AI tips & trends

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.

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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