Sturdy Signals

What is a customer Signal?

By
Joel Passen
July 7, 2021
5 min read

Customer Signal
(noun) a gesture, action, or 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 in Slack, Email, Salesforce, Webinars, training sessions, quarterly business reviews, Zoom calls, etc. 

For B2B SaaS businesses, 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 (500 customers, $20k annual contract value). And reducing churn in this example is saving just five customers a year. 

Examples of customer Signals

Identifying, classifying, and escalating customer Signals to the right people at the right time empowers companies with information and insights to preempt issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities to improve the bottom line. 

For example, when a customer asks, “Can I have a copy of our contract?” in a support ticket, a Signal is sent. In a SaaS environment, the customer is likely signaling risk. Maybe they are evaluating a competitor. Maybe there has been an executive change or a shift in priorities. Regardless, every SaaS leader will agree that this signal needs to be escalated so action can be taken. 

Below are a few other examples of customer Signals. This is not an exhaustive list; every company will vary on what is important. An interesting exercise is to sit down and list out the Signals that your teams should be watching for. The output of this exercise can be used to improve operations, user experience, training workflows, and more.  


Examples of customer Signals

Where to find Customer Signals

Most of us have given our customers the ability to communicate with us using a variety of channels. After all, we want to hear from them. This allows us to gauge their health, status, and likelihood of buying more of our products and services. 

Given the prevalence of multi-channel communications workflows, critical Signals are often trapped in layers of technology across multiple teams, gathering digital dust. The most common scenario for most businesses is that important customer Signals are hiding in plain sight. They’re trapped in email accounts, ticketing systems, call transcriptions, chat logs, and CRMs. And for most of us, the only way we utilize this information is if someone manually identifies, records, and escalates it.

How to use customer Signals 

In today’s competitive SaaS environment, the most successful companies are learning to “listen” and interpret the Signals that their customers are giving them about their products and services. The category-leading companies are doing this at scale - automatically. 

With SturdyAI, teams can easily sign up for alerts on specific Signals, accounts, and even competitor mentions. For example, the most appropriate team member in any group can get an alert whenever:

  • One of your customers requests a copy of their contract or asks about their renewal date
  • An account has a new executive, point of contact, or executive sponsor
  • A user asks for information about adding more users or adding a new product or service
  • One of your customers mentions one or more of your competitors
  • A user reports an outage or bug
  • A customer is signaling satisfaction and, ultimately, referenceability

What’s exciting about customer Signals

Customer Signals undoubtedly help us understand our customers better. Specifically, by defining and leveraging Signals at scale, we can have a clear understanding if our products are delivering the value promised at the time of the sale. We can also better understand if our customers are willing to grow with us or if they are growing away from us. 

Rapid advancements in technology, especially AI, are making it easier to help brands quickly and responsibly use data to understand customer behaviors and predict customer needs. When we have the ability to discover new patterns and insights in our data, we are better able to anticipate future decisions. In the end, harnessing customer Signals presents opportunities—and incentives—to deliver better service and find new ways to grow.

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Software

STURDY.AI ANNOUNCES $6M SEED ROUND

Joel Passen
April 1, 2025
5 min read

Sturdy's Customer Intelligence Platform performs real-time revenue threat root cause analysis, and delivers cross-functional insights to the teams and systems to mitigate churn.

Portland, OR — April 1, 2025 — Sturdy.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered customer intelligence, today announced it has raised $6M in Series Seed funding. Voyager Capital led this round, with participation from Fortson VC as well as existing investor, Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to deepen Sturdy’s AI capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.

Modern Teams Need Actionable Intelligence to Protect and Grow Revenue

With customer expectations higher than ever and retention under pressure, the need for proactive, AI-driven revenue insights has never been more urgent. According to industry data, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Enterprises have spent millions on building silos of applications to get closer to their customers and create active communication channels in the hope of mitigating churn risk early. Yet, this has failed to provide the proactive warning signals required. Sturdy closes the gap by seeing across these silos for a unified view of customer communication.

“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”

Investors Bet Big on AI-Powered Revenue Threat Detection

The funding round attracted a strong syndicate of investors aligned on Sturdy’s vision for a more innovative, AI-native approach to revenue intelligence. Voyager Capital, known for backing category-defining SaaS platforms, led the round, with General Partner Diane Fraiman joining Sturdy's board.

“Sturdy is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in enterprise software—how to extract proactive insights from the flood of daily customer interactions,” said Diane Fraiman, Managing Director of Voyager Capital. “Retention has become a critical topic in boardrooms. We believe that every business will have a system of intelligence in the next 3 years. Sturdy’s platform is positioned to become essential infrastructure for any company serious about protecting and growing revenues while truly putting their customers first.”

“Sturdy is one of the most powerful and immediate applications of AI and natural language processing we’ve seen,” said Thomas O’Keefe, CEO of Solo LLC. “At both Solo and previously at Syntrio, it has delivered instant value—surfacing proactive, actionable customer insights and driving measurable improvements in retention.”

About Voyager

Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast early-stage venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies for today’s modern economy. Voyager invests primarily in B2B technology companies, including AI-driven business solutions, software-driven hardware, sustainable agriculture, and supply chain. The firm's domain expertise, go-to-market, and team-building resources are proven to help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has over $550 million under management with offices and resources in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and Calgary. 

About Fortson VC

Fortson VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in the Pacific Northwest, built for exceptionally rare founders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.  Led by Cole Younger, Fortson brings over two decades of early-stage investing experience and a disciplined approach grounded in authenticity, grit, and courage.  While driven by curiosity, our primary focus is B2B software and the technological frontier around it—the infrastructure, intelligence, and automation shaping the future of how businesses create value.

About Grotech Ventures

Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the technology landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.0 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting as small as $500,000. For more information, visit http://www.grotech.com.

About Sturdy

Founded in 2020, Sturdy is an AI-forward autonomous Customer Intelligence platform that proactively identifies churn risks across all customer-facing silos. Sturdy analyzes unstructured customer interactions—emails, calls, support tickets, chats, and more—discovering revenue threats, pinpointing root causes, and delivering cross-functional insights in real time. Sturdy has analyzed billions of customer interactions, giving it one of the largest proprietary datasets in the category and enabling its models to surface insights faster and more accurately than competitors. At a time when customer retention is a top priority for every business, Sturdy turns the noise of customer conversations into a strategic advantage.

For more information, visit www.sturdy.ai or reach out to Joel Passen at joel@sturdy.ai

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy now integrates with Jira

Joel Passen
March 10, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever to turn customer feedback into action while saving businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. With Sturdy’s new Jira Connect, any AI-powered Signal in Sturdy can be automatically logged in Jira—helping teams capture, prioritize, and resolve issues faster than ever.

Sturdy for Jira is a Game Changer

Every team needs to know more about their customers. 

Turn customer feedback into valuable Jira content automatically. Sturdy’s AI accurately detects feature requests, bug reports, and other critical product feedback. Customizable agents then deliver this context-rich intelligence to a configurable staging area in Jira with all relevant user and account details, such as segment, ARR, and more. The content is objectively summarized automatically. From there, assigning it to an epic, task, sprint, or release is just one click.

Productivity Gains that Move the Needle

Businesses are unknowingly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on something as simple as manually logging Jira issues. A single customer-facing rep wastes nearly 87 hours annually on repetitive data entry—scaling up to a staggering $354,200 per year for a team of 100 reps. By integrating Sturdy’s AI-driven automation, businesses can reclaim thousands of hours, improve productivity, and reinvest those savings into growth and innovation—all while ensuring more accurate, real-time data flows into Jira effortlessly.

Align product teams with customer reality.

By centralizing AI-powered insights in Jira, Sturdy ensures that product and engineering teams get a complete, objective picture of what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to be built—without relying on anecdotal feedback. Customer-reported issues appear in Jira moments after they happen, ensuring your product and engineering teams stay ahead of emerging trends and critical bugs—without the lag of traditional reporting.

Effortless setup, immediate impact.

Sturdy’s turnkey integration takes minutes to configure. Once connected, your team gains instant access to context-rich, structured feedback—helping you make faster, data-driven decisions that improve customer satisfaction.

Want to get started? Click the 'Schedule Demo' button at the top of the page.

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy Now Analyzes Customer Slack Channels

Joel Passen
March 3, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever for teams to tap into the power of customer conversations. With this integration, Sturdy’s AI-driven insights—trained to spot key behaviors and trends unique to your business—are now right where your team works. That means more proactive decisions, better collaboration, and a serious productivity boost.

Here’s how Sturdy works with Slack.

  • Get the right insights, right in Slack. Sturdy delivers AI-powered Signals where your team already works, flagging risks, expansion opportunities, and other key moments in real-time. No more digging through conversations—just actionable insights when you need them.

  • Stay on top of every conversation. If your team works asynchronously in Slack channels, it’s easy for important feedback to get lost. Sturdy keeps you ahead by surfacing critical insights before they slip through the cracks.

  • Act fast, not after the fact. Whether it’s a service risk, a feature request, or a potential upsell, Sturdy helps teams spot and respond to what matters—without disrupting their workflow.

Seamless sync with your tools. Sturdy doesn’t just stop at Slack. Insights discovered in customer Slack channels automatically flow into Jira, CSPs, CRMs, and other systems, ensuring the right teams get the right info—without extra work.

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

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