From Pilot to Powerhouse: How Staircase AI Rewired Our CS Culture

Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining our session. I'm John Lauer. I'm Matt Bird.

All right, let's make this happen. All right, so first of all, ConnectWise, I'll let Matt introduce our company. Yeah, so ConnectWise is a software company who provides software for essential businesses in IT industry. So we're excited to be here, talk a little bit more about our adventure with Staircase.

Absolutely, and so that everyone knows the technologies that we'll be talking about that we use at ConnectWise from Gainsight is Staircase.cs as well as Staircase.ai. So that's not our total tech stack, but that's what we'll be focusing on in this session. All right, so we want to do a poll. I think we have a poll set up.

Maybe we do, maybe we don't. But anyway, we want to identify where everyone is at with their current AI journey, where their adoption is at. And so we'll just do a show of hands, I guess, would be fine. So we can get a sense of where we are.

So we just gave some basic categories here. If you're starting, so you're looking, you're trying to identify what works for you, what may or may not be something that you want to engage in with AI. And then as you move on from there, there's collecting, which many people are in today. You're piloting things, you're trying different technologies, you have some [INAUDIBLE] out there in your organization.

And then we have organize, so you've really started down the path in all the right ways. You've selected vendors, you might have an LLM that you're operating internally in your organization. And operational means that you are using the technology to make critical business decisions. All right, so we can see the survey here.

I'll see it up there. So if you want to maybe talk a little bit to that map on what we're seeing here. Give it maybe five more seconds. Yeah, that's fine.

Okay, well great. If you want to, can we put the, I have no idea. Why are you, oh. [SOUND] Well, I will tell you the- [LAUGH] Hey.

So 48% organized, there's a lot of collecting as well. The good thing is that most of you are not in the starting phase, so you're not just getting going. And so you're definitely in the right room. And I think what we typically see is that most companies today kind of saying, hey, go use AI, don't have a lot of direction.

Hopefully after today, you'll get a better idea of how we've implemented the staircase and how we've kind of gone into the next phase in our AI journey. Yeah, and another takeaway that we want to make sure that everyone has. Being early in the sessions like we are, we are providing a framework as well. So if you are really getting to a point where you are organized, you're collecting these top two results, and you really want to figure out how do we now take this to the floor, it's operational, where it is really part of our business.

The framework that we'll give here is basic, but it is something that you can use to make business decisions and start to make meaningful impact in your companies. All right, if we can switch back to the PowerPoint. This is so fun. There we go, awesome.

Okay, so elements of an effective AI deployment. 10%, and this is a BCG study. So 10% are algorithms, the logic, all the things that starts to comb your data, starts to figure out what valuable or not valuable to your business. 20% is the technology.

Now what we hear about many of us, whether you're casual fans of this space, you pay a lot of attention to it. [INAUDIBLE] LinkedIn, favorite place to be. And you'll see that I think it's probably fair to [INAUDIBLE] percent of the content that's out there about AI, about adoption, about the technology, is focusing on this 30% of what makes a successful deployment happen, right? So what is this big gray area?

What is the 70%? What is needed to take you from technology to functionally affecting your business in all the right ways? Is it having your CTO write a think piece somewhere? Maybe, but not what they're saying.

So 70% of what makes up an effective implementation is making sure that you have effective processes supported by the people in your organization and proper change management to take all of these things that you learn, the technology that you deploy, and put it into your processes, into your workflows, into the software that your team uses every day. You've probably seen something like this before. Many of you are very experienced in this space. How many of you, it will do show of hands, we will not switch to the slide.

How many of you have done some sort of software deployment in your career? Here, many of you, right? Whether it's a new billing system, a new contact center system, a new whatever ticketing, right? And I think that this is very similar to what you've probably experienced.

We've all, myself included, have made the mistakes of focusing all about the technology and maybe not so much about the people, right? And I think if you think about how you've deployed things over your career, if you wanted to focus a little bit more on the people, how you integrate into the processes, how you make the cool things that the technology can do actually affect the way the business gets done. You would have had a much more smooth and effective deployment. So that's something I want you all to think about as you learn things and you see these great demos.

And there are so many good people here with some really cool products. But you need to think about how they integrate into your organization. Okay, so some typical AI pilots. So I'll start with on the far right here, the map.

So let's say that you're a smaller company. You don't have a data team. But you have some data and you want to start to show something with it. You've been given a directive of, hey, we need to start to use AI to get some insights and learn things.

And you can build some reports, you can build some dashboards, you can really give some good information. Perhaps you work, again, somewhere small and you start to look at your data, your sales data. And it shows, hey, what's really interesting is we make a lot of online sales on Sunday mornings and also on Tuesdays. But you wouldn't have really thought about the Sunday morning thing.

So it's really great, gives you some insight, gives you a nice report, some FYI and some FAQs or whatever they call. And share those out to your boss and. So that's one way to do it. We have now some data that we're looking at.

Then in the middle, one of my personal favorites is, and what probably many of you experience, right? Where people will build these co-pilot type of interactive agents. We connect a few different data sources. And we say, hey, what's really cool is they can do anything.

And you as a leader may ask a question, okay, well, how should people use this? And the answer is, it's really cool, it can do everything. It's great, you just use it for anything. Likely it's not gonna be used too much in two weeks.

And the last thing where things go wrong is AI replacing judgment before trust is earned. This is the people all in and say, look, I now have this insight, I'm automating everything. I don't need people to make decisions, the AI is smarter, the computing is smarter, with it. So where does this go sideways?

Where do these pilots not land? And how do these not result in a successful implementation of the technology? So let's think about, again, that company that was my theoretical company that I was making up. In the middle there we have the do anything co-pilot app.

And maybe someone in product starts to interact with it, they spend 15, 20 minutes with it. And they come up and they try to pull in some interesting product insights and stuff like that. And they go to a staff meeting and they say, hey, great news. I use that do everything co-pilot thing, really awesome.

I got some really cool insights. And it turns out that we get a lot of online sales on Sunday mornings. I had no idea. And then in that same meeting, that data person is sitting there saying, hey, I knew about that two or three weeks ago.

It was in the thing that I made and sent to you all and you didn't read it. So it's disorganized, it's not connected, right? Now where it gets a little, maybe even more interesting is when the IT person comes in into that same meeting, says, hey, great news. I'm gonna save this company so much money.

This is awesome. Here now, how to automate all of our system maintenance. This is great. And what's even better is I made this agent that goes in.

I don't need to just talk to a few interns and some IT guys. I can scrub all of the knowledge that exists on Reddit and I can use all of the past 10 or 15 years of IT knowledge. I can make this agent that does everything for me completely automatically. So the first deployment of it is we're gonna shut our systems down and run all of our backups on Sunday at seven in the morning.

Concerning, because we have all this data that shows, actually, that's when all of our sales happen. Disorganized, right? Not connected and not flowing through the business. This is where problems with AI pilots start to occur.

When it gets outside of casual interest, when it gets outside of a department and starts to make meaningful business decisions, you have to think about the solution that you have doesn't work across your company and can everyone use that same solution to come to the same conclusion. So this is a fun quote. It's about the lack of being orderly, the lack of being connected. And one of the advantages of being disorderly, being disconnected, is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

It's meant to be sarcastic, right? But you don't wanna run your business operating off of exciting discoveries. You wanna operate your business off of a known platform that makes sense for you. All right, so how do we use Staircase at Connectwise?

We integrate Staircase into our CS motion, and we'll talk later. Matt will talk about how Staircase has gone beyond CS and now informs other things that we use to operate our business, including renewals, risks, sales, product, all kinds of stuff. And so what we have set up as far as our integration goes, is data coming into Staircase from Gainsight, from our call recording software you've probably heard of, a CRM that you've probably heard of. All of our support tickets are coming into this thing.

And another thing that's incredibly important for us is all of the email communications that go between our customers and Connectwise employees are captured in Staircase as well. This is critically important for us. It's the biggest deal that we get out of Staircase, is that email communication. For any of you, and I'm sure many of you work in CS, we probably have an interesting relationship with sales from time to time.

How often have you heard something like, this person never said anything to me. They never emailed this information to me. I didn't know this was going on or that was going on. All of that's captured in Staircase, and it's raised so that we can see the communication.

And if it indicates any sort of risk or anything like that, we can address it without ever having to talk to that other person and get any information back from them. So that's all of the data layer that we have. And how we focus Staircase is we chose to focus it on risk first. Risk is a thing for everyone these days.

It's a challenge for every company where you're looking at trying to make sure you have your revenue retention at a good place. And so we use Staircase to focus on that. So for us, we use insights that are generated from Staircase to give us automated CTAs that go to our CSMs. And that allows us to identify risks that are occurring on accounts that may or may not have been raised by the SMs on their own.

And with those automatically delivered, there's no wait time, there's no debate that goes on. We know that it's accurate, and we know that it's something that needs to be actioned on by the CSM. At the manager level, they're able to see a dashboard view that allows them to track where are those at, you can follow up on those with your CSMs, see if we're making progress, not making progress, and what we might need to be doing to improve that moving. And the team also has weekly status reviews to review accounts that are in risk, which is fairly normal for most organizations.

What are the results for us? And where does this matter? We'll show some numbers here in a little bit. The CTAs for risk have increased three to five times.

That sounds scary, that sounds overwhelming. For us, it really wasn't versus self-reported. It took the number from probably a little bit low to something that made a lot more sense. And we've been able to provide product driven risk information to our product teams to give them direct feedback about where a product can be developed or improved.

We heard that in the keynote here just a little bit ago. The value that can be provided there. And we also integrate it entirely into our CSMs workflow. Staircase is inside of Gainsight.

They also can use a standalone on a web page, whatever works for them. But it's part of their workflow, it's part of the screens they're in, it's part of what they do every single day. And this from Harvard Business Review, I think, is something to really think about. In this big push to hurry AI along, hurry technology along, and get as much of it in front of people as possible.

If you talk to people, it causes a lot of pressure, a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety. And what this quote shows is that whenever you integrate your technology into the processes about the people and put in places where they already work, the amount of mental strain, the amount of mental fatigue is significantly less than what it is if you just give them a new page and say, use this and move on with your day. All right, so I will jump into the success driven framework. So this is what we use at ConnectWise to think about everything that starts as a signal and progresses through and turns into some sort of action that we take on an account.

So we look at any signal that can occur, whether it's big, whether it's small. We don't only look at big complaints and only address those. We look at everything in totality and decide what we want to do with it, how we want to action it, where it occurs. And that way we can make sure that our resources are deployed in the best possible way that we can so that all work is valuable and there's no wasted actions that occur here.

So if you're taking pictures of slides, this is probably one to take a picture of. So this is, again, like I said, it's fairly basic, but you need to think about how this would work in your business, right? Everyone has their own way of doing business. I'm not saying that the way that we do it is the only way to do it, but I hope that this inspires you as you go to these other sessions throughout the day.

To think about how you can use this, and I will go into detail of these. How you can use this and your operations teams can use this to identify everything that you want to take action on. You can define it and allow for your leadership, your other departments, to have confidence that your success team is doing the right thing. So for us, it's four things.

We look at a signal, which is answering the question of what happened. We have intent, which is answering the question of why does this signal matter. Control, which I would argue is maybe the most important thing, is who decides what to do and when. And then the action is what exactly should happen.

What is the customer touch point that will occur based on that signal on the far left side? Okay, so how do we define these things? We define these things, we break these down a little bit, and again, this works for us, you can define this however, it works for your business. But we will break all of these down at this level so that we can really assess it, we can think about it.

We can have meaningful conversations, myself as an ops person. I can go to Matt and say, hey Matt, does this make sense? Or am I overreacting, am I underreacting? And we can have that conversation that makes sure that the two of us are lockstep in what we need to be doing to ensure that success is happening in our organization.

So here in defining signal, we look at things like what type of signal is it? Is it a positive and negative signal? And I think the other thing that's really important to think about is your confidence level. A signal of someone typing an email to you that says, I want to cancel service, pretty clear that they're not happy.

But if you may have heard some time, at some point in time, that somebody clicks a web page or clicks a certain part of your website, and then that makes them at risk. I don't know, maybe that's the last of a concern. So, something to think about, you would define all of these in this way. And then they move on to intent.

So what does this mean? And these are typically a combination of signals. In each of your businesses, you know what these are. These into giving you a guess as to what the intent of that customer is.

So as an example, like what I have on here at the top, account dark and high ARR, that account dark is a staircase term for those of you who don't have it. And it basically just means what you would think, which is that the account is not communicating with you. You've tried to reach out, they're not responding back, something's going on there. We identify that as a retention risk that we want to action on, because they've spent a lot of money with us.

Of course we want to action on that. So this is again identifying what the intent is. And then when we get into the control, again, I would argue this is the most important thing if you want to talk about buy-in from your teams. If you want to talk about making sure you don't overwhelm them, that you don't stress them out.

They see the implementation, whether it's staircase or anything else, as a job aid, a tool to help them, rather than something to overwhelm them, stress them out, and push their limits. Control is where that happens. So this is again about preventing over automation. If you're a CSM, you do not want to start your day, open your browser up and see 150 notifications to address that day.

Nobody does. So you have to be very intentional about what you automate and what you have be actioned by someone after they review it. So, you know, you have automatic things, guardrails where someone would get a notification, they would review it and then decide if they want to take an action. That's a manual CTA.

And most companies, that's what they're doing today anyway. You get an email that says, hey, I don't like your company. I'm probably going to make a manual CTA for risk. What we've been able to do with Staircase is have the belief, and we've tested it and made sure that it's perfectly true, and it is.

That if we get a churn risk notification in Staircase, it's almost 100% dead on that there is certainly some sort of risk that's occurring there that we need to address with an account. So we've taken that from, we had a guardrail on where we were just seeing the notification and then creating a manual CTA to now fully automating that. And what's great for us is that if you have CSMs that may or may not be paying enough attention to their accounts, and we all know these things occur, you will not see a situation where a CSM says, I'm all good, I have no risk CTAs. But meanwhile, there's all kinds of stuff going on in their book of business, right?

This elevates that automatically. Now the manager can be involved. The CSM can be more engaged. It's a significantly better outcome for the business so that you are for certain addressing the accounts that you need to be addressing.

And what's also nice about it is it allows your CSMs to spend time where it makes sense for them to spend their time. If today they have a large book of business and they just spend their day making phone calls, even to the happiest customers, I'm not saying that's bad, but if they need to address something, this tells them, hey, these five accounts, something needs to happen immediately. We have a risk and you can't wait two weeks for your next check-in call. And then finally, the action.

So the action is what actually happens. With all of the stuff that came up, the signal and all that stuff, what is the outcome? And you have to define these things. It's incredible.

If someone is not assigned accountability, we all know this. If someone's not assigned accountability, will it ever get done? No, right? There's no way.

Maybe some heroes will do a few good things. But in general, not consistently. So you want to make sure that you define things like the owner, you define what good looks like, what's successful. And the most important thing is the exit criteria.

And if you're not capturing this today, this is something you need to be capturing as quickly as you possibly can to validate if an action that was taken by a CSM is actually resulting in your customer either stating or writing or however you tell, that yes, that action did take care of my problem. But it did solve for my grievance. So making sure that you track that is incredibly important. So that's all the theory.

That's the basic framework. What does this look like at Connectwise? So I'll show you a little bit under the hood of what we do. So this is an example of one of the automated actions that we have.

So this is related to churn risk. And we're looking at only our account. So for us, like many companies, we heard all about long tail this morning. That we have many companies like ourselves have named individuals working our larger accounts and then pooled resources on our long tail.

So for us, in this example, we are looking at our larger customers as well as those that have had a churn risk or a risk notification raised by staircase automatically. Those are the two signals that we are using to start to then work this forward into some sort of action that we'll go with. So the intent, this is again pulled off of the, or similar at least to the slide that I had earlier, where we have a high ARR customer with a churn risk indicator. That is a retention risk for us, and we need to action on that, right?

We need to get somebody on the phone to figure out what is going on, how can we resolve the concern? The control, so here's a great example of control. Maybe that CSM was one of our better ones, one who was already engaged. Maybe they had already made a manual risk CTA for this account because they knew something was up.

We're making sure they don't get a second one, right? This is where they get frustrated, and they're like, nice automation, I already made the CTA, right? So we have a control here to make sure they don't get doubled up, tripled up on CTAs. If they don't have a CTA already built, we automatically create one for churn risk and assign it to them.

And then the action, again, we define, it's all written here. We define it out, what is the outcome, how do they engage, and how do we confirm that that customer has said, yep, you're good. And this is what it looks like in our gain site instance, so we're not playing any tricks here, we're doing it live for sure. All right, so what does this work into as far as real outcomes, real numbers, real things that are affecting our teams?

And I'll let Matt, he's been standing here so nicely. [LAUGH] I'll let Matt talk to the actual outcome here in a second. One more for me. So yeah, so the risk CTA, so we started automating the risk CTAs in March.

Up until then, it was a manual process where a CSM would say, hey, I have a risk, I'm gonna create the CTA. And you can see the change here that occurred. So this went from one, two, three, and what does this mean? Our CSMs in general have a book of 80 to 100, some 120 accounts, something like that.

The likelihood of one being at risk in 80 or 100, pretty low. We know that. And you can see that the manually entered ones maybe wasn't passing the sniff test. Once it automated this, then it went up to seven per.

That sounds about right to me. And this doesn't have the updated data for April, but once we started making these, raising these, and the team started to work on these, the automated ones that they received in April actually went down to five per CSM. So we're seeing actual action happening on those CTAs that are raised. And we're seeing the automated number going down.

So it isn't constantly going up and stressing the success team out. It is just raising things that they may legitimately not have known about. And allowing them the opportunity to take action and improve that relationship. So I'll let Matt go from here with saves and what that means to us as a company.

Yeah, for sure. And so, I mean, if you like me, when I first saw this slide, I was like, this looks terrible, more CTAs, this is not gonna go over very well. But to be quite honest, when we rolled this out, the signal got so high. And the frequency of the intent of that risk became so noticeable that our CSMs actually stopped worrying about the other CTAs and really focused clearly on the high risk ones that were surfaced by staircase.

So we were able to reduce the amount of kind of activity CTAs and really drive them into the high risk situations. Which, of course, the outcomes are absolutely what we wanted with the saves. But if we go to the next slide, just kind of teeing this up. So really the big story for me when I kind of knew we were something with it was I was on a meeting with our whole executive team.

And the topic was retention and GRR. And our CEO had brought up, he said, hey, well, how do we know where customers are going and what's happening? And we had just rolled out staircase. And it was one of these aha moments for me where I pulled up the topics inside of staircase and was able to kind of show exactly all the verbatim on one of the bigger topics and reasons why partners or customers were leaving.

And I took a screenshot, I posted it back into the chat real quick and all of a sudden you heard everybody pause on the call. And all of a sudden the next thing was, wow, where did this data come from? I want access to this. Every executive on that call then asked for access right away to staircase.

So what this really told us is that we've got something here, we've got new data, we have the verbatim that we've never had before. So if you see on the next slide, how does this translate more into other departments and using this cross-functionally? Today when you're buying software, looking at software, typically people will kind of roll their eyes at some cases that Gainsight is just a CS tool or that's just all isolated and into your CS organization. But the nice thing we unlocked with staircase was it's not.

It's so much more than that because there was a really good interesting story that came out within our product team where our sales organization came to product and said, hey, we're hearing this come up from our customers, they need this feature and it kept coming up. And of course product teams sometimes challenge sales and say, okay, well tell me how much it is and we'll go look at it. And typically that then translates into CSMs, go look at all your emails, listen to your calls and let us know in a couple of months how many times this topic has come up so that we can see if we can size this feature. Well, based on staircase, we're able to go back into all of our topics.

We surfaced up this one feature that our customers were looking for. We now had a captivated audience and the sizing of all of these customers to know how much potential revenue we could make if we built out this feature. So sales team loved it, product team had a clear direction and knew what the value in the ROI was on the time that they were gonna spend building that feature. So it really shows you that it's not just this pure CS at risk tool and where the frequencies of the signals, but it's so much more than that.

And on the next slide too is that when we see within the sales team, John kind of made a joke about how there's kind of CS sales attention sometimes. What we found, especially in the long tail was, we've got over 20,000 different customers in our long tail. And it's not so impossible, even with a pooled model, to get in front of all of them and understand what's happening. But what we did with staircase was start to really hone in on what the risk signals were, but what were the expansion opportunities?

These expansion opportunities come in the way of support cases, calls that are happening, emails that are moving around, and responses that partners or customers are giving back to us through those emails. Within that, we were able to uncover and unlock significant amount of expansion opportunities for a sales organization. But also in our long tail, we've seen the highest return on investment from a GRR standpoint in our whole business. Our long tail is actually, the retention has grown the most there.

So it's been really fantastic for us to get both the expansion and that retention just on some of this data that we're getting from staircase and the call to actions as well. Yeah, and one thing that I would also mention that we all saw at the keynote earlier today, there were some things that they were showing there that they were calling out. The expansion analysis was one of the things we were talking about, the risk analysis. Those are things that are included in staircase today.

So if you buy it and implement it, it's ready to rock and roll within a couple of days, which is pretty cool. So those technologies are functioning, they are real. They are not made up, I can promise you this, we use them every single day. So it is true functioning technology.

Okay, so the key takeaways and then we have a lot of Q&A, which is very exciting. So what should we take away from the session? So the first thing is define what AI will help you do. Not just do I have it, can it do everything?

No. What will it help you do? What will it help your team do better, be more effective at, be faster at? Make that something that you think about.

It isn't just about the technology, it's about how you implement it inside of your business. So that's integrating AI into processes. So if you have a process today for addressing risk, for addressing an expansion opportunity, how can you integrate that in? The success framework that we showed is just consistently organizing and planning how you want to use this technology.

This allows you to really look at things in a way that you say, okay, this has value for my business, maybe less here, maybe less here. And you identify what you take action on. There's something that you might, if you're doing, you say, we have all these signals and we're gonna do all of it. Full blown automations and things like that with the outcomes.

You'll wear your team out so quickly. So you have to identify what is truly the most important thing. Define it the right way. Have some other things in your back pocket.

So if you finish, maybe you call it a campaign, maybe not. But you finish, maybe your big push, you have another big push, you're ready to do that and you have it defined in the right way. That helps your executives that buy in. They know exactly what you're thinking, what your plan is, how you're defining it.

And that confidence goes a long way in them getting the other people in the organization to buy into what you're doing. Identify cross-functional uses, like what Matt said. There's tons of value of what we gather out of CS. Again, to point back to the key, there was the highlight or the statement of we as CS professionals should be far more involved in providing information back to the product teams.

Staircase allows you to do that. And you can see here is a set of quotes from emails that I have from my customers. This is what they're saying this feature will do to make their business more effective, that they buy from us. You're able to do this and it's not like a long data dip.

I mean, you're doing this in five minutes, ten minutes. It's disturbingly fast how you can get this information. And finally, is again, thinking of Staircase is more than a CS tool. Your entire organization benefits from this.

So if you wanna have an opportunity to take the easy layup win, this is something that makes a lot of sense. All right, and now we will go into questions. So we have a few up here. Or, we'll let Scott facilitate.

[INAUDIBLE] There you go, we've got some time for questions here. What other use cases have you explored with Staircase? Is it possible to leverage it for overall signal detection or adoption driven outreach at scale? Yes.

So, let's see. So for overall signal detection, I assume that that's just related looking at every signal, every way in a business. Positive, negative, whatever. You can leverage it for anything.

Create things that are called insights in there that allows you to identify, let's say it's key terms or key concepts. Maybe you have a certain subset of customers that you're very concerned about, I don't know, government regulation or something. You can create an insight that's just focused on that government regulation and pull up accounts that are giving you some sort of activity on that. So that allows you to maybe identify accounts that are talking about a certain thing or whatever it might be.

So yes, I mean there's all kinds of stuff that you can do with it. And really your creativity is what holds you back. Yeah, the only thing I would add to that is that the one thing that I didn't realize with Staircase was the reporting that you could build out and the customization for certain topics. And how you could start to isolate that and really see where.

So if you had, say there was something that was popping up from a churn signal that was out there and you really wanted to study and explore it. Like John was mentioning, you would probably go and search record through record or have to listen to call recordings, whatever it may be. The ability to just pull that and get really focused in on what's happening, what people are saying, and then you can start to back into it. Because there is a timeline that will show you all of the events that are happening or not happening in some cases to help mitigate that churn before it even gets there.

So I mean, it's really endless. And I don't know if we've really put it into the adoption driven piece yet. Definitely on our roadmap of things to look into. How did you know your AI pilot was ready to scale?

And what was the signal slash top indicator? It's written as the capital letters, the signal indicator. So thanks for whoever asked that question with the dramatics on the, it's very true. So we start a pilot with 1,000 accounts.

We have about 50,000 in there today. For us, as I mentioned, there were a few things. So it isn't there is the one thing, but there are a few things that we identified very quickly. The churn risk analysis, accurate, fast.

It allowed us to get in front of issues that would take weeks and weeks to bubble up and be raised. We knew this very quickly. And we were able to engage with customers and get feedback from customers that, hey, this is great. I feel like I'm really cared about by you all because I just raised this problem to my salesperson yesterday and now you're calling me today, right?

So for us, that was one of the indicators. Another one, full transparency. We had a few executives at a session with some of our top customers. And they were using, actually, they were using the mobile display on it.

And they said, I got feedback from a number of them that the, so every account in Staircase has an AI analysis that is generated for at all times. So it'll tell you, here's what this account is up to. What they're happy about, what they're not happy about, where they have problems. And you can read this and know exactly what's going on on that account in less than five minutes.

So our executives are meeting with these, I don't know, we probably had a few dozen presidents and CEOs of these companies at this session. And they said it was crazy how every single one of those briefs was without fail what that leader was talking about with them. What the complaint was, what the issue was, right? 100% accuracy, right?

They've never had that before. They would be clicking around through who knows what. Cases and stuff and hoping for the best. Here they can type in the account name, read, maybe scroll up a couple swipes and they're good to go.

And that is the conversation that they were ready to have. And it allowed them to be more impactful in those conversations with those top clients. Yeah, from my lens it was, in sales, sales always wants more accounts. And CS, you kinda want less accounts.

And within that kind of world, there's always more conversations that are happening on the sales side. And what we had found was through some emails and calls that there were things that were being discussed and CSMs had no clue. They can't be everywhere at once. And so it was the ability to have that insight into what's being discussed on the accounts and be able to action that without having to have a debrief every single day and there's not perfect overlap on accounts.

So it was really the ability to kind of scale out that CS communication and be everywhere without being anywhere. How do you manage the overload of CTAs automatically generated from staircase? I said we don't overload them, right? No, so yes, if we made a CTA for every single indicator in staircase, it would overwhelm immediately.

We are focused solely on the risk ones. And that was the graph that I was showing a few slides back. It was seven per CSM, totally manageable over the course of a month for our teams at least. So again, it's defining what you want the CSMs to take action on.

They cannot take action on everything. They need to drive this home, especially sometimes with leaders that aren't really thinking about that they want everything fixed today. You have to set some ground rules and that's one of the things that's really defining what do you want your teams to address. That's how you prevent people being overwhelmed by too many CTAs, is just simply limiting how many you make.

I like this one. What is the biggest piece of advice you could give to a team that is implementing staircase in Gainsight in the next three to six months? What is the most important thing to prepare before implementation begins? Okay, so the most important thing to think about with these technologies is, again, I can't say enough.

How does this integrate into their work day? How does your success team work with these technologies? And how do you hold them accountable? How do your managers manage them?

All that kind of stuff needs to be thought about. You can't just give them a couple of screens and say, look, everything's here, you're good to go. Doesn't quite work that way. So thinking people-centric in the way that you design your roll out is number one to me because that will get you the best bang for your buck in the amount of training time that you spend.

Don't just show them how to click a few buttons and let them go. Right, you need to talk about what is the value of creating a call to action? How are we, if you have an ops team, what are you going to use orchestration for? What are you going to use staircase for as far as indicators and things like that?

Again, it's defining. What I showed in that framework, defining those things. Thinking about the outcomes for people. Focus on that far more than the technology.

This technology, and I've been working in ops for like 20 years, which is a disturbing statement to me. This is honestly the easiest stuff that we've ever worked with as far as having technology to implement. Staircase, we realistically had it up and running in like two days. Right, and then we were just checking stuff and seeing what it did and learning, right?

Gain site might be a smidge more time, but at the end of the day, it's not a big engineering endeavor. So you have time to think about how you integrate this into your teams. That's the most important thing to think about. All right, time for one last question here.

Who builds your risk CTAs and playbooks, and how are they created? So they're up front here if you want to speak. That's right, you can ask them. Yeah, we don't want them to eat lunch.

So if you just want to come up here and talk to them, they'll build it. They'll tell you how to build everything, it's great. Yes, we have two or three brave souls who creates these for us. They work with our management team.

So this is a group collaborative effort, right? In operations, our job is to serve Matt's team and his leaders and his managers and make sure that they get value out of the work that we do. So we work with those teams, right? We have a regular cadence with the managers.

What are we working on? There's all kinds of stuff that comes up that is an immediate change we need to make, and sometimes it's just kind of normal course of business stuff. But yeah, work with the teams. And for us, it is operations.

People that are focused in-gain site, in staircase, and maybe a few other technologies as well. But they're really the heroes behind the scenes for our success team. Yeah, I would only add is that I don't think there's a magic playbook to reduce churn. It really comes down to the tasks that are inside of it and the leadership and the management of those folks that are executing the tasks.

So staying on top of those, having the right dashboards, reporting, and views. It's really what it comes down to because, again, we're only signaling and trying to put CTAs in front of our CSMs when we know that there is high intent of risk, and so we wanna make sure that people are spending their energy on those first. It's not necessarily, we've got keywords and really interesting playbooks that we've built. It's just the managing the execution of those.

All right, that concludes this session. Please feel free to go enjoy some lunch, and thanks again. Connectwise team. Thank you.