AI tips & trends

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.

1. Understand the most common reasons for customer churn.

The first step in dealing with customer churn is to diagnose why the customer is canceling in the first place. There could be any number of reasons, but consistent themes and topics will emerge with the analysis. Churn doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a culmination of bug reports, feature requests, executive changes, response lags, unhappy sentiment, contract requests, renewal inquiries, and more.

If your team receives one or two pieces of feedback from a customer expressing frustration, it might not be the beginning of the end of the relationship. But, what about 10 times in 30 days? What if that customer is still in the onboarding phase of their journey? You'd want to know. And, more importantly, you’d want to take action to repair that relationship. 

2. Elevate customer engagement early on. 

Speaking of the onboarding phase, the first few weeks and months after a customer signs up for your product or service are crucial. This is when they get to know your product and develop a relationship with your team. Most importantly, this is when customers determine whether your service is really going to drive the value outlined in the sales process. If you can increase engagement during this period—through things like work sessions, listening workshops, self-service content, regular check-ins, etc.—you can set your customers up for success and decrease the likelihood that they'll churn later on.

3. Listen deeply to what customers are saying.

As previously mentioned, certain insights can be indicative of future churn—things like executive changes, contract requests, questions about the contract terms, unhappy sentiment, etc. By listening for these insights, you can proactively identify opportunities to guide the relationship early on and take steps to prevent them from turning into bigger issues down the road. Traditionally, for most B2B SaaS enterprises, this process hasn’t been scalable. Listening to your customers at scale is nearly impossible. Luckily, new developments in AI and machine learning have enabled customer intelligence platforms (CIPs) to analyze every email, support ticket, chat, and more for specific insights that empower your teams to focus on relationships that drive revenue. 

4. Take action on customer feedback quickly. 

If customers feel like their voices are being heard and that their feedback is being acted on, they're much more likely to stick around. As a baseline, make sure you have a system in place for collecting customer feedback (surveys, Net Promoter Score® emails, etc.) and that you're regularly reviewing that feedback to see what changes you can make to improve the customer experience. Additionally, take a step beyond soliciting feedback to ensure you’re capturing customer sentiment at scale. Nothing is more powerful than the unabridged, unbiased voice of the customer. As we mentioned earlier, that can only be accomplished at scale through a customer intelligence platform.  

5. Understand what features and services your customers want most. 

Find ways to add value for your customers—through things like upselling, cross-selling, or simply offering new features or services—you can reduce the likelihood of them canceling their subscription. At the end of the day, customers are either growing with you or away from you. Identifying trends in what your collective customer base asks for the most is a surefire way to keep your customers growing with you. Customers who feel like they're getting more bang for their buck are less likely to look elsewhere for a similar product or service staving off painful losses to competition.  

6. Provide the level of service you’d expect as a customer.

One of the best ways to prevent customers from churning is to provide them with the level of customer service you’d expect as a customer. If your customers feel like you're listening to their concerns, issues, and suggestions and that there is some actionable output, they’ll be less likely to look to a competing product that can provide them with what they need. The root of excellent customer service starts with simply listening and taking the next best action. Adopt the mantra of listening, acting, and improving. 

7. Seek to develop advocates, not just keep customers. 

Customer-obsessed companies don’t just service customers, their goal is to create advocates. Customer advocates are the ultimate customers. They serve as references and speak at industry events and webinars. They provide success stories, product reviews, and quotes for your marketing team. Developing advocates is about putting your customer first, and putting your customer first starts with listening at scale. It’s high time to start using all the feedback your customers give you daily to better understand their wants, needs, and issues so you and your teams can take the necessary action.  

For most B2B SaaS companies, customer churn is what we call the CODB — the cost of doing business. But the fact of the matter is that churn is a “rearview mirror” metric. Traditional telemetry-based reports and customer health scorecards capture what’s happened in the past, and most of the time, if you’re dealing with churn, you’re already too late. With CIPs, like Sturdy, you have valuable insights at your fingertips to look forward through the “windshield” and to see around the corners along the way. This allows you to detect and combat churn before it happens. It’s like a lead-gen for building more durable, profitable relationships. 

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Churn. We've all heard about it before, especially if you're building a SaaS business. There's no shortage of thought leaders who proclaim the all too simplistic mantra: "Decrease churn! And increase profits!"

Yet, for many, churn as a metric is confusing and ambiguous. For example, customer churn is different than revenue churn for example and there many ways to calculate churn leading to confusion across your company.

If you're tired of the over-reliance on churn, you're not alone. Analysts and investors have been increasingly skeptical of churn rate calculations for years.

“There are too many darn ways to calculate churn. That makes it ambiguous.” says, Dave Kellogg

So if churn isn't the magic pill many businesses want it to be, what should you be looking at?

It all starts with, net dollar retention.

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What is net dollar retention (NDR)? 

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Net dollar retention (NDR) aka net revenue retention (NRR) has emerged as one of the top SaaS metrics that matter and for good reason.

NDR takes into account upgrades, downgrades, and churn to quantify how much recurring revenue from current customers you retained across a defined period of time. Why focus on a single metric such as churn, that doesn't actually give you the complete picture of the health of your business?

While no one metric is going to transform your business overnight, net dollar retention does help answer two incredibly important questions for businesses (especially SaaS businesses) looking to grow.

Net dollar retention can help answer:

1. Is your product delivering the value promised during the sale? 
2. Are your customers growing with you or without you? 

Having answers to these two questions can dramatically improve your business across the board.

What makes net retention so powerful is that for most companies, it’s cheaper to sell to existing customers than to sell to new customers. This makes net retention the most cost-efficient way to accelerate revenue growth. Instead of investing tens of thousands of dollars in a new marketing campaign, you can strategically use net dollar retention to improve the qualities and services of customers who have already trusted you enough to make a purchase. Yes, acquiring new customers is part of the business game, but all too often businesses neglect one of the most important revenue streams that already exist: current customers.

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How to calculate net dollar retention

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If your NDR is over 100%, this means that an increase in revenue is attributable to your existing customers.

Here’s how to calculate NDR. 

(Starting MRR + expansion — downgrades — churn) / Starting MRR  = NDR

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you start the month at $100,000 in recurring revenue (MRR). Over the month it added $25,00 in expansion revenue, has $10,000 in downgrades and another $5000 in churn.

($100,000 + $25,000 — $10,000 — $5000)/$100,000 = 110% NDR.

Your MRR is $110,000 with an NDR of 110% This is good. Essentially, your upgrades / upsells lifted your revenue despite losses. 

Without understanding your net dollar retention rate, you might be under the impression your business is sinking without a solution in sight. But with the knowledge that current customers are helping keep your business afloat, you can continue to invest in your marketing and business strategy without making rash business decisions.

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What is a good net dollar retention (NDR) rate?

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A minimum NDR rate of 100% is considered good for SaaS businesses selling to the SMB market. Selling to smaller accounts naturally yields a lower NDR. SMB clients are less financially stable, ripe for acquisition, and have smaller budgets. 

An excellent enterprise NDR rate is 130%. As with many SaaS metrics, there are other things to consider. For example, Workday’s NDR is 100% but gross retention is 95%. Either Workday is very good at selling the “whole” deal or their product footprint presents limitations. 

Here are some examples of net dollar retention rates for some interesting SaaS and SaaS-enabled companies.  

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Why you need to care about net dollar retention.

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NDR provides a revenue-based view of customer retention. NDR is increasingly important as you scale from a small to a medium-sized business and beyond. For example, a $5MM business that churns 20% can replace that $1MM with a net new business when it’s growing by +50% a year. But when a $30MM business needs to replace $6MM this becomes insurmountable especially if the growth rate is slowing. Understanding net dollar retention from the start will allow you to stay the course if your NDR rate is in line with or above average. Similarly, a low NDR score means you may have bigger challenges within your business you need to address before further investing in scale.

As with most things in business, the effects of NDR compound with time. It’s either additive or punitive with every customer that you acquire. This means that small upticks in NDR can add up to very large differences in total revenue over multiple years. For example, assume a business had $10MM in revenue last year and consistently generates 20% of revenue from new customers. Improving the  NDR from 95% to 105% may sound meager, but over five years the business will gain another $5MM in revenue. 

One of the biggest challenges within a business is knowing those small actions that have life-sized effects. Monitoring and tracking your NDR rate is invaluable in helping you build a sustainable business over the long term.

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How to increase your Net Dollar Retention.

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Net dollar retention is an important metric to track. So the question is... how can you start identifying those opportunities to grow and deliverable value at scale?

First, hire a great team of CSMs who know your customer's needs and pain points inside and out.

Second, develop more premium services to sell to your customer base.

While on paper, this sounds straightforward and doable. But frankly, this takes a lot of time, resources, and buy-in from management to create enduring impact. 

Now consider this.

What if you had a “tool” that could analyze customer emails, tickets, and conversations for important signals that are typically related to predicting churn?

Maybe something that could listen for suggestions about features and products that might accelerate value capture and lift revenue.

What if you could start such initiatives without major upfront investments in data infrastructure or change the way your teams work?

We may be biased, but here at Sturdy, we created that exact tool. Connect with a member of our team to learn how tracking NDR and other critical metrics can help take your business to the next level. 

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Despite customer intelligence still being an emerging field, there are already many incredible CI platforms that can help you get the most out of your data. Utilizing customer intelligence data will not only help improve your overall business strategy, but it’s also a powerful way to improve customer satisfaction and customer experience. 

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Data on its own isn’t beneficial. What matters is understanding the customer journey of your users and analyzing data, customer feedback, and customer behavior to make better decisions.

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But as with most things in business, not all customer intelligence platforms are created equal. Depending on your goals, the size of your company, and your budget, each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses.

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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. 

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Choose a customer intelligence platform that works well with your tech stack.

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Businesses today, on average, use 37+ tools across their teams and departments. Every department has its “go-to” tools. Yet, keeping track of all that data collected by these tools can take time, and it only gets more challenging the more systems your business uses. With so many silos, it can be impossible to understand all your data in aggregate.

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When choosing a customer intelligence platform, the platform you select must integrate deeply with the critical components of your current GTM tech stack.

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For example, at Sturdy, many of our customers use Salesforce, so we began focusing on Salesforce integrations for our customers who rely on using the most popular CRM in the world. A customer intelligence platform can have flashy dashboards. Still, it will be challenging to realize game-changing value if it doesn’t pull the full payload from your CRM. 

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At a minimum, buyers must choose a system that integrates directly into your CRM, email, and ticketing system. Be skeptical of CI tools that claim to integrate with hundreds of tools “out of the box.” Chances are these systems are using a third-party integration platform. While third-party integration platforms are great for some things, they can be limited when ingesting data from custom fields. And otherwise, they represent another failure point on the reliability daisy chain. 

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Many CI platforms, such as our platform, Sturdy, become more valuable with more data they access. To that end, it’s essential to identify your largest customer feedback channels. For most of us, it’s likely email. Our research has shown that over 60% of B2B customer-to-business conversations are over email. This makes a tight integration with your email platform imperative. The right CI tools analyze email, and then and only then can they give you predictive customer intelligence data based on the bulk of your everyday customer interactions.

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Pro tip: When considering customer intelligence platforms, integrations matter. Choose a system that has authorized integrations with your other vendors’ marketplaces. Avoid systems that rely on third-party integration platforms. And, if email isn’t a core integration, you’ll likely be missing the lion’s share of insights about your customer relationships. 

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A secure, privacy-first customer intelligence platform

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Let’s face it, there’s a consummate conflict of interest in businesses today. Business units must leverage data to turn raw information into actionable insights. On the other hand, InfoSec and privacy teams must ensure compliance with a myriad of regulations relating to collecting and using data, mainly when it contains PII.  

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Personally identifiable information or PII is any information that permits an individual’s identity to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information linked or linkable to that individual. But, if you collect someone’s name and email address, you are collecting PII. For this reason, you must choose a CI platform designed for the privacy-first era. Anything less is asking for trouble. Here are some tips to get started:

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First, ensure your potential partner maintains an information security program certified by yearly SOC2 Type II audits. This protects the security, availability, confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of their services and your customer data.

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Next, understand each provider’s approach to processing PII. Being SOC 2 Type II isn’t really about privacy. Otherwise, it’s essential to know if a vendor’s employees, consultants, or sub-processors have access to your customers’ PII. If they do, this is a problem. Look for a solution that offers a virtual data clean room. This way, you can ensure that data from different systems, including email, ticketing, and customer relationship management (CRM), is securely funneling into one spot. This data is encrypted and then anonymized, making it impossible for anyone in the data clean room to access PII. 

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Choose a customer intelligence tool that gets buy-in across all your teams. 

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There are very few teams in a SaaS business that don’t need more insights about customers. Customer intelligence is something your entire company should be involved in. Everyone in your organization will benefit from your chosen customer intelligence platform, from engineering to product to marketing. 

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When choosing a CI platform, consider the following:

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• Insights for various teams: Customer Intelligence isn’t just for customer success teams. Product and engineering teams can immediately benefit from learning more about customer frustration, confusion, and wants directly from the voice of the customer. Marketing teams can transform positive insights into customer references. Rev Ops and the BI team can create new analytical frameworks from previously unavailable data.   

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• Fast time to value: Let’s face it, we’ve all bought platforms that were oversold, hard to implement, and even harder to administer. Look for solutions that can deliver insights to your specific use cases quickly. Understand the resources required to start receiving value and what resources are needed to maintain the program in the future. 

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• Tech stack: When choosing a customer intelligence platform, the platform you select must integrate deeply with the critical components of your current GTM tech stack. And don’t forget email. 60% of customer-to-business communications start with an email. 

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• Avoid duplicate functionality: CI platforms often have similar functionality to systems you already have, like customer success platforms and CRM systems. Look to compliment your existing system with rich data from a customer intelligence solution. 

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• Security: Does the platform have a clear and transparent take on data security? Ensure that any system you choose is SOC 2 Type II ready.

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• Data privacy: How does the platform handle data privacy? Is the vendor using anonymization, pseudonymization, and de-identification techniques?

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Customer intelligence is not a magic bullet: Avoid platforms that make incredibly bold claims.

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It’s essential to have realistic expectations when choosing a CI tool. Just as AI-driven content marketing can be helpful for copywriting and content marketing, it won’t do all the legwork for you.

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This advice applies to customer intelligence platforms and any SaaS tool your business might use. Many “all in one” tools or “magic bullet” solutions claim they can do everything. But remember, the more the vendor tries to do, the more likely they, too, have “soft spots” where the technology isn’t good. 

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At the end of the day, a customer intelligence solution should help you operationalize your practices and programs and get your entire organization enthusiastic about using insights to improve products, drive growth and expansion, and, ultimately, increase your NDR. Find solutions that demonstrate a clear path to value in the shortest time. These are the solutions that the C-suite can fund. 

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Finally, customer intelligence is a hot topic. But it’s not exactly new. So with the tremendous growth in the CI world, some organizations have failed with products that don’t deliver value. The good news is that integrations, data sciences, and privacy tooling have all dramatically improved in the past 3-5 years. This has made products more powerful and easier to maintain.

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Turn customer feedback into actionable insights. Get clear on your CI goals.

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Customer intelligence tools continue to innovate incredibly quickly, but choosing a tool that serves your specific needs will make or break your experience. 

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Perhaps you’re really focused on reducing churn. You may want a platform that streamlines your data points in one easy-to-read channel. Improving your customer experience is your number one goal. Increasing customer lifetime value, for example, is a common goal regarding competitive intelligence.

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Of course, you’re almost certainly going to have multiple business goals. Still, it’s critical to have a clear idea of what you’re hoping the CI platform can help you accomplish from the start. Before you schedule a demo or request more information, have 2-3 specific goals in mind. 

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Invest in both the now and the future with customer intelligence

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There are significant gaps between what customers think about your products, the level of services you provide, and the execution of the journey you’ve outlined. The question is, “how seriously are you taking their feedback”? How closely are you listening to your customers? Churn doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s a culmination of feature requests, “how to” questions, executive changes, response lags, unhappy sentiment, and more. The right customer intelligence must deliver the insights to help teams create more enduring relationships with arguably the most significant cohort of humans outside your employees — your customers. 

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While customer intelligence 2.0 is still in its infancy, businesses that utilize modern CI solutions effectively have a clear competitive advantage over those that do not. Nothing speaks louder than the voice of your customer. Today’s customer-obsessed teams make better decisions based on insights into the data customers generate for us with every conversation.

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Interested in seeing around the corners? Learn where customer intelligence is going. Schedule a demo with Sturdy today.

In today's increasingly competitive business landscape, you and your team need every possible advantage to help you stand out.

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From analyzing customer data to perfecting the customer journey for your users, there's no shortage of things to do to give yourself an edge. Today's most successful businesses continue to turn to customer intelligence to help them improve their products and services and to implement an effective business strategy.

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

What is Customer intelligence?

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Customer intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data from internal and external sources. It plays a critical role in unlocking customer insights. 

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Customer intelligence (CI) covers everything from interviewing your customers and asking for direct feedback to looking at your data to know where there's room to optimize your funnel. 

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The customer intelligence process is not something you can check off your to-do list and call it a day. Instead, it's a never-ending process that will keep you competitive. 

How to turn customer data into actionable insights

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When a customer emails you, "Hey, can you add this feature?" they want you to use that data. In a perfect world, you could implement any feature a customer requests. Still, as you likely know all too well, resources are limited.

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To make matters worse, ensuring the data gets to the right team can take time and effort. Collecting data is easy, but turning that data into insights is the challenge. Unstructured data is one of the biggest challenges teams face today.

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It's not like your email messages have a data field that tells your engineering team, "Hey, build this." 

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At smaller companies, you can get by manually recording this information with rules like "Hey, if something important happens, log it in Salesforce." 

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At larger companies, this doesn't work. 

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The conversion of unstructured data to useful data is the most challenging part and where you can reap the most significant benefits. Turning unstructured data into helpful info is one of the most critical parts of a successful customer intelligence strategy.

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Today, many organizations are getting hundreds, if not thousands, of messages daily. And virtually none of that data is converted to easy-to-use insights automatically. 

Cracking the customer intelligence code: "turn noise into music."

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Imagine if all of the customer data across your company was working together (including your black holes, like email). Imagine the efficiency your organization can achieve when you're not only collecting relevant data but you know exactly what steps you and your team need to take. 

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This is customer intelligence at its finest.

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If your best customer posts a bug, it might not be a big deal. If your best customer complains about a bug in chat, email, and ticket system, well, someone better take a look.

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Before the emergence of customer intelligence platforms, this type of identification and triage was almost impossible, which is one of the biggest reasons we created Sturdy.

Analyzing customer data to win big with your business

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We should continue doing everything possible to mine our customer communications and develop strategic customer signals. Yet, many companies know more about their anonymous website visitors than their paying customers. 

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Truly understanding the customer journey of your customers from start to finish can pay massive dividends down the line. Understanding customer behavior and customer signals and being proactive in finding your users' pain points can dramatically improve the health of your business.

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Virtually every company has a way to track and monitor its website visitors—something we like to call table stakes. Yet, almost zero have any way to monitor and monetize the happiness of their actual customers.

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Here's a challenge...

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Answer this: If your company was about to lose a customer, who would be the best person to save that customer? What metrics would you use to support your answer?

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Most companies need customer intelligence data to answer this question.

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Let's take it one step further.

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How many times did a customer say, "You guys are great!" last month? How many times were those happy customers converted to references and case studies? And how many of those references are delivered to your sales team to help them close new business?

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Again, it's the 21st century.

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We realize the challenges of customer intelligence are great.

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But in this area, failure is unacceptable. To have a truly operationalized customer-focused company, you need to mine these communications without bias and without manual data entry.

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You need something that never gets tired, doesn't need training, and gets better as you throw more data at it. And most importantly, you can't wait until the quarterly business review is complete with triaging a churning customer.

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Customer intelligence solutions are the answer to staying relevant in today's business world. And here at Sturdy, we are on a mission to help businesses deliver better products, services, and experiences through actionable data.  

It's official: Announcing our SOC 2 Type II Report

Shortly after launching Sturdy, we started our SOC 2 certification process. A SOC 2 report is for services organizations that hold, store, or process the information of their users. You can read more about it here.

Late last year, we obtained our SOC 2 Type I report. This represents a "snapshot", indicating that we have robust controls in place to ensure the security and availability of our customers' data.

Today, we are announcing that Sturdy has obtained a SOC 2 Type II report. This is the most comprehensive SOC protocol, and attests not only to the suitability of our process and systems, but our operational effectiveness of sticking to those controls over a period of time.

The full writeup describes our suite of controls for securing and handling customer data, including:

• System monitoring and ongoing risk assessments
• Internal access control to production environments
• Disaster recovery, data backup, and incident response processes
• Communication of changes to customers
• Employee on-boarding and termination processes

We're proud of this report. It is a reflection of our dedication to security and the product of many months of hard work from our team, particularly Eric Weidner. Our commitment to security is about more than checking a box: every day we make sure that our systems and processes are worthy of the important data our customers trust us with.

Sturdy is a data-centric system of intelligence for post-sales teams. Working with data, including some of our customer's most sensitive information is what we do. We work to earn their trust by putting security and privacy front-and-center. This includes industry-leading controls, data minimization, and a secure-by-design architecture. Perhaps most importantly, we have built a security-conscious culture from Day 1: everyone at Sturdy knows that we solve for security first. You can read more about our processes and approach below.

Security Program

At SturdyAI, the security and integrity of our customer's information is of utmost importance. Therefore, Sturdy has developed and maintains a comprehensive Information Security Management program to manage risks to the security, availability, confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of Sturdy systems and products. Our program has been independently audited and certified to meet the requirements of Trust Services Criteria SOC2 Type II.

Privacy

Sturdy products utilize customer communication data to detect important signals that may have private information included such as names and contact information. To protect the privacy of this information, we maintain policies and processes to comply with data privacy regulations such as CCPA and GDPR and to help our customers comply with their obligations as the controllers of this data. Please see the Sturdy privacy policy for more information on data privacy practices and controls.

Infrastructure

Sturdy utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the Infrastructure-as-a-Service hosting provider. All data stored in AWS data centers located in the United States. Communications into our services are encrypted-in-transit and data is stored encrypted-at-rest using industry standard encryption mechanisms. Web application firewalls and network management tools such as VPC's, private subnets, and security groups are used to manage the flow of information and access between services. Infrastructure services are defined, managed, and deployed with Infrastructure-as-Code orchestration tools for consistent and repeatable systems.Tenant data is isolated in separate systems and production systems are kept in restricted access accounts separated from the development environments. 3rd-party penetration testing is conducted annually.

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Questions about Sturdy's security program? Contact us at security @ sturdy.ai. 

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We are excited to announce that we’ve raised $3.1M in a financing round led by Lawson DeVries at Grotech Ventures. We'd also like to welcome Lawson to the board of directors. He brings over 20 years of software-focused venture investing and management experience with him.

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Read the full press release here.

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The idea for SturdyAI came from running SaaS businesses for the past 15+ years.

Our “Aha!” moment was when we realized that our customers were actually telling us what they want and need, every day.

The idea for SturdyAI came from building, bootstrapping, and scaling successful SaaS businesses. While running companies we realized that there is an ever-growing body of valuable data being created by our users. This feedback is just sitting in email accounts, in video conferencing systems, in chat logs, and buried in ticketing systems. We founded SturdyAI to empower businesses to solve problems that we faced as entrepreneurs and executives. At the end of the day, running a SaaS company is about keeping customers and taking advantage of the long tail of subscription revenue.

With the subscription business model reaching near ubiquity in many industries, particularly in cloud-based software, driving dollar retention (NDR) has evolved as the most important business metric. Companies with higher dollar retention are simply healthier and more valuable. So how does a subscription-based business drive dollar retention? Our earliest decks talked about, “getting your data in one spot”. But that wasn’t the problem we were trying to solve (wanting to see all the data in one spot is a symptom, not a solution). The problem wasn’t really a communication problem, it was a mining and refining problem. The problem we solve is separating the signals form the noise.

When a customer requests a copy of her contract, that message must get forwarded to the "Saves Team" - immediately. Save a customer — improve NDR.

Customers give us information to run our businesses better, to predict churn, to capture references, to get in front of renewals, to prioritize features, yet these critical signals are trapped and decaying in dozens, if not hundreds of data silos. Our customers are giving us the "answer to the test" in Slack, Email, Zendesk, Salesforce, Gong, Zoom, etc. Today, the only way we utilize this information is if someone manually identifies, records and escalates it.

These signals are immensely valuable. For example, reducing churn from 10% to 9% in a $10 million ARR business means that every customer is worth $17k more in lifetime value. And reducing churn in this example is just saving 5 customers.

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Today's CX stack is missing a systems of intelligence. Sturdy fills the void.

Greylock's Jerry Chan may have coined the term system of intelligence. He wrote about the category in 2017 saying that "What makes a system of intelligence valuable is that it typically crosses multiple data sets, multiple systems of record." He actually predicted that SturdyAI would exist — "The next generation of enterprise products will use different artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to build systems of intelligence."

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SturdyAI’s customer intelligence and automation solution empowers B2B SaaS companies and other subscription-based businesses to: 

• Unify all sources of customer feedback like email, tickets, chats, call transcripts, surveys, and more, into a unified channel.
• Analyze all customer feedback for important business insights like churn triggers, contract requests, buyer changes, feature requests, quality of service issues, and more that help lift dollar retention (and more).
• Create just-in-time automations to drive insights to the people, teams, and systems that need them most to enable immediate actions.

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We're just getting started.

We aren’t here to reinvent and change the way teams or companies work — necessarily. And that is what is so exciting about what we do. SturdyAI is the force multiplier for your business. If you already have a cutting edge BI tool, we just give it better data. If you have a good CX app, we make it more insightful. If you have spent years perfecting your customer health score, we have a new data source to make it more accurate. If you have a great Customer Success, Account Management, Operations, Marketing, and Product teams, we make them more efficient and provide them with better data.

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“SaaS companies collect a ton of information from their customers every day, but much of it fails to convert to useful and actionable data. Now using AI and automations businesses can proactively understand whether their customers are likely to churn, which features will entice them to renew, are they experiencing bugs, are they happy or not, and much more.,” said Lawson DeVries, Managing General Partner, Grotech Ventures. “Customer retention and expansion are critical for SaaS businesses to maintain consistent growth trajectories, especially as we head into a more challenging environment for acquiring net new customers. Actionable customer intelligence is no longer a nice-to-have aspect for companies of all sizes – it is mission critical for businesses to thrive in today’s market. Grotech has a long history in this segment of the software market, and we are proud to be a catalyst to help fuel Sturdy’s continued strong growth and bring AI to companies that will need to do more with less now and in the future,” continued Mr. DeVries.

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“Churn doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a culmination of bug reports, feature requests, executive changes, response lags, unhappy sentiment, and more. Sturdy discovers the preemptive signals that help teams create more enduring relationships to lift dollar retention.,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of SturdyAI.

“Every SaaS company has a customer database of record, some have systems of action like customer success platforms but the critical component that most companies lack is a scalable system of intelligence — a system that listens to all of your customer feedback and routes the important things to the right people in the systems that they use every day. That is why we built Sturdy.”

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Interested in learning more about SturdyAI? Get in touch.

‍Churn hurts

No matter how great your sales machine is at acquiring new customers, unwanted customer churn creates a real drag on exponential growth. If you’re not thinking about churn, you’re probably living in your own fantasy world with dragons, fairies, and other magical creatures.

SaaS companies are banking on their subscription revenue compounding. This is only feasible if you hold onto your base. What’s more: without the base, you can’t upsell and expand.

How closely are you listening to customer feedback?

Search the internet for ways to prevent churn and you’ll find all kinds of good advice. But what if we told you that your customers are sending you signals every day that have potential impact on top line revenue?

Listening to customers is harder than it sounds.

Customer-facing teams at unicorns interact with thousands of customer accounts and tens of thousands of users every month via email, chat, support tickets, video conferences, surveys, and more. Nearly 20% of of this "feedback" contains valuable insights that teams can use to improve products, strengthen relationships, and reduce churn. 

You're invited

Join Joel Passen, 3x CRO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai, for a live 30 minute product talk to see how innovative customer-facing teams are leveraging AI-based solutions to better understand, improve, and expand customer relationships — and battle churn! 

Jun 7, 2022 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Register here

During this product talk you’ll learn:

• How post-sales teams are leveraging data that has previously been hiding in plain sight to detect potential churn
• How CX teams can easily deploy AI-based technology to gain new insights on how to deliver value to their customers
• How product, customer advocacy, and leadership teams can access unbiased customer insights

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Teams at payroll companies interact with hundreds of customers every month via email, chat, support tickets, video calls, surveys, etc. Everyday customer conversations create an enormous and ultra-valuable data set.

On average, a $10m payroll company produces more than 10,000 customer conversations every month. Nearly 20% of those conversations contain valuable information that teams can use to improve client retention rates and improve the overall customer experience.
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Stay competitive. Start improving processes, relationships, and revenue by using the most valuable data you already have: the conversations you’re having every day with customers.

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Save your spot. Register now.

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Join Sturdy’s CRO, Joel Passen (Paycor, Newton), for 30 minutes to see how innovative teams are leveraging customer conversations to impact the top line with Sturdy’s modern customer intelligence solution to:

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- Gather valuable customer intelligence at scale
- Automate repetitive, inefficient, yet critical tasks
- Turn the voice of the customer into actionable outcomes

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Live Workshop: Leveraging Language for Customer Intelligence

Apr 28, 2022 10:00 AM Pacific  / 1:00 PM Eastern

Register here

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In B2B SaaS businesses, customer-facing teams interact with hundreds of customers every month via email, chat, support tickets, and video calls. Nearly 20% of those conversations contain valuable information that teams can use to improve products, strengthen relationships, and impact revenue. For subscription-based businesses, the insights that can be derived from a company’s language cube makes accessing this data a business imperative for leaders.

Customer language is an enormous data set. On average, a $30m B2B SaaS company produces more than 10,000 customer conversations every month. How closely are you listening?

Capturing, consolidating, and analyzing the true voice of the customer sounds like a good idea, right? To be a successful customer leader, your teams must be able to devise new ways to improve the overall customer experience and, at the same time, drive value. With a plan in place to use customer language — the authentic voice of the customer — your line of business is empowered to influence customer engagement through better product inputs, build deeper relationships with multiple stakeholders, and drive revenue retention and net dollar retention.

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You and your team are invited! 

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Join Cynthia Beldner, Customer Success and Operations leader, for 30 minutes to see how innovative teams are leveraging customer conversations to:

- Gather valuable customer intelligence at scale

- Automate repetitive, inefficient yet critical tasks

- Turn the voice of the customer into data any team can access and use

This is also a great opportunity to see Sturdy in action.

Save your spot. Register now.

Sturdy’s two-way Salesforce integration makes customer insights – about products, processes, relationships, and revenue – actionable, trackable and reportable in any object in Salesforce.

Sturdy is a customer intelligence solution trusted by leading CX, product, and operations leadership at some of the most innovative B2B SaaS companies.

This easy to implement solution is designed to help businesses and organizations improve their products, processes, relationships, and revenue by using the most valuable data they already have: the conversations they’re having every day. Not only can Sturdy detect signals in conversations — in real time — accurately, now it can automatically push critical signals and insights to systems and humans that need this critical information the most - no coding required. 

How to Enable Your Team

Sturdy detects events and insights– executive change, expansion opportunities, unhappiness – from your emails, call transcripts, chats, support tickets (wherever customers are talking with you)! The full details of the conversation and signals detected are sent to Salesforce. A new Signal Event is assigned to the right team member and, of course, recorded to enhance reporting, health scores, etc.

See for Yourself

Interested to learn more about how the Sturdy Customer Intelligence Platform can help empower your teams with the insights to build better products, relationships, and processes to help you teams scale? Request a demo and we’ll be happy to show you.