Why Teams Still Manually Email Customers in 2026 | Katie West Interview

Описание: In this episode, Katie West (CS leader at Anatomy, former Rudderstack) breaks down the expensive manual work that still dominates customer success in 2026—and why AI hasn't solved it yet.
The reality? CS teams at $8M+ companies are still:

Manually writing hundreds of personalized emails every week
Asking engineers to pull email lists from databases
Spending 6-9 months building health score dashboards from scratch
Recording the same training videos over and over because docs don't work

Katie shares what's broken and what builders should fix:
✓ Why you can't tell who's actually using your product (set-it-and-forget-it vs. churning)
✓ The email generation problem: combining usage data, CRM data, and user data to write personalized outreach
✓ Why she has to ask engineers for email lists in 2026
✓ Why docs are dead and what product training should look like instead
✓ The behavioral change problem everyone underestimates
This is Vol 2 of The Builder Weekly - where we interview operators to surface expensive problems that small AI teams can now solve.
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ABOUT KATIE WEST:
Katie leads customer success at Anatomy (healthcare fintech, $8M raised) and previously built CS operations at Rudderstack and Rakuten. She's spent years in the trenches of post-sale—onboarding, adoption, renewals, and churn prevention.
ABOUT THE BUILDER WEEKLY:
Every week, we interview one operator to uncover expensive problems that just became economically viable to solve with AI. Not "here's a problem, go build it" - but "here's the real manual hell operators face every day."
If you're a builder trying to figure out what to build next, this is for you.