In its simplest form, Customer Intelligence helps you understand your customers better.
It gives you the insights to maintain product-market fit and ensure you grow with your customers, not away from them. CI isn’t just a tool or platform. It’s a holistic approach to how you do business. Aaron Thompson adds,
“ When you talk about Customer Intelligence, it’s bridging that gap between the reality of what our customers are experiencing and what we believe they’re going through.”
As we’ll see throughout this report, it can often be the difference between building a thriving business or a transactional turnstile that struggles at scale.
2. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
Chapter 1:
What Is Customer Intelligence? ...................................................................................................................... 4
Chapter 2:
Customer Intelligence Presents A Massive Opportunity
For B2B Businesses ....................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Chapter 3:
Customer Intelligence, Evolving Quickly ................................................................................... 12
Chapter 4:
AI Is Fueling The Next Generation Of
Customer Intelligence ....................................................................................................................................................... 14
Chapter 5:
The Customer Intelligence Landscape ........................................................................................... 16
Chapter 6:
How Businesses Are Using Customer Intelligence ................................................ 20
Chapter 7:
Choosing A Customer Intelligence Solution ........................................................................ 23
Chapter 8:
Customer Intelligence, The Missing Piece Of The
Modern SaaS Tech Stack ............................................................................................................................................. 25
Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................................................................... 28
3. | 3
Introduction
Introduction
It’s not surprising that with the maturity of the SaaS business model, retention reigns
supreme as the primary driver to scalable growth and a high valuation. Seemingly minor
improvements in customer retention drive huge increases in revenue retention and lifetime
contract value. According to Totango’s Guy Nirpaz, “70–95% of SaaS revenue comes
from retention and expansion of existing customers.”
But, even high-performing teams struggle to champion on behalf of their customers.
Why? Because data about what their customers need and want is elusive — it is hiding
in unstructured content like customer email conversations, chats, phone calls and tickets.
Trapped in these conversation silos is data valuable to almost every group in a SaaS
business. UI teams can benefit from finding confusion, engineering leaders need to know
about bugs, and everyone needs to know when a customer is unhappy. It is this “content”,
customer conversations, that Customer Intelligence (CI) solutions will leverage to great
advantage for their customers.
SaaS Revenue
5-30% from initial sale
70–95% from existing customers
https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/customer-success/
4. | 4
What Is Customer Intelligence?
What Is Customer Intelligence?
Customer Intelligence (CI) is the practice of collecting and analyzing key customer-generated
data to glean crucial insights, risks, trends, and opportunities. CI is heavy on integrations,
and often uses advanced data sciences like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and
natural language processing (NLP).
CI is about data. To grasp the concept of Customer Intelligence, first imagine if you could
unite all of your customer feedback — tickets, chats and customer emails. Now imagine
harmonizing this new data stream with data in your CRM, CSPs and usage tracking systems
to create new benchmarks and critical alerting. That is the essence of Customer Intelligence.
(It goes without saying that core to any competent CI solution is data privacy).
Remember, your customers want you to use their emails and tickets. They want you to fix
bugs, make your product less confusing, build key features, and service them better. CI
means better listening.
Listening to customers is harder than it sounds.
4,000
The number of
conversations per month
with business Signals like
cancellation, bug report,
feature request, or renewal
in a typical $50-200MM
B2B SaaS business.
7
Average number
of teammates that are
communicating with a
single customer account
on any given day.
2X
In a typical B2B SaaS
company, customers have
two times more activity
in email than tickets. Said
another way, a company
with 10k tickets has 20k
email conversations.
9%
The percent of customer
conversations that contain
a negative theme like
slow loading, outage, or
unhappiness.
5. | 5
Every business strives to ensure that its customers are happy, and that they are receiving
value. And, SaaS companies have vast amounts of customer feedback at their disposal.
Yet, very little converts into valuable, actionable data. Delivering data from the customer’s
feedback, at scale, is CI’s core value proposition.
During our interviews of customer success experts for this report, we learned that CI means
different things to different people. Whether you’re an enterprise SaaS company or a tech
scaleup, a forensic-level understanding of your customer base is the key to remaining
competitive in an increasingly mature industry.
Irit Eizips, Chief Customer Officer CEO at CSM Practice, defined Customer
Intelligence:
“ Customer Intelligence is an AI-enabled analysis of large sets of customer
data, aimed at identifying timely opportunities for proactive action to help
prevent churn, increase product adoption or expand wallet share.”
Aaron Thompson, Customer Success Keynote Speaker Educator, states that Customer
Intelligence is
“ ...the ability to understand the signals that point to risks and even expansion
opportunities that customers mention in emails, tickets, chats, calls — wherever.
It’s omnichannel. CI discovers where we may be unintentionally adding friction
to the customer experience. This is particularly important when we consider
what some teams are trying to do at scale in the one-to-many situations.”
What Is Customer Intelligence?
https://www.csmpractice.com
6. | 6
What Is Customer Intelligence?
Peter Armaly, VP of Customer Success at ESG, shared his belief that Customer Intelligence is
critical in helping us evolve from the conventional approach to customer engagement.
“ It’s really hard to predict the future, but CS leaders should understand that
relying on static segmentation models might expose their company to undue risk.
Maintaining a high level of attention on your standard high-touch segment is like
putting all your eggs in one basket. Leaders should better leverage Customer
Intelligence to more precisely determine what the entire customer base is all about
and whether their organizational energy could be redeployed in a smarter way
towards other customers that offer greater long-term revenue potential.”
Grow With Your Customers, Not Away From Them
In its simplest form, Customer Intelligence helps you understand your customers better.
It gives you the insights to maintain product-market fit and ensure you grow with your
customers, not away from them. CI isn’t just a tool or platform. It’s a holistic approach to how
you do business. Thompson adds,
“ When you talk about Customer Intelligence, it’s bridging that gap between the
reality of what our customers are experiencing and what we believe they’re
going through.”
As we’ll see throughout this report, it can often be the difference between building a thriving
business or a transactional turnstile that struggles at scale.
https://esgsuccess.com
7. | 7
Customer Intelligence Presents A
Massive Opportunity For B2B Businesses
Customer Intelligence Presents A Massive Opportunity For B2B Businesses
Your existing customers provide an excellent resource for nearly every business unit — data.
And, Customer Intelligence enables you to utilize data that you are already collecting.
By understanding what delivers value, you can accelerate your growth cost-effectively
and consistently.
A common theme we found in our research and interviews is that with B2B specifically, there
was a significant focus on CI being critical for businesses that want to increase margins,
operational efficiency, and gross dollar retention through customer success at scale.
“ [CI] allows companies to serve a growing number of customers in a more
scalable way. There’s a limit to how many accounts customer success
managers can handle… at some point, it’s just not very efficient to scale by
hiring more people. By using CI, CS executives can extend the coverage of
their customer base without increasing the size of their CSM team.”
says Eizips.
Some of the critical outcomes that Customer Intelligence can improve are:
Net Dollar Retention
NDR provides a revenue-based view of customer retention. NDR is increasingly important
as you scale from small to medium-sized businesses and beyond. For example, a $5MM
company that churns 20% can replace that $1MM with net new business when it’s growing
8. | 8
by +50% a year. But when a $30MM business needs to return $6MM due to cancellations,
this becomes significantly difficult if the growth rate slows.
The effects of NDR compound with time. It’s either additive or punitive with every customer
that you acquire. This means slight upticks in NDR can add to substantial differences in total
revenue over multiple years. For example, assume a business had $10MM in revenue last
year and consistently generates 20% of revenue from new customers. Improving the NDR
from 95% to 105% may sound meager, but the business will gain another $5MM in revenue
over five years.
Customer Intelligence Presents A Massive Opportunity For B2B Businesses
9. | 9
Data From One, To Many
Technology advancement is fundamentally an act of data democratization. Previously
nuanced capabilities have become cheaper, simpler, and more accessible. The same should
go for customer insights — but so far, it hasn’t been. The promise of CI is to put the power
of data into every team’s hands so everyone can make smarter, data-driven decisions
mainly related to the product, relationships, and processes.
Customer Intelligence Presents A Massive Opportunity For B2B Businesses
10. | 10
CI puts self-service insights into the hands of business users without relying on specialists
to create reports. Typically, business intelligence tools are bought by specialists who expect
advanced capabilities and complex use cases. Those same tools have a steep learning curve,
leaving most teammates behind. Modern CI solutions democratize customer data insights
and seamlessly deliver when and where they are needed most — at scale, all the time.
Create A Collective Reality
CI provides your teams and leadership complete visibility into every channel used to
communicate with your customers. Teams share a collective reality about which topics
matter most to your customers. CI solutions can track emerging customer and product-
centric trends and understand the state of your customers in real time.
Advanced CI solutions are designed to extract these trends and deliver them to the people,
teams, and systems that need them the most — autonomously. This gets everyone on the
same page and boosts productivity and efficiency by reducing manual data entry.
Take The Mystery Out Of Renewals
“Let’s get together to discuss Acme Corp”. In many organizations before a renewal
discussion occurs several team members have an “account review meeting”. CI may not
make this meeting obsolete, but it should make them less frequent and more insightful.
When an Account Executive prepares for a renewal discussion, what data is at their
disposal? Analyzing the unabridged, unbiased, and often unsolicited customer feedback,
from every source, creates an early warning system for teams to identify potentially at-risk
accounts early, so there aren’t any surprises during the renewal conversation.
Customer Intelligence Presents A Massive Opportunity For B2B Businesses
11. | 11
“ Sturdy has reviewed over 20 million customer conversations and one of the
more interesting patterns that we’ve found is that when a customer sends an
inbound email, ticket or chat in the 90 days before renewal, they are 3 times
more likely to renew.”
Joel Passen, Sturdy Co-founder
Customer Intelligence helps identify customers in the neutral zone who are not already
lost but at risk. That way, customer-facing teams can prioritize working on getting those
customers into a healthier status. Intentionally interacting with customers during an
uncertain time in their journey is a powerful conduit for building trust with customers. The
result is long-term retention.
Convert Customers From Strangers To Advocates
The power of a customer’s words to describe and share their experience working with your
business is invaluable. CI helps you discover the magic moments, enthusiastic fans, and
generally positive people ready to be activated to tell their stories.
CI solutions amplify the topics and sentiment that, until now, have been hidden in inboxes
and systems gathering digital dust. Customer Intelligence empowers teams to take an
automated approach to active listening. It allows teams to identify new buyers, develop
champions, and generate valuable customer references and reviews.
Customer Intelligence Presents A Massive Opportunity For B2B Businesses
12. | 12
Customer Intelligence, Evolving Quickly
Customer Intelligence, Evolving Quickly
Customer Intelligence has evolved over the last few years, and the landscape looks
almost nothing like it did just a few years ago. Initially, businesses relied on survey-based
measurement systems to gather customer relationship data. Today, leaders increasingly
recognize that survey-based systems fail to produce deep insights. And while surveys
remain a helpful vehicle for conducting research, leaders have become wary of low response
rates, data lags, ambiguity about performance drivers, and the lack of a clear context to
inform broader decisions.
While many of us can’t rid ourselves entirely of surveys, they continue to fall short for
three reasons:
1. Surveys are a backward-looking tool in an era where customers
and employees expect near real-time remedies.
2. Survey results capture frustration, but often fail to capture its
source or context.
3. Surveys often fail to capture the “silent majority”, and instead
amplify the most annoyed or pleased.
Fortunately for business leaders, Customer Intelligence is evolving beyond survey-based
systems, fueled by advances in the ability to aggregate, normalize, and analyze data with the
help of artificial intelligence. Other business units, including marketing and revenue management,
have already transformed through aggregating and analyzing these rich data sets.
13. | 13
Multi-
Platform
A.I.
Engine
Data Clean
Room
Automation
Engine
Feedback
Chat, Tickets, Customer Email (CRM), Voice, Community
Insights
CRM, CSP, Team Members
From Surveys To
Predictive Insights,
Customer Intelligence
Is Evolving Quickly
Today leaders have a choice.
They can use surveys to
ask customers about their
experiences. Or they can
use data about customer
interactions to predict whether
customers will remain loyal,
cancel, or consume more.
Customer Intelligence, Evolving Quickly
14. | 14
AI Is Fueling The Next Generation
Of Customer Intelligence
AI Is Fueling The Next Generation Of Customer Intelligence
Many decades ago, AI was touted as the next new thing. It has finally arrived. The
resurgence of AI is most likely due to the fact that computer technology as a whole has
improved. And thus, so has AI. While the techniques and algorithms have become more
advanced, the computing power of the cloud has made AI better and more efficient.
As AI becomes more mainstream and scalable, so do the outcomes. Irit Eizips believes
that the AI and machine learning component of CI is where some of the most significant
benefits exist.
“ As it stands, it’s exceedingly difficult for a customer success team to scale
when the number of customers they need to manage is growing fast.
Customer Intelligence allows businesses to scale their current customer
success practice by leveraging AI and data analysis automation.”
AI-enabled Customer Intelligence will help teams capture more data and to use it more
effectively, at lower costs. The era of manually classifying tickets and saving important
emails is coming to an end. Do more with more, for less.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eizips
People don’t buy the shovel;
they buy the hole.
Ed Powers
Principal Consultant, Service Excellence Partners
15. | 15
AI Is Fueling The Next Generation Of Customer Intelligence
Although AI and Machine Learning are considered significant components of practical
Customer Intelligence, it’s important not to get too caught up in technology and innovation.
Ed Powers, the Principal Consultant at Service Excellence Partners, puts a finer point on this:
“ People don’t buy the shovel; they buy the hole.”
While AI can make it easier to discover valuable insights at scale, the conversation around
Customer Intelligence should center around what it can help accomplish rather than getting
bogged down in the details of how the “sauce” is made.
CI allows businesses to scale
their current customer success
practice by leveraging AI and
data analysis automation.
Irit Eizips
Chief Customer Officer CEO, CSM Practice
16. | 16
The Customer Intelligence Landscape
The Customer Intelligence Landscape
A renewed interest in Customer Intelligence doesn’t come as a surprise. Customer
experience and customer value realization have emerged as top concerns among
business leaders, with more than 87% of senior executives indicating that customer
experience is the leading growth engine for their businesses. The investment community
has also taken a keen interest in Customer Intelligence-related startups pumping billions
of dollars into the space in the past 48 months. The funding has been distributed across a
variety of sub-categories as well. Let’s break CI down into a more digestible conversation.
Customer Intelligence is quickly growing into a broad category. And as our interviews for
this report revealed, customer intelligence means different things to different people.
https://www.northhighland.com/newsroom/press-release/north-highland-2020-beacon-report-business-leaders-cite-customer-experience
Support Focused
Customer Intel - Product
Health Score Tools
C.I. Subcategories
Customer Intel - Sales
Customer Intel
25.6%
35.9%
20.5%
12.8%
5.1%
17. | 17
The Customer Intelligence Landscape
Through our research, we learned that there is a growing ecosystem of CI sub-categories,
segment-specific platforms that go deep to solve unique customer-related challenges. But
no matter the application, it is clear that leaders are looking for deeper insights with which
to drive and retain revenue.
Customer Intelligence
US-based Sturdy represents a strong example of a robust, Customer Intelligence solution.
Sturdy collects unstructured data sources like customer emails, tickets, chats, meetings,
community data, and more via public APIs. It then restructures the data while also
pseudonymizing and anonymizing it to address privacy concerns. The “clean” data is
combined with other data sources like CRM data and gets put into one searchable system
that every team can use. After converting customer conversations into a valuable data
source, Sturdy uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning
to surface essential topics and themes that help teams improve products, relationships,
and revenue. Finally, Sturdy has developed a no-code automation engine and a suite of
APIs (Sturdy’s Data Exhaust) to route essential data and insights to the people, teams, and
systems that need them most.
CI systems like Sturdy can analyze multiple channels of customer-generated feedback
like customer emails, support tickets, chat, call transcripts, community data, and more.
Analyzing numerous channels of feedback creates the opportunity to discover diverse
topics relevant to multiple audiences within the business. Nearly every Customer Intelligence
solution leverages advanced data sciences to provide a missing layer to today’s B2B GTM
stack by offering a System of Intelligence.
https://sturdy.ai, https://news.greylock.com/the-new-moats-53f61aeac2d9
18. | 18
The Customer Intelligence Landscape
Sales-Focused Solutions
There is no shortage of products that help sales and other pre-revenue teams to understand
better and immediately act on the information customers share via conversations. The
leader in the space, Gong.io, has pioneered the Revenue Intelligence category, which is
closely related to Customer Intelligence and worthy of a mention in this report. Sales-
focused CI solutions primarily analyze recorded sales calls for coaching opportunities and
conversational insights about customer buying behaviors. Others to watch in this category
are Invoca and Databook. Both are taking innovative approaches to provide sales teams
with Customer Intelligence.
Support / Call Center Intelligence
Aside from sales-focused CI, The call center and customer support-focused sub-category
lead the way in terms of funding and product maturity. Companies like Observe.AI, Balto,
and Forethought have raised $358MM to analyze interactions like support tickets and
agent-managed phone calls. These solutions seek to reveal coaching opportunities, quality
of service issues, sentiment, and compliance matters.
Productivity Tools
Productivity-based CI apps like ‘Nuffsaid and Retain.ai help customer success teams
understand which customers need the most attention and which are blackholes for your
resources. For example, ‘Nuffsaid uses a proprietary engine to prioritize tasks that matter
most and log information to other systems without app-switching. This might be particularly
useful to teams that use an “at scale” or “one to many” approach to manage customers.
https://www.gong.io, https://www.invoca.com, https://trydatabook.com, https://www.observe.ai,
https://www.balto.ai, https://forethought.ai, https://nuffsaid.com, https://retain.ai
19. | 19
The Customer Intelligence Landscape
Health Score Tools
Arguably, customer health score solutions appear more as an output of Customer
Intelligence than a sub-category. These solutions target SMB buyers who haven’t adopted
a more robust customer success platform. Companies like Akita and Involve.ai analyze
product usage, NPS, a number of support tickets, and customer sentiment and then, with
the help of data science, ascribe a health score to your accounts. Involve.ai takes it further
by recommending playbooks once an account reaches a certain health threshold.
https://www.akitaapp.com, https://www.involve.ai
CI discovers where we may be
unintentionally adding friction to
the customer experience.
Aaron Thompson
Customer Success Keynote Speaker Educator
20. | 20
How Businesses Are Using
Customer Intelligence
How Businesses Are Using Customer Intelligence
Throughout our interviews, surveys, and research, “scale” appeared frequently. Leaders
are looking for ways to do more with fewer resources while maintaining a high customer
satisfaction rate.
Joanne Degnan, former Chief Customer Officer at UKG, argues:
“ If you are in rapid growth mode and have 300 CSMs handling 1000 accounts,
for example, it can be challenging to ensure you’re giving the highest quality
service to everyone in the same way. CI can help ensure you’re able to scale
without relying solely on human-at-a-desk-power.”
The right Customer Intelligence solution can be a force multiplier by making teams more
agile and empowered to make decisions based on more qualitative data.
As businesses become more data-driven, it’s not enough to collect the data; they must
utilize it to drive their business forward. When discussing the importance of Customer
Intelligence for a modern-day business, it’s critical to understand the end goal. There are
three main areas in which CI can make businesses more effective. They include:
1. Maintaining product-market fit
2. Improving processes
3. Understanding relationships
https://www.ukg.com/
21. | 21
How Businesses Are Using Customer Intelligence
Customer Intelligence For Product Teams
Product teams are constantly trying to understand users better so they can maintain
product market fit. Customer Intelligence solutions help pinpoint topics that characterize
essential aspects of customer-to-business relationships, such as Bug Reports, How-To
questions, or Feature Requests, to name a few. To understand the patterns underlying the
insights, more advanced platforms will leverage AI to group semantically similar customer
feedback into themes automatically. Teams can then drill-down into the sentence-level
context to understand on-going bugs, main topics where users have knowledge gaps, or
central areas of customer frustration.
Customer Intelligence For Operations Teams
Unfortunately, it’s not a stretch to say that we know more about our website visitors than
we do about many of our customers. Every click visitors make on your corporate website,
or display ads, is analyzed in a dozen ways, surrounded by analytics and automation. Yet,
conversations comprising hours of investment on both sides gather digital dust in data silos.
Critical customer feedback decays in databases because organizations aren’t ready to
analyze these conversations.
Why? Because they don’t have the tools to do so. This is where Customer Intelligence
comes in. CI solutions are creating a new data frontier for SaaS businesses. Ops teams
are putting this data to work by creating new analytical frameworks that have never been
possible before.
22. | 22
How Businesses Are Using Customer Intelligence
Customer Intelligence For Customer Success Teams
At the end of the day, relationships matter. Cancellations don’t happen in a vacuum.
They culminate in bug reports, feature requests, executive changes, response lags, unhappy
sentiment, and more. CI empowers you to leverage your rich customer data to help you
uncover the not-so-obvious opportunities for upsell, cross-sell, renewal, and advocacy.
Businesses are using CI to identify customers in the neutral zone — those who are not
already lost but at risk — so customer-facing teams can prioritize working on getting them
into a healthier status.
Leaders should better leverage
Customer Intelligence to more
precisely determine what the entire
customer base is all about and
whether their organizational energy
could be redeployed in a smarter way
towards other customers that offer
greater long-term revenue potential.
Peter Armaly
VP of Customer Success, ESG
23. | 23
Choosing A Customer
Intelligence Solution
Choosing A Customer Intelligence Solution
Despite Customer Intelligence still being an emerging field, there are already incredible CI
platforms that can help you get the most out of your data. Utilizing Customer Intelligence
will not only help you increase your revenue, but it’s also a powerful way to help you
maintain product market fit and increase customer advocacy.
Whether you’re already sold on the value of Customer Intelligence or looking for ways to
take your business to the next level, this section of the report covers the key considerations
you need to know about choosing the right Customer Intelligence platform for your needs.
When choosing a CI platform, consider the following:
• Insights for various teams: Customer Intelligence isn’t just for customer success teams.
Remember all the sub-categories from the last section? Product and engineering teams
can immediately benefit from learning more about customer frustration, confusion, and
wants directly from the voice of the customer. Marketing teams can transform positive
insights into customer references. Revenue operations and business intelligence teams
can create new analytical frameworks from previously unavailable data.
• Fast time to value: Let’s face it, we’ve all bought platforms that were oversold, hard to
implement, and even harder to administer. Look for solutions that can deliver insights
to your specific use cases quickly. Understand the resources required to start receiving
value and what resources are needed to maintain the program in the future.
24. | 24
Choosing A Customer Intelligence Solution
• Tech stack: When choosing a Customer Intelligence platform, the platform you select
must integrate deeply with the critical components of your current GTM tech stack. And
don’t forget email. More than 50% of B2B customer-to-business communications start
with an email.
• Avoid duplicate functionality: CI platforms often have similar functionality to systems
you already have, like customer success platforms and CRM systems. Look to compliment
your existing system with rich data from a Customer Intelligence solution.
• Security: Does the platform have a clear and transparent take on data security? Ensure
that any system you choose is SOC 2 Type II ready.
• Data privacy: How does the platform handle data privacy? What is the technical
approach to safeguarding your customers’ PII?
35.9%
25.6%
20.5%
12.8%
5.1%
Incoming
Data Sources
Tickets
Customer Emails
Chat
Calls
User Community
25%
50%
10%
10%
5%
25. | 25
Customer Intelligence, The Missing Piece
Of The Modern SaaS Tech Stack
Customer Intelligence, The Missing Piece Of The Modern SaaS Tech Stack
Everyone we interviewed for this report responded enthusiastically and affirmatively that
most businesses today need to embrace using Customer Intelligence. Companies that don’t
leverage CI will be left behind by those who do.
Armaly argues, that
“ Customer success is in the best position at this moment to drive company
transformation. (CI) insights should drive actions back to the company to
improve the product, services and engagement from other teams.”
Larger businesses, particularly with more operational resources and seemingly endless
amounts of data, can benefit from CI the most. Scale-ups ($10MM ARR) are also often
poised to benefit from CI as the telepathic nature of their early stages dissipates, and
growing pains detract from a focused customer-centric mindset.
In explaining the power of CI, Ed Powers, the Principal Consultant at Service Excellence
Partners, reflected on a time when he was making sales for HP. He recalled a top-performing
manager shadowing him for a sales meeting and giving him invaluable feedback after the
session had ended. Powers suspects there are many opportunities missed due to natural
limitations of scale.
“ [Customer Intelligence] is like an extra pair of eyes and ears; there’s only so
much we can process on our own. Machine learning and AI can come in and
surface those insights you may otherwise miss,”
says Powers.
26. | 26
The consensus among those we interviewed suggests that buyers are becoming more
educated about the benefits of Customer Intelligence. At the same time, the market is
maturing rapidly. We also learned that buyers who include their peers in the buying process
have better outcomes. This makes sense, as many teams are starved for unabridged insights.
It’s not just CX data; it’s operational data.
“ Prior to Customer Intelligence, the status of customers was
extremely subjective… There’s often a different “vibe” across
support, sales, and marketing.”
says Degnan.
CI, when utilized correctly, allows you to become proactive in improving customer success
rather than playing defensively.
“ Anecdotally, we found a reduction in case volume as the result of
being proactive.”
Degnan further explained.
Emily Ryan, Chief Customer Officer at Valuize, was more direct in what needs to happen for
the adoption of Customer Intelligence to continue.
“ The mindset shift has to continue for permanent B2B businesses. It is not
enough to say we are cloud-based or that we will shift our model from
perpetual license to subscription… The finance department has to be on board,
and the accounting team and the sales organization need to understand
what this means. It’s not all about the sale. The marketing team needs to
understand how this changes their ecosystem.”
https://www.valuize.co/
Customer Intelligence, The Missing Piece Of The Modern SaaS Tech Stack
27. | 27
Customer Intelligence, The Missing Piece Of The Modern SaaS Tech Stack
CI helps further expand how you collect data and gives you the exact blueprint of what
steps to take next. Unanimously, the experts we interviewed for this report believe that
one of the most underrated aspects of CI is that it can help give your brand and quality of
service consistency.
While this report could only scratch the surface of the possibilities of Customer Intelligence,
it’s clear that it is here to stay.
Contact a team member at Sturdy to see how CI can help
your business grow through insights hidden in plain sight.
Schedule a demo
https://www.sturdy.ai/contact-us
Your Customers. happy
Keep Your Customers. happy
28. | 28
Acknowledgments
Massive thanks to the expert panel who shared feedback and insights with Sturdy:
Emily Ryan https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyrspeer
Chief Client Officer at Valuize https://www.valuize.co
Aaron Thompson https://www.linkedin.com/in/athomps
Founder and CEO at Red Slacks https://redslacks.com
Ed Powers https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-powers-ab5315
Principal Consultant at Service Excellence Partners https://se-partners.com
Irit Eizips https://www.linkedin.com/in/eizips
Chief Customer Officer CEO at CSM Practice https://www.csmpractice.com
Joanne Degnan https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanne-jackson-degnan
Former Chief Customer Officer at UKG. https://www.ukg.com
Peter Armaly https://ca.linkedin.com/in/peterarmaly
VP of Customer success at ESG https://esgsuccess.com
*Some quotes were edited for clarity and brevity.
Acknowledgments