We get the same feeling from Gainsight and Skilljar—your teams actually listen to customers and quickly deliver features that make our work easier, rather than just putting ideas out there and hoping someone acts on them years later. That responsiveness and focus on features we need improves our experience so much.
But now with Staircase, we know exactly who's active, who we're talking to. Marketing thinks this is gold. They're now using the output from the stakeholder report within Staircase to start targeting specific people. And once we start adding roles like executive sponsor, champion, decision maker, buyer, or user, it will become even more useful.
Our internal support, technical success, and CS managers all direct customers to the community for self-service. We primarily impact our scale segment—customers who manage their Qualtrics programs independently, so they use the community to ramp up, educate themselves and self-serve.
John has been really great working with us and Armin to figure out how we create a community instance for our SMB customers. John has taken the lead and now we have a solution that's pretty much ready to go. We've had great support during this process.
We use Staircase triggers to send notifications to Slack channels, which helps us loop in CSMs and leaders even if they're not copied on the email.
We've been playing around with the Claude connector, which overall is really good! The dashboards you can create on Claude are great - it's a bit of a different flavor to Staircase because you're able to adjust what information to include and how to display it.
I was very nervous when we acquired Staircase because I'm the only admin on the Gainsight side and thought, 'Geez, another tool to admin.' But I actually feel like since we've acquired it, it's taken a lot off my plate. Obviously new problems arise—mostly mapping issues and questions I have to answer around that. But I think the team did a really good job at exploring the tool for themselves and finding value out of it very quickly. For the most part, it's a pretty simple tool. After we implemented it—aside from a few hiccups—for the most part, it was pretty smooth. Because that tool gives them access to build reports on their own—unlike Gainsight, where we hadn't set it up for them to build reports—allowing them to make their own reports in Staircase has been helpful, because a lot of my day-to-day is building reports out of Gainsight. Now they're able to do it themselves I don’t receive as many questions.
I'm excited to see what the Champion integration can do for our community.
We had a trial last year with Staircase and saw that it captured all our email engagements automatically, pushing the communications into the timeline. We could see all email interactions from our support team members who work primarily in our ticket system and don’t use Outlook. It was great for insights, and our leadership team really liked the automated email capture.
I really like the AI Answers feature. It seamlessly combines information from both help content and the community. It accurately locates and summarizes recent conversations with useful content that may not be found in help articles, such as workarounds and updates on known issues. It also surfaces the most relevant threads when a discussion spans multiple topics. This feature does a much better job of helping our members find the most recent and relevant content than the standard search.
Staircase literally crawls all customer communications—anyone from product, HR, or sales—and tracks all of their emails. Staircase has been really helpful for enterprise teams to track multi-level threading and analyze sentiment.
I thought the Skilljar integration was great. The one-login experience across Skilljar and our customer community is going to be super helpful.
Prompting is much more effective in Staircase. We use an incredible internal enterprise AI tool to help navigate our Salesforce instance, but we have so much unstructured data that it's difficult to parse. Staircase's specialized AI helps us focus on the signals that matter most for these customer use cases.
We’re using the community as our primary communication channel because we support a wide range of products and clients. Instead of relying on journey orchestrator emails for product updates, we’ve shifted to a model where users access information directly in the portal. If they want email notifications, they can subscribe to the relevant groups—eliminating the need to build and maintain separate email programs.
As the VP of Customer Success for a leading, AI-driven digital supply chain platform provider, I rely on Staircase as my primary source of truth each day. When I log in, I need an immediate, clear view of global retail customer health—starting with any churn risks—so I can quickly prioritise where intervention is required. In parallel, I look for value-driven insights, such as customers reporting measurable outcomes like cost improvements against key KPIs. This allows me to track realised value at scale, reinforce the impact of our platform, and proactively identify opportunities to develop customer advocacy and reference stories
Our Community has focused on becoming a hub: a central customer-first destination for a number of resources including our Product Roadmap, Updates, Events and much more. Some resources are available elsewhere in our ecosystem - but not easily. The growth Community has seen is a reflection of putting the customer first.
We need to focus on customer attrition by using Gainsight PX data to identify usage patterns and onboarding failures so we can predict who might churn. For example, we want to spot customers who log in once or twice and then never return, and then reengage them to improve onboarding and renewals.
Gainsight has so many great features. For example, in Khoros, we did not have the ability to differentiate between questions and discussions. This subtlety is very important because it allows us to manage and track SLA's, gives granular ability to assign points and leverage gamification to reward members appropriately. Gainsight gives us that capability.
We did our churn analysis for the full year to understand the churn drivers and feed into our voice of the customer initiative, which we presented to the board last week. NPS and CSAT are limited, but with Staircase we've analyzed over 2,000,000 interactions to identify themes and topics, giving us more intuitive insight into real problems than surveys alone.
We’re primarily using Staircase to monitor client sentiment, and now we’re starting to use topics to monitor deliverables—like confirming clients received their financial statements—and to measure the impact of our learning and development initiatives on clients.
With our limited POC data, Ask Staircase highlighted risk and the associated ARR by analyzing emails alone, which was amazing.
One nice thing about Dean is that he is honest and he listens to us. He's been a game changer here for us at Cato, helping us to land. He's the best of the best at skilljar. If we need to get RFEs on the books, he does it and we do product roadmap sessions quarterly, so we can even help drive the direction of skilljar if needed.
This is so great because right now this is such a manual process. I have to identify, well, and I don't even look at the whole thing—I look at the customers that have churned and then look to see what their usage manually in Skilljar is. So being able to just come to a dashboard and track that will be such a time saver. Totally.
It's super interesting. We're obviously leaning in heavily with AI. Right now, in terms of maturity, we're adopting Staircase, which is a big part of our churn prevention, risk identification, and health score strategy. It's a big part of our strategy there.
What do you like best about the product?
What I appreciate most about Gainsight is how it changes the way customer work is prioritized. Instead of relying on gut feeling or scattered notes, the platform gives a clear sense of which accounts need attention and why. Timelines and automated cues help keep conversions contextual, so customer interactions feel more informed and consistent.
What do you dislike about the product?
The platform requires a significant upfront investment in setup and internal alignment. Without clear ownership and planning, it's easy to overbuild dashboards or health metrics that don't actually drive action.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Gainsight addresses the problem of unclear customer priorities and inconsistent follow through. Before using it risks often surfaced too late and customer context was fragmented. Now, signals activities and outcomes are tracked in one place, making it easier to act early and stay alliance as a team this has improve customer health, reduced reactive firefighting, and brought more structure to how customer success is measured and executed.