AI tips & trends

The question is no longer about whether you will use AI; it’s when. And no matter where you are on your journey, navigating the ethical implications of AI use is crucial.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Sturdy’s brand message lately. Part of this process entails interviewing folks from various walks of life about the current state of their businesses, their teams, and the companies they invest in.The recurring theme: Sales Leaders aren’t having a good time right now. But you knew that already. I want to talk about what you don’t know.

There has been, and should be, a lot of talk about Ethical AI. Over the last several weeks, I have been revising Sturdy’s Ethical AI policy. I am trying to convey that we don’t do shady stuff and won’t let our customers do it, either.

Years back I had an idea that every time a customer expressed some sort of "love" we would reach out and ask them to be a reference. The way this was supposed to work was that the Support/CS person would forward any happy customer to the marketing team as a "Reference Lead.” Then, marketing would reach out to the customer. Nothing groundbreaking here. If your business doesn't already do this, go ahead and give it a shot. Happy customers close deals for you.

I have always been fascinated by how product roadmaps are maintained. So much so that I feel it necessary to pen a bombastic screed on the topic.

My neighbor asked me to speak with his son (who is not connected here on LI). The son is a mid-market account manager (post-sales) at a large SI (pure services). His remits are expansion/upsell, renewal assistance, and retention/escalation. His book has 30 customers, and its approximate value is just shy of $1mm annually.

I’ve hired dozens of post-sales people over the years, and here are 6 attributes that I consistently interview for.

I was speaking to the COO of one of our customers a few weeks back and he said that Sturdy’s “Response Lag” signal was his “Laptop Smasher.” This signal is defined as a “customer is asking for a status update on an unresolved issue.” If your goal is to make sure your customers feel heard, then it is a bad one.

At the end of last year, I shared a regular expression (regex) that identifies "contract requests." That's a scary signal for people who like to keep customers.Today, I want to discuss the scariest of the Scary Six, "Executive Change."

Once we identified Contract Request as a revenue impact, our incredible CS team trained everyone to identify “Contract Request” language. We then built a process for addressing them. The before/after impact of identification and triage was remarkable and resulted in doubling the retention rate for this signal.

When I started my first SaaS company, I had a standing meeting on my calendars every week to read random support tickets (random is the crucial word, by the way). Reading tickets was always illuminating and often painful. One of our learnings was a churn risk called "New Sheriff."

Often lost in this discussion of AI technology is the discussion of its impacts on our teammates and coworkers. What does the widespread adoption of AI in business mean for the careers of people who work at these businesses? While many of us are, and should be, concerned about job destruction, I want to talk about job creation.

Customer churn is a term often used in the SaaS world, but what does it actually mean? Simply put, churn is the rate at which customers are lost. These are customers that have canceled your service and aren’t coming back. It can be calculated for individual customers (B2C) or for an entire company (B2B). Four different types of churn are commonly measured: customer churn, revenue churn, gross churn rate, and net churn rate. Let's take a closer look at each type.

To understand what really creates end-user value, you have to listen to customers — closely. Unfortunately, listening to customers is harder than it sounds.

In today's digital age, the sheer volume of data generated by businesses is staggering. Ironically, most of this data is unstructured and trapped in things like emails, support tickets, and phone calls. Until now, this meant that the only way to extract valuable insights was by using manual labor to categorize them.

It’s no surprise that AI is transforming product management. The function was poised for evolution. AI is now simply accelerating more teams to become even more customer-focused, data-driven, collaborative, and iterative.

In today's world, the power of AI is undeniable and, in many cases, is yet unknown. Businesses are leveraging this technology to increase their productivity and efficiency in ways that were never before possible.

CEOs are challenging their teams to leverage AI in every facet of their businesses to increase their productivity. gain deeper insights into user behavior, automate mundane tasks, and drive deeper insights with which to make critical decisions. It’s here. The big question is: How can you use it in your business right now?

there is no shortage of ideas and blog posts explaining how businesses will use LLMs to generate content and remove routine or laborious tasks. Some say LLMs will render coders and lawyers obsolete. (BTW, they won’t). While there will certainly be job disruptions, we believe the change will be one of radical productivity improvement and, as a result, much more interesting and fulfilling work for many of today’s knowledge workers.

Following last month’s release that enables Sturdy’s users to slice and dice their Data UI Home Page with fields pulled from their customer system of record (CRM), we’re excited to introduce Account Views.

Every business wants to stay ahead of the competition. We’ve got a saying here at Sturdy; “your customers are either growing with you or away from you.” And, if you think about it, you are just trying to develop a relationship with your customers to create trust and loyalty. To that end, one of the fundamental tenants of any healthy relationship is listening. Yup. It’s that simple. 

Churn is the biggest threat to growth for B2B businesses having recurring revenue models.

Product research is a crucial component of successful software product development. By understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviors, technology companies can create products that create value for their customers and differentiate in the marketplace.

More Signals! More insights! More knowledge! Today, we’re excited to announce the release of three new Signals designed to help our customers better understand their customers and what to know, now. As always, the new Signals were inspired by Sturdy’s existing customers and their feedback.

Overall, creating a modern VoC program is essential for businesses in today's competitive market. By understanding its fundamentals and leveraging advanced technology, companies can gain valuable insights that can help them succeed.

So, what does this mean for Sturdy? Well, we need to rethink two parts of our product. First, we need to make it much, much easier to sign up for the “Nows” that are important to you. Second, we need to ensure that all those duplicate messages in inboxes, chats, cases, and tickets don’t create duplicate warnings. No noise, just Signal.

We’re fired up to announce the launch of two new Signals designed to help customers gain more insights about their customers. Inspired by Sturdy’s existing customers and developed by our data engineering team, the new underlying language models detect when end users are confused and having trouble with billing-related matters.

As we look ahead to 2023, it's clear that Customer Intelligence will continue to be one of the most essential tools businesses can use to stay competitive and understand their customers better. By leveraging customer data through CI platforms, companies are able to make informed decisions that will help them improve customer engagement and drive sales and revenue retention. They ultimately increase customer satisfaction levels across all channels to ensure your customers grow with you, not away from you.

Customer retention is the ultimate force multiplier in any B2B SaaS business. It involves building strong relationships with existing customers, ensuring they stay loyal to your brand, helping them use more of your product or service, and becoming advocates who bring in more customers through word of mouth. By investing in customer retention and ultimately increasing your customers' lifetime value (LTV), SaaS businesses unlock tremendous potential for growth and profitability.

Whether the salesperson or account manager said “yes” when they should have said “no,” or what they said was accurate until someone else messed it up, overpromising often haunts post-sales teams.

When we started Sturdy, the idea was simple, “the way we record and monitor customer feedback is insane. It has to change”. So we decided to tackle customer email first. Along the way, we realized we had built the first “Customer Email Intelligence Platform.” Throughout this journey, we learned that a Customer Email Intelligence platform must do four things very well, all at once.

Customer feedback is information given by your customers about the quality of your products and services. Are you meeting customer requirements and delivering value? Whether good or bad, there is no better and more reliable data source about your company than customer feedback.

In 2022, the team at Sturdy spoke with over 100 CX leaders and attended several CX-focused conferences. What we heard was consistent — teams don’t have the correct data to look through the windshield. Instead, we are still looking through the rearview mirror. Here are some of the most common challenges. Sound familiar?

I have worked on the product side of software for about 20 years, and the most common question from management is, “What are we building next?”. It is a question that I ask myself almost every day.

Valuize's Chief Client Officer, Emily Ryan, invited our very own Joel Passen to discuss data hiding in plain sight. Hosted on LinkedIn live, the Valuize team has been kind enough to share this excellent content with us.

Customer attrition is a certainty for any SaaS company. The simple truth is that you will lose customers over time. Sometimes this attrition is out of your hands. However, at other times, you can directly impact whether or not it occurs. This post will explain customer attrition and how you can proactively mitigate it.

Few things are more critical to the success of a business than developing customer advocates. Every brand wants to make its customers happy. In SaaS, even minor improvements in customer experience lead to more significant gains in customer retention. Considerable increases in customer engagement significantly boost retention revenue.

In any business, customer churn—or the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service—is inevitable. Cancellations happen. But that doesn't mean you should just roll over and accept it. There are things you can do to decrease customer churn and protect what is arguably the most important aspect of revenue — the longtail subscription revenue of your customer accounts. Let's take a look at the seven most effective strategies for decreasing customer churn.

Whether you're already sold on the value of customer intelligence or looking for ways to take your business to the next level, this article will cover everything you need to know about choosing the right customer intelligence platform for your needs.

In this article, we'll answer the question: What is customer intelligence? As well as show how customer intelligence can be incredibly useful in improving customer loyalty, customer experience, and more.

The product and data teams have been busy this summer! Here is what they’ve been sweatin' over for the past several weeks. The teams have been focused on 3 major releases. The first of which will drop next week.

Investments from Grotech Ventures and other strategic partners to support sales and marketing expansion and research and development of the company’s AI-led customer intelligence and automation capabilities

Join a 30 minute product talk to see how innovative customer-facing teams are leveraging AI-based solutions to better understand, improve, and expand customer relationships.

Sturdy now has a bi-directional integration with Salesforce.com

Sturdy as an AI platform that unites all user language and converts it to data so that other people, teams and products can leverage that data. For example, when a user says, “Hey, when is our renewal date?” in an email to the accounting team (or through any other channel), Sturdy will flag it and then help you get it to the right person.

Take your workflows a step further with our automations! This new powerful functionality allows you to create your own automated workflows without writing a single line of code.

Sturdy is like a lead generation tool for customer references. On average, businesses using Sturdy see a 2.5x increase in customer references in the first 6 months of getting started.

Sturdy's Response Lag signal calls out when customers are waiting for responses from customer-facing teams and are chasing your associates for updates, actions, access, etc.

The new Expansion Signal empowers Sturdy users to identify when their customers express purchasing intent like adding more users, buying services, or upgrading their plan.

Late last month, the team added a new customer signal to our AI-powered customer intelligence platform called “How To”. This signal detects when your customers ask, “How do I do this?”.

New to Sturdy’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform is the Unhappy signal. The new model detects negative sentiment and customer frustration in emails, support tickets, chats, and video calls.

Sturdy.ai is joining fellow SaaS technology innovators to share our solutions with the Colorado Customer Success community on October 13, 2021

The loss of an executive sponsor is a red-level risk event but it doesn’t need to be fatal. Detecting signals that indicate an executive change / loss of sponsor is one of the first steps to future-proofing your client accounts and increasing your customer retention rates.

Customers send signals that help us predict churn, capture references, get in front of renewals, prioritize features, and just run our businesses better.

See Sturdy in action! CS Insider Founder, Brandon Cestrone, takes a short tour with SturdyAI Co-Founder, Joel Passen.

Slack has become the de facto tool for internal communications. By shifting internal communication out of inboxes and into channels, teams can work more collaboratively while reacting to critical issues in near real-time. This is why today, we are excited to announce that SturdyAI is now integrated with Slack.

We’ve cracked the code and productized a scalable way to harvest more customer references.

Anymore, churn is just SaaS slang. Net dollar retention has emerged as one of the top SaaS metrics that matter. Sturdy analyzes customer data for important signals that preempt risk and detect upsell opportunities.

The idea for Sturdy was born from asking this all too common question, far too many times, “What is going on with Customer X?”

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of SturdyAI, a ground-breaking business intelligence platform that leverages advanced data science to detect items of importance in customer-to-business communications. In simple terms, SturdyAI helps people at B2B SaaS businesses leverage a data set that until now has been hiding in plain sight - data that your customers want you to use.