AI tips & trends

It is widely known that it costs five times as much to acquire new customers than it does to keep existing ones. Renewals are tied to more than just LTV (Lifetime Value), they also directly influence customer acquisition costs (CAC), budgeting, margins, and brand reputation. According to Gartner Group Statistics, 80% of your future profits will come from 20% of your existing customers. Renewals are the lifeblood of SaaS businesses. This is why we are excited to announce our latest language model that detects when customers are conversing about - Renewals.

Here is how it works.

Sturdy is an AI + automations 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. Next, using Sturdy's no-code automation engine, the signal is routed to the appropriate account manager or teammate (who likely would never have been notified or notified too late) who can take action.

In addition to relying on top-of-the-funnel demand gen activities to bring in new business, leaders must turn their attention to a key source of growth hiding in plain sight- your customers (we have a signal for this too - Expansion). Systematically detecting critical business signals like renewals and ensuring that the appropriate people on your team are responding quickly needs to be part of your growth playbook.

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Whether your SaaS business serves 500 or 500,000 users, success hinges on relationships with your users. Unfortunately, listening to users isn't all that easy given the volume of everyday communications and the number of tools in play like email, ticketing systems, chat, video calls, Gong, etc. To compound matters, users are often communicating with multiple people on multiple teams. Deriving value from this data set that is practically hiding in plain sight has been, until now, nearly impossible.

Enter automation. Automation allows you to better understand your relationships with users and provide a better user experience in the process. Automation in this context is the process of using AI and robotic process automation to discover insights and trigger actions at scale.

Introducing Sturdy Automations

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. Build out new combinations tailored to the needs of specific teams that want more information about your company’s users. Then extend workflows in the systems they work in the most. Today, Sturdy customers can begin adding custom automations in a few easy steps. 

Step 1. Choose a Signal

The first step in building your automations is to pick a signal. A signal is transmission delivered intentionally or unintentionally by a customer that conveys information, instructions, or insights. Customers send signals that help us predict churn, capture references, get in front of renewals, prioritize features, and just run our businesses better. Our customers are giving us this information every day in email, tickets, chats, calls, and more. In fact, we know that nearly 17% of all user-to-business communications contain a signal.

Step 2: Select a field

Depending on the signal you've chosen in step one, you will then select a field. A field is a set of identifiers and attributes that describe a customer. Common examples of a field may include the customer ARR, segment, territory, support level, even custom fields are pulled into Sturdy. The list of fields is populated via API from your master customer database of record like Salesforce.com. 

Step 3: Set a value

Now that the first part of our automation (signal + field) is ready, it is time to pick a value. Like fields, values are populated from your master customer database sent to Sturdy via API. For our automation, we selected the field Salesforce Account Customer Segment. The corresponding value in Salesforce is a monetary value imported from a pick list in Salesforce.com.

Step 4: Pick someone to notify

Your automation recipe is nearly complete. Now you just need to pick someone or a system to notify. To customize the exact notification that will occur, pick a notification method. Email and Slack are automatically enabled and available today. In just a few weeks, you can add Salesforce, your CSP, Jira, etc. 

What’s next. 

In the next few months, we’ll empower Sturdy users to create longer and more complex automation recipes with multi-step automations. And, later this year, our plan is to create a library of pre-prepared recipes to make it even easier to get started. 

Let's talk about the potentiality of happy users. They stay with your business longer and, on average, they spend 67% more than new customers. The power of user advocacy is punctuated by the demonstrable success of NPS leaders. In Fred Reichheld's recent book, The Ultimate Question 2.0 he notes that over the past decade the firms with the highest brand loyalty and subsequent NPS scores returned five times the U.S. median (for public companies with +$500m in revenue).

Happy users often require less support and inspire your customer-facing teams to deliver similar experiences across your user base. They provide valuable testimonials, reviews, references, and case studies. That’s we developed Sturdy's - Happy Signal. 

Here’s how it works. We’ve built technology that detects items of importance like user happiness, among other things, in user-to-business communications like email, support tickets, video conferences, chats and more. For example, when a user responds to an email or support ticket with, “I can’t thank you enough --- you just saved me so much time! You’re the best!”,  Sturdy will instantly recognize this as a signal, flag it, and get it to the right teammates.

Most businesses use CRM, spreadsheets, and reference management tools as the go-to location to find and request references but they lack functionality to build a sustainable customer reference pipeline. Continuously building a pipeline of references is a key use case and measurable value proposition for Sturdy.

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.

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The 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.

Sturdys newest business signal is live in customer accounts. The Response Lag signal calls out when users are waiting for responses from customer-facing teams and are chasing your associates for updates, actions, access, etc. How do we do this? We start by ingesting every customer communication (emails, tickets, calls, chats, etc.). Then we use NLP/AI to discover signals like Response Lag. Next we transmit those signals to the people and systems so action can be taken.

While top line monetization opportunities tend to get the attention, often the biggest, near-term lift for B2B SaaS and SaaS-enabled businesses is operational in nature. The Response Lag signal gives managers insights into areas for service improvement and illuminates coaching opportunities that, ultimately, help to foster better relationships with customers. ‍

Next up is our Security signal. It detects when Customers indicate in their conversation some sort of security concern, like: “Have you had a data breach?” Appropriately, look for the red customer signal called Security. 

Expansion is a critical stage of a successful SaaS growth strategy and the overall customer journey. It’s all about further monetizing the customers you have, and broadening your footprint so you have a larger target market to pursue. That’s why we are excited to announce that we’ve added a new customer signal to our AI-powered customer intelligence platform called “Expansion”. 

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

Given the volume of customer conversations across various communications channels, valuable customer signals like those that imply account growth are often trapped in layers of technology, across multiple teams, gathering digital dust. Our newest signal, Expansion, cuts through the noise and across silos to help customer success and account management teams seize on critical upsell opportunities. 

Want to get Expansion signals? Getting started is refreshingly easy and won't strain your internal resources. 95% of the initial work to get started is done by the team at SturdyAI. Sturdy leverages data that you are already collecting with existing systems (email, CRM, ticketing systems, video conferencing, etc) and can be configured to leverage those same systems to receive insights so your teammates can work in the platforms they are most accustomed to. Clients typically start receiving their first customer signals in less than 4 weeks. Realizing value thereafter is nearly immediate. No change management or IT resources required!

Sturdy's Data Engineering team has been hard at work developing new customer Signals. 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?”. By listening for this type of interaction, SturdyAI users get immediate access to insights like:

• Which new or existing features do your customers need help with, either because they are confused by them or because they are very interested 

• When seemingly small UI/UX issues become trends

• Which customers could benefit from more training, helping you to develop your champions

• How to improve your knowledge base, help text, and self-serve content   

Next up, we’ll launch our new Expansion Signal. This signal will help to identify when your customers express purchasing intent like adding more users, buying services, or upgrading their plan.   

It’s weird to be happy to announce a new customer signal called ... Unhappy. Strange but true. 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. 

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The Unhappy Signal is the first of many new Signals to come.

Unhappy is one signal in a series of new signals that Sturdy’s Data Sciences team is developing. The team is also exploring innovative ways to correlate causes of the negative sentiment with specific signals. For example, Sturdy will be able to show how specific bugs or account leadership changes impact customer sentiment. For those less familiar with what we are developing, the Sturdy platform scans emails, chats, support tickets, and other related customer communications. It then automatically detects signals that impact revenue, product roadmaps, references, and more. 

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Customer success, account management, customer marketing, and product teams use Sturdy.

Customer success, account management, customer marketing, and product teams can now more easily surface what is occurring, but also discern why it is happening because the platform automatically provides contextual highlights. That’s critical because all too often, the onslaught of customer communications is smothered by the sheer volume of messages. These large unstructured data sets stored in multiple systems in the cloud are not easy for companies to use on their own 

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No training, no change management required.

We aren’t here to reinvent and change the way teams or companies work. 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 killer CX app, we make it more insightful. If you have 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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More about us.

Led by a team of seasoned founders and B2B SaaS experts, Sturdy.ai is unlocking massive value from data hiding in plain sight. Using AI, Sturdy helps P&L holders preempt customer issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities in time to improve this quarter's results. Sturdy’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform detects critical signals from your customers and routes them to the right people at your company in real time, unlocking value and reinforcing process execution. 

Sturdy.ai is joining fellow SaaS technology innovators Prodoscore and Update.ai to share our solutions with the Colorado Customer Success community. Members will learn about the newest technologies available to customer success teams in an engaging format featuring live product demonstrations. 

Customer success leaders and team members will  briefly kick the tires on some exciting new offerings that can help lift customer retention rates, deliver better customer experiences, and increase productivity.‍

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When: Wed, October 13, 2021 at 4:00pm MDT

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Where: Register for free here

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Who should join? 

If you're a cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, MSP, mobile) manager whose mission is to onboard, serve, retain, and grow customer relationships, this regional community is for you! Meetups feature networking, learning, and sharing ideas to combat customer churn and increase loyalty. This is a local chapter of the Customer Success Association (http://www.customersuccessassociation.com). Topics include new technologies, "best practices," management systems, and people dynamics. Attendance is free and all are welcome.

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About Sturdy:

Led by a team of seasoned founders and B2B SaaS experts, Sturdy.ai is unlocking massive value from data hiding in plain sight. Using AI, Sturdy helps P&L holders preempt customer issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities in time to improve this quarter's results. Sturdy’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform detects critical signals from your customers and routes them to the right people at your company in real time, unlocking value and reinforcing process execution. 

It happens all the time, and you’re often the last to know. Your sponsor, once your economic buyer and advocate, is on the move. Gone. Losing an executive sponsor or senior point of contact is a catalyst for churn. Often “Executive Change” is reported as unavoidable churn. But is it? ‍

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Here’s How It Happens

Surviving an executive change is possible - even likely

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Surviving an executive change is more realistic if you have a plan. Winging it and leaving a save to chance is not a winning solution. Your plan needs to start well before you receive news that your sponsor has departed. Ideally,  you need to start by understanding your customers’ organizational structure and power chain. You need to understand how decisions get made. Post-sale teams should continually blueprint accounts looking for additional executive-level advocates. Also, risk is mitigated when you leverage your champion to create co-champions that will advocate for you when there is a shake up. A good rule is to create and foster at least three key advocates within each customer account. Ideally, these stakeholders should be cross-functional representing finance, IT, and functional teams. 

Even when you do have a process in place to address loss of sponsor, the news is often blindsiding. More likely than not, executives don’t share their transition plans with anyone outside their org with advance warning. Otherwise, signals of change are often unconsciously ignored due to the sheer volume of communications your team is dealing with. Worse yet, what if requests like our example above land with a teammate that simply responds with a copy of the contract unaware of the gravity of the situation? 

If your heart is racing and your palms are sweaty, you’re not alone. We’ve been there. That is why one of the first language models that we developed and trained when we started Sturdy was executive change. 

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Detecting customer Signals ‍

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So how do you detect executive change signals? There are some hacks out there. The easiest to implement is one that leverages LinkedIn Sales Navigator. If you have a paid account, set up “Career Change” alerts in LISN. This will work for smaller companies with 20-50 customers but gets too noisy at any kind of scale. The big constraint is that you can't filter the alert by decision makers only. This would be a good feature for LISN though by the time your DM updates their profile with a new role, the window of opportunity to save the account likely will have closed. 

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At Sturdy, we use our own product to detect executive change signals. Sturdy analyzes emails, tickets, chats, and video calls listening for signals of executive change. When it detects language synonymous with the loss of a sponsor, it flags the conversations and alerts our stakeholders immediately. Our alerts are sent to a Slack channel called #executive-change. At our stage, this is quite effective and still manageable. Eventually, we’ll connect Sturdy to our case management tool creating a more sophisticated closed-loop process.  

Below is the same message from the top of this post but this one was run through the Sturdy AI Inference Engine. It’s been accurately flagged with customer signals indicating executive change and a high probability of churn. This message triggered a real time alert to our customer operations team. 

Reacting to an executive change

We think about signals as lead generation for inquiry and action. And, as with sales leads, acting with urgency yields the best outcomes. Borrowing from our sales / marketing SLA, our requirement is to follow up on executive change signals inside of 1 hour. This makes us seven times more likely to schedule a meeting with the customer in the same week as the signal was received. Having a set timeline, we prevent procrastination and promote action.  

Otherwise, we have a defined play that we run. The play has 3 phases and we train our workmates on this and other plans on an on-going basis. Here is an outline from our post-sales playbook for executive change. 

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The loss of an executive sponsor is a red-level risk event. Winging it doesn’t save customers. You need a defined process in place to mitigate account churn and solution downgrades. Team members need to investigate the account vitals quickly. Information should be gathered from other client stakeholders. If a new sponsor is in place, a briefing should be scheduled ASAP. Show the new leader what’s in it for them. Clearly emphasize the value your solution delivers. Minimize their risk. Show them the future. Give them an easy win. 

A reminder of why it matters 

The B2B SaaS industry is maturing quickly. Competition is fierce. Category leading post-sale teams focused on customer retention and monetization are building capabilities to significantly contribute to top line growth. For example, A $100M ARR Company with 2000 customers saves 30 customers in Year 1, dropping its churn from 8 to 6.5%. By maintaining this churn rate, its revenue in year 1 will be $1.6m higher. By year 5, $25m, and by year 10 almost $170m higher (50k ACV, 5% upgrade rate, 30% growth rate). Look at these numbers through an investor’s lens where some companies are valued at 25x earnings. Those are some real numbers. Saving a couple dozen customers a year really adds up. 

Summary

The loss of an executive sponsor is a red-level risk event but it doesn’t need to be fatal. 

1. Preventative measures like fostering multiple executive-level relationships to develop cross functional advocates significantly mitigates risks. Go wider. Go cross-functional. Have no less than three key executive contacts at every account. 
2. Building a process or deploying technology to detect risk is key. Knowing is more than half the battle in this instance. 
3. Creating a defined process to manage a loss of sponsor event is imperative as is training team members to respond with urgency. 
4. Creating a culture that reinforces the importance of retention and customer monetization is a key to motivating high performance post-sales teams. 
   

Sturdy, a revenue retention solution using AI-powered conversational analysis that identifies opportunities and preempts risks hidden in everyday customer conversations, is pleased to announce its integration on the Zendesk Marketplace.

Sturdy has developed an integration with Zendesk that enables Zendesk customers to tap into data that, for most, has been hiding in plain sight - the customer-generated content of tickets and chats within Zendesk.

Sturdy already works with Zendesk customers and helps them by:

• Increasing customer retention rates by .5-2%: Sturdy surfaces actionable insights that signal indicators of customer churn like executive and sponsor changes, contract requests, poor sentiment, and more. 
• Increasing customer lifetime value by 5-15%: Sturdy amplifies the unbiased voice of the customer while detecting customer signals such as feature requests, bug reports, outages, renewals, and upsell opportunities. Use of these signals enables teams to better understand their customers’ needs. 
• Increasing team member efficiency: Sturdy’s customer signals cut through the noise of email and tickets so team members can resolve the most revenue-sensitive issues quickly and with the relevant context. 
• Increasing customer references by 10-25%: Sturdy listens for signals of referenceability and serves a lead-generation for customer marketing and customer advocacy teams. 

The integration between Sturdy and Zendesk involves the use of Sturdy's AI technology to detect critical custom-generated signals from everyday communications like tickets and chat sessions. Once detected, customer signals are routed to the appropriate team members to take action resulting in revenue preservation, revenue generation and the gathering of critical trends that provide insights into customer behaviors. 
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"We are excited to partner with Zendesk and we share their mission to improve customer experiences," said Joel Passen, one of Sturdy’s co-founders. Leveraging AI and ML, we turn previously underutilized sources of customer content (tickets and chats) into actionable data that amplifies the voice of the customer and automates critical processes resulting in improved customer outcomes and, ultimately, revenue retention for SaaS enterprises.”
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To learn more about Sturdy's products, please visit sturdy.ai
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To learn more about Sturdy's integration with Zendesk, go to https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/sturdyai/?q=mkp_sturdy
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About Sturdy:

Led by a team of seasoned founders, Sturdy is unlocking massive value from data hiding in plain sight. Using AI, Sturdy helps P&L holders preempt customer issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities in time to improve this quarter's results. Sturdy’s AI-powered customer operations platform detects critical signals from your customers and routes them to the right people at your company in real time, unlocking value and reinforcing process execution.