover, then Laura takes over. Can you see the brain home page?
- Gary Liddle NoneI can see a search bar and a list of pages down the left. Yep.
- Marcus Bell NoneGood. So, three things. First, how to ask the brain a question and get something you can trust. Second, pulling up one customer's whole picture, collections, tickets, calls, invoices, in one go. Third, a bit on saving what you build so your colleagues in Teesside can reuse it. Happy to go where you want though.
- Gary Liddle NoneThat's pretty much it. What I'm sick of is opening four different systems before a call with a customer. Collections in one place, the missed-collection tickets in the helpdesk, emails somewhere else, and then finance ringing me about an invoice I can't see.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneYeah, that's exactly the problem you bought it for, so let's start there. Marcus, if you stop sharing I'll put mine up.
- Marcus Bell NoneStopping now. Over to you, Laura.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneOkay, you should see my screen now. This is the same home page but I'm logged in as a standard user, same as you. Gary, can you log in on your side so you can follow along? The link's in the invite.
- Gary Liddle NoneYeah, give me a sec. Single sign on, is it? Right, it's thinking. Okay, I'm in.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneLovely. So there are two ways in. Search, which is good when you know a name or a word. And chat, which is good when you don't know exactly where the answer lives. Try chat first. Type something you'd really ask on a Monday morning.
- Gary Liddle NoneHang on, I'll do a proper one. Which of my customers have had more than one missed collection this month?
- Gary Liddle NoneOh. That's come back with a list. Is that really all of them? It's got the account names, the dates, and a ticket reference next to each.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's it. And if you click the little source marker beside each line, it shows you where it came from. The helpdesk for the ticket, the CRM for the account. That's the bit I'd get you into the habit of, always glance at the source before you say it to a customer.
- Gary Liddle NoneRight. Because I've had the AI thing before where it just makes it up.
- Marcus Bell NoneFair worry. It only answers from what's been loaded from your own systems, and if it can't find something it should say so. If it ever gives you an answer with no source, flag it to me. I'd want to know.
- Gary Liddle NoneOkay. That's reassuring, actually. Can I try one on a customer I know has had trouble? There's one with several sites near Middlesbrough that rings me every other day.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGo for it. Use their name, and then ask what's changed recently. Don't be too formal, it copes with normal language.
- Gary Liddle NoneRight, so it's given me a summary. Two missed collections, a call logged last week, and an invoice that's marked as paid. Which is interesting because they told me on the phone they hadn't been billed correctly.
- Marcus Bell NoneThat's a good example of why the invoice view matters. If you click through, you'll see the invoice status from the accounting system. It might be that they're looking at a different one.
- Gary Liddle NoneYeah, there it is. It's got two invoices, one paid and one still open but not overdue. Ah. So they've probably got the wrong one in front of them.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneWhich is a much nicer conversation than ringing finance and waiting for a call back.
- Gary Liddle NoneMassively. That would have saved me a morning last month.
- Marcus Bell NoneWhile you're there, Gary, can I ask how many of the Teesside team have logged in so far? I've pulled the numbers and usage across the company is up a fair bit on last quarter, but I can't see it by region.
- Gary Liddle NoneNot many from my side, to be honest. Me, and I think one of the others has had a poke around. The rest said they'd wait to see if I could make sense of it first.
- Marcus Bell NoneRight, that's useful. And that's why I'd like you to be the person who shows them. We've got sixty seats on Growth, so there's plenty of room. Nobody's going to run out.
- Gary Liddle NoneGood to know. I'd assumed we were nearly full.
- Marcus Bell NoneNot even close. Sorry, Laura, carry on.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneNo, that's all fine. So, next bit. Search. Say you've got a customer called in, and you want every mention of a particular site address across emails, calls and tickets. Type the site name into search, and then use the filter on the left to narrow by type.
- Gary Liddle NoneI'll try the same customer. Okay. Filter by calls. It's brought up the recording summaries. Oh, that's handy, I can see what my colleague said to them in March, I'd never have found that.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's the one I'd push the rest of the team on. Before you ring anyone, spend two minutes on what we've already said to them.
- Gary Liddle NoneCan it do that for the whole patch? Like, give me everything said about collection times across all my accounts?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneIt can. Chat is better for that. Ask it, summarise what customers in Teesside have said about collection times in the last quarter, and then ask it to group them by theme.
- Gary Liddle NoneOkay, it's come back with three themes. Early starts, missed bins after a holiday, and people not being told when a driver is running late. That's... yeah, that's what I'd have said. But it's got it on one page.
- Marcus Bell NoneThat's the sort of thing you can take to your own manager without having to build a slide, which, I'll be honest, is half of why people get value out of it.
- Gary Liddle NoneHa. Yeah. My manager would love that. I've been writing those up by hand.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneOkay. Let's look at how to save it. Top right of that answer there's a button to save as a page. Click it and give it a name you'd recognise. Something like Teesside collection themes.
- Gary Liddle NoneSaved. Does it update itself? Or is it frozen from today?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGood question. A saved page re-runs the question, so it picks up new data after each nightly refresh. It's usually complete before you start work in the morning. If you want a frozen copy, there's a separate export option.
- Gary Liddle NoneBrilliant, that's what I wanted. So I could have a page each for the biggest customers and just open it before a visit.
- Marcus Bell NoneExactly that. And you can share the page with the other account managers, so you're not all rebuilding the same thing.
- Gary Liddle NoneCan I share it now? I'd like to see what it looks like on someone else's screen.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneSure. Use the share button, and pick a colleague by name. If nobody else is set up yet, it won't find them, so don't worry if it's empty.
- Gary Liddle NoneRight, it's got a few names in there already. So some of them have accounts, they just haven't used them.
- Marcus Bell NoneThat's pretty common. The accounts get created at the start, and then nobody has a reason to open it. Which is why I want the page to be the reason.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneRight, let's go to the dashboards builder, because it's part of Growth and I don't think anyone on your side has touched it yet. It's basically a way of putting a few of these answers side by side as charts.
- Gary Liddle NoneIs that going to be fiddly? I'm an account manager, not an analyst.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneNo, you start from a question you've already asked. Go back to the missed collections one and choose add to dashboard. It'll suggest a chart type. You can just accept it.
- Gary Liddle NoneOh, that's a bar chart by week. It looks fine, actually. Can I change the grouping? I'd rather see it by customer than by week.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneYep, there's a dropdown above the chart. Group by. Pick account.
- Gary Liddle NoneDone. And... yeah, now I can see the worst ones straight away. There's two that stick out a mile.
- Marcus Bell NoneThat's the one I'd bring to your regular catch up with your manager. It tells you where to put your time.
- Gary Liddle NoneCan I ask something slightly off topic? When the data is wrong, who fixes it? Say a customer's address is out of date in the CRM. Do I tell you, or do I fix it at source?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneFix it at source, in the CRM, same as you always would. The brain picks it up on the next refresh. We don't hold a separate copy that you'd have to update.
- Marcus Bell NoneAnd if you fix it and it still shows the old one a couple of days later, that's the point where you ping me and I'll have a look at the connector.
- Gary Liddle NoneOkay. That's simple enough.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneLet's do a bit more with chat, because the wording makes a difference. Try asking something vague first. Tell me about my customers.
- Gary Liddle NoneIt's asked me which customers. Ha. It wants me to narrow it down.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneRight, which is actually what you want. Better than a long answer that isn't what you meant. Now be specific. Customers in Teesside with an open ticket older than a week.
- Gary Liddle NoneOkay. Right. There's a short list. And it's put the age of each ticket next to it. Oh, that one's been open a while. I didn't know about that.
- Marcus Bell NoneThat one might be worth a call today, then. Don't let us hold you up.
- Gary Liddle NoneNo, I'll note it down. Honestly, if that's all I got out of today, it was worth it.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneOne more habit to build. When you ask about a person, say a contact at a customer, add their role or their company. Otherwise it might bring back someone with the same name from another account.
- Gary Liddle NoneYeah, we've got a few of those. Same surnames all over the North East.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneHa, I believe it.
- Marcus Bell NoneGary, shall I ask what you'd like to be able to do that we haven't shown? Because I can see you're getting the hang of it, and I'd rather spend the rest of the time on your real work.
- Gary Liddle NoneYeah. Right. So what I'd really like is, before a quarterly review with a customer, to pull up a one page summary. Collections volume, any problems, anything they've said on calls, and where they are on invoices. Could I build that?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneYes, and it's a good one to build live, so let's do it. I'll talk through it and you do the clicking. Make a new page, call it customer review, and add four questions to it.
- Gary Liddle NoneOkay, first one, collections for this customer over the last three months. Second, tickets raised and how they were resolved. Hang on, is it better to say resolved or closed?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneEither's fine. Resolved is probably closer to how the helpdesk labels it.
- Gary Liddle NoneThird, anything they've said on calls or in emails about service. Fourth, invoice status. Right. And now I've got to put the customer's name in each one?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's the clever bit. Instead of the name, click make this a variable. Then when you open the page, it asks you which customer, and fills it in everywhere.
- Gary Liddle NoneOh, that's slick. Okay, I've picked the Middlesbrough one again. It's filling in. There's the collections, the tickets, and... the calls one's a bit long.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneYou can ask it to keep that to three bullets. Edit the question and say, in three bullet points.
- Gary Liddle NoneBetter. That's genuinely usable. I could take that to a meeting tomorrow.
- Marcus Bell NoneThen do. And tell me how it goes, I'd like to hear what they say.
- Gary Liddle NoneCan I share this with the other Teesside lads? Or do I need to ask someone?
- Marcus Bell NoneYou can share it yourself. If it's useful, I'd say share it with the whole team and tell them what it's for. Better coming from you than from us.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneActually, while we're here, shall we do a short group session for them? Half an hour, you and the rest of the Teesside team, on a call, with this page as the starting point. Marcus or I could run it.
- Gary Liddle NoneThat would help. I'd probably do a worse job explaining it. Can I sort out a time with them and come back to you?
- Marcus Bell NoneOf course. Send me a couple of options and I'll book it. Next week or the one after is fine.
- Gary Liddle NoneOkay, so, last thing from me, and it's a bit of a naff question. What happens if I get it wrong? Say I ask something odd and it gives me a daft answer, is there any harm?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneNone. It reads, it doesn't write. Nothing you ask changes your CRM or the helpdesk. The worst you can do is get a daft answer, and then you rephrase.
- Marcus Bell NoneWhich is a good thing to say to the team. Some of them will be nervous about breaking something.
- Gary Liddle NoneYeah, I think that's holding a couple of them back, to be fair.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneRight. I'd like you to try one on your own, no help from us. Pick a customer you've got a visit with next week and build the review page for them. We'll stay quiet.
- Gary Liddle NoneOkay. Challenge accepted. Give me a few minutes.
- Gary Liddle NoneRight, I've done it. It was fine. I got stuck once on the variable bit and then remembered. It's all come through. There's one thing, it's said there's no call recorded for the last two months. Is that right or is it a problem?
- Marcus Bell NoneCould be either. Do you know if anyone's spoken to them on a recorded line?
- Gary Liddle NoneI don't think so, actually. It's been mostly emails and me popping in.
- Marcus Bell NoneThen it's probably right. Good to see it saying so rather than guessing.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneI'll put together a short list of the questions we've used today so you don't have to remember them. Some starters, plus the customer review one, saved as a shared page for the Teesside team.
- Gary Liddle NoneThat'd be great. Thanks, Laura.
- Marcus Bell NoneAnd I'll send a recap this afternoon. Bullet points, what we covered, the links, and the booking for the group session once you've got dates. If anything's unclear, shout.
- Gary Liddle NoneWill do. And I'll ask the lads about times tomorrow. I'll nudge them to log in before then so they've at least seen the home page.
- Marcus Bell NonePerfect. Happy to jump on a call in a few weeks as well, just to see how it's landed and whether anything's not working for you.
- Gary Liddle NoneYeah, that'd be good. Honestly, I came in thinking it'd be another system to learn, and it's not. It's mostly just asking.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's the best thing you could say, thank you. Honestly, keep asking it daft questions. That's how you find out what it's good at.
- Gary Liddle NoneHa, I will. Right, I'd better get on, I've got that open ticket to chase.
- Marcus Bell NoneGo and sort it. Thanks for your time today, Gary.
- Gary Liddle NoneCheers both. Speak soon.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneBye, Gary. Speak soon.