Integrations

Sturdy announces Slack integration

By
Joel Passen
May 11, 2021
5 min read

Slack has become the de facto tool for internal communications for many teams. By shifting internal communications out of inboxes and into channels, teams can work more collaboratively while reacting to critical issues in real-time. This is why we are excited to announce that SturdyAI is now integrated with Slack. Now teams that rely on Slack to collaborate can create custom channels to receive important signals from SturdyAI.

For those less familiar with SturdyAI, we’ve built a product that analyzes business language(support tickets, emails, customer chat sessions, video and phone call transcriptions, etc.) for important signals that impact the bottom line. For example, when a user asks, “Can I have a copy of our contract?” in a support ticket, our product instantly recognizes this as a potential cancellation signal, flags it, and alerts the team in charge of triaging accounts. Today, our AI today recognizes 7 distinct signals, with dozens more currently in development. And the cherry on top is that SturdyAI gets smarter with every message.

Here’s how it works. 

Step 1 

First, a customer communicates with their vendor via email, support ticket, chat or recorded call. Below is an example of a ticket submitted through a ticketing system. 

Customer Support Ticket
Customer Support Ticket

Step 2

Next, SturdyAI ingests and analyzes the ticket in real-time looking for important signals. In this ticket, there is a critical issue. The customer, Brightlight, is asking for a copy of their contract. This is a clear signal that this customer may be at risk. Furthermore, the customer is indicating that they have purchased a product that may have similar features reinforcing the urgency of this message. Below is the original ticket that SturdyAI analyzed and applied the Strong Churn signal.

SturdyAI analyzes customer support tickets for signals that can indicate customer churn.


Step 3

Now that SturdyAI is integrated with Slack, critical signals are  “chirped” into Slack channels.  SturdyAI’s customers create their own Slack channels to receive critical signals. Integrating SturdyAI takes minutes. When SturdyAI is integrated with Slack, critical signals are  “chirped” into Slack channels.  SturdyAI’s customers create their own Slack channels to receive critical signals. We've seen some great use cases already. Here are a few of our favorites.

#competitor-mentions

#customer-references

#executive-change

#feature-request

In this example, we’ve created a “Churn Alerts” channel. These customized channels provide teams and leaders with real time visibility into critical customer issues so the right people can take action before it’s too late. Below is a screenshot of our churn-alerts channel and the alert that was triggered by the original message that this customer sent about requesting a copy of their contract.

SturdyAI chirps signals into custom Slack channels.

Why now?

Integrating with Slack was moved to the top of our feature roadmap as the pandemic has created new challenges for our customers related to remote operations. Less in person attendance by customer-facing teams means widening internal communication gaps at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Plus, integrating with Slack just isn't that hard. In the coming weeks, we will continue to refine the integration and, ultimately, the user experience making it easier for users of Slack to get mission-critical signals from customers in the apps that they use most.

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Customer Churn

The Most Dangerous Threat to CROs

Joel Passen
July 1, 2025
5 min read

The most dangerous threat to CROs doesn’t live in the opportunity pipeline.

It's churn.

  • It doesn’t scream like a missed quarterly pipeline goal.
  • It doesn’t show up in dashboards until it’s too late.
  • It's rarely caught by a generic 'health score'.
  • It's the board meeting killer.

Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.

📉 CAC is way up.

📉 Channels are saturated.

📉 Talent is expensive.

📉 Competition is fierce.

📉 Switching costs are low.

The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”

Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”

No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.

Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.

Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."

  • The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
  • Account Management may own the renewal and growth number.
  • Support is in the foxhole on the front line.
  • RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
  • Marketing might send an occasional newsletter via email.
  • Finance may be leaning in on the forecasting.
  • Product is building things that supposedly the customers want.

But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.

If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.

Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.

The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.

We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.

Software

Have you heard this from your CEO?

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

CX Strategy

Talent gets you started. Infrastructure gets you scale.

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

✅ A crisp, written ICP and buyer persona (not just tribal knowledge)

✅ Accurate prospect data to target the right ICP

✅ A playbook that outlines how you win—and how you lose

✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

Schedule Demo
A blue and gray logo with a black background
A number of different types of labels on a white backgroundA white background with a red line and a white background with a red line andA sign that says executive change and contact request
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