Navigating AI Ethics

If improving revenue retention is a key priority in FY25, here is some food for thought. If you believe data is the essential foundation for improving retention, imagine the possibilities with 50-100x more data about your customers. Here’s the thing: Every business has this customer data, but 99% of businesses are sleeping on a data set that could change their business. It’s the unstructured data that’s sitting in ticketing systems, CRMs, chat systems, surveys, and the biggest silo by volume - corporate email systems. Most of us still rely on structured data like usage, click rates, and engagement logs to gauge our customers' health. However, structured data provides only a partial view of customer behavior and revenue drivers. Unstructured data—like customer emails, chats, tickets, and calls —holds the most valuable insights that, when leveraged, will significantly improve revenue outcomes.

Why Unstructured Data is Essential for Revenue GrowthImproving Customer Retention: Unstructured data helps businesses identify early warning signs of dissatisfaction, allowing them to create proactive interventions before customers churn. Repeated mentions of poor experiences, response lags, product-related frustration, and more in call transcripts, cases, and emails indicate potential churn risks. By identifying these trends while they are trending, businesses will improve retention.

Fueling Product Innovation: Let’s face it: Our customers bought a product or service. Post-sales teams don’t develop products and are limited in what they can directly impact. Product teams need more unbiased, unfiltered contextual customer data, and they need it consistently. Unstructured data provides real-time feedback on how customers use products and services. Businesses can analyze customer feedback from multiple channels to identify recurring requests and pain points. This data fuels product innovation and informs customer-led roadmaps that lead to higher engagement rates and more profound value. Developing products that directly respond to customer feedback leads to faster adoption, better advocacy, and a competitive advantage.

Identifying Expansion Opportunities: Unstructured data reveals customer needs and preferences that structured data often overlooks. Businesses can uncover untapped expansion opportunities by analyzing email, chats, and case feedback. These insights help identify additional products or services that interest customers, leading to new upsell or cross-sell possibilities. To drive immediate improvements in revenue retention, the key isn't pouring resources into complex churn algorithms, chatbots, or traditional customer success platforms—it's being more creative with the data you're already collecting. Start listening more closely to your customers, identify the patterns in their pain points, and share this knowledge with your peers who can improve your offerings. This is the year to start thinking outside of the box.

Last year, I bought a pair of ski pants and the zipper fell out on the first chair lift. I called Burton, and they offered an exchange. New pants, first chair, same problem. Support informed me that I was required to return the pants for repair. The repairs would be completed after ski season. For the inconvenience, Burton offered me a 20% discount on my next purchase of skiwear. The next time I am in the market for skiwear that I can't wear during ski season, I will use that coupon.

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I started my first business over 25 years ago. Since that day, I have lived in an almost constant state of fear that somehow, somewhere, things would get so broken that we'd treat a customer like this.

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Let's be clear, no one who runs a business wants stuff like this to happen. Yet, it happens all the time.

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If you run a software company, your engineering team will have usage tools and server logs to tell you when your product is "down" or running slowly. They can report which features are being used and which ones aren't. You'll learn that certain features in your product cost more to run than others, maybe because of a bad query, code, or something else. And you'll know what needs to be upgraded.

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However, every time a customer contacts a business, they are "using" (or "testing") your product. If you sell ski pants, your product is ski pants, and your customer service team. If you sell software, your product is your tech and your customer service.

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Yet, your customer-facing teams have very poor usage data, if any at all. Which feature of our service gets used the most (billing, success, support)? What are the common themes? Is one group working more effectively than the others? Does a team need an upgrade? 

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(BTW, what costs more, your AWS bill or your payroll?)

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The reason your customer-facing teams don't have usage data is because this data is "unstructured," and it is everywhere. Imagine if your engineering team needed to check 50 email inboxes, 1,000 phone recordings, a CRM, and a ticket system to get your product usage statistics. 

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That's where your customer-facing teams are today. Until you can get answers from these systems as easily as an engineer can, you’ll continue to churn, annoy customers, and try to hire your way out of a retention problem. It won’t work.

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(The image attached to this post is not entirely accurate but read on, and I’ll explain)

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.

After one of my interviews, I received a text with a quote by the former CEO of Swedish Airlines, Jan Carlzon.

An individual without information can’t take responsibility. An individual with information can’t help but take responsibility.

There are many different “things”’ that impact revenue: bad service, confusing products, poor response times, overselling, bug reports, price, whacky renewal processes, etc. You already knew this.

You know a lot about economic conditions, because that information is widely, and publicly available. You probably know a fair amount about “Sales Things” because your team is talking about “percent to goal” in almost every meeting, and there are a lot of discussions about what’s working and what isn’t. And, you likely review almost every deal in your pipeline.

What would happen if the opportunities in your pipeline were randomly placed in your ticket systems, CRMs, and a smattering of email inboxes? Knowing what was working with sales would get more difficult, if not impossible.

Today, the issues that affect service, product, marketing, etc., are randomly smattered across every customer-facing system in your business. The only way you “know” they happen is if someone else decides they are important enough to log or forward.

How do you get the information you need to make an impact?

Where is the information your product team needs to know?

Where is the information that your pricing team needs to know?

Where is the information that your renewals team needs to know?

If your Product Marketing Manager wants to know how their new pricing plan is working, what would inform that? A pretty good source—I’d argue the best source—of that information is sitting in emails, tickets, and call transcripts. But, if you are a Product Marketing Manager, you don’t have access to tickets, call transcripts, or customer emails.

You’ve been paywalled.

If you want to know what features to fix, there’s a data point in your Support Chatbot. When your Renewals Manager needs information on an account , they need to scroll through tickets and ask a few people, “What’s going on with this account?”

As a result, every business has smart people who rely on other people to log things, categorize things, and forward things. This is why our teams have logins to systems they seldom use -  so they can find a “thing” they might need.

The irony is that the information you need to know to do your job effectively is harder to source than the information about things you can’t control.

You probably know the inflation rate. If you don’t, you can discover it in one search.

Your VP of CS probably doesn’t know “What’s the most common source of customer frustration in the last 90 days?” Why? Because that information is splashed across your business in a host of silos that VP can’t access. Imagine trying to do that job, without that answer.

Imagine if that VP could answer that question in one search, using what customers are actually saying to every person in your business.

This paywalling has made our businesses fragile and slow. The hints of the B2B slowdown were arriving at our doorsteps in emails and tickets for months. “We’re cutting costs”. “Procurement wants a discount.” Why didn’t we see this coming? Because we weren’t looking for it, and couldn’t find it.

Time to get faster, and sturdier. You have smart people who can take responsibility. Bust the paywalls and give them information they need to react and act.

Do that hard things,

Steve

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