Staircase AI Overview
Overview
Staircase AI is an advanced customer intelligence platform that automatically analyzes all customer communications across email, meetings, and support channels. It delivers AI-powered insights about customer sentiment, relationship health, and emerging topics that would otherwise remain hidden in day-to-day conversations.
Enhance Gainsight CS with Staircase AI
Gainsight CS provides robust tracking of product usage, customer health scores, and success plans. To complement this, Staircase AI adds deep visibility into the voice of the customer by analyzing everyday communications, delivering additional insights that enrich customer understanding and drive proactive engagement.
The table below illustrates how Staircase AI by Gainsight enhances and complements the capabilities of Gainsight CS:
| Gainsight CS Capabilities | Staircase AI Enhancements |
|---|---|
| Product usage metrics | Communication intelligence across all channels |
| Manual CSM updates | Automatic sentiment analysis and trend detection |
| Scorecard-based health | Relationship intelligence and multi-threading visibility |
| Planned customer journey | Real conversations and unfiltered feedback |
Business Use Case
Let’s say a customer success team uses Gainsight CS to track usage metrics and manage success plans. However, they wish to identify early signs of churn or missed expansion opportunities due to limited insight into actual customer conversations.
By integrating Staircase AI, the team gains automated sentiment tracking, relationship intelligence, and actionable insights, enabling earlier intervention and more strategic engagement.
Key Benefits
- Earlier Risk Detection: Detects sentiment shifts, competitive mentions, and relationship changes, up to six weeks earlier than usage data alone.
- Deeper Customer Understanding: Capture unfiltered feedback from emails, meetings, and support interactions to guide better product and CX decisions.
- Relationship Intelligence: Map team-to-customer connections and relationship strength to reduce single-point-of-failure risks and boost renewals.
- Actionable Insights: Transform static reports into AI-powered recommendations to help CSMs manage more accounts with higher precision.
Integration Capabilities
The Staircase AI integration with Gainsight CS provides a unified and seamless experience for customer success teams with following capabilities:
- Single Sign-On (SSO): Enables secure, unified access across both platforms
- Consolidated Data: Combines communication insights with product usage and health data
- Embedded Views: Displays Staircase AI insights directly within Gainsight C360 and P360 layouts
- Executive Dashboard: Includes a pre-built dashboard for immediate visibility into key metrics
Note: A separate Staircase AI subscription is required. Contact your Gainsight representative for pricing and availability.
Staircase AI Value Across Roles
The Gainsight-Staircase integration delivers value across the customer success organization. Here's how it empowers each role to drive better outcomes:
Executive Leadership
Key Challenges
- Limited portfolio-wide visibility into true customer sentiment
- Reactive rather than proactive resource allocation
- Difficulty identifying systemic issues across customers
With Staircase and Gainsight Solution
- Executive Dashboard provides real-time view of sentiment, engagement, and risks
- Revenue by Health Score visualization shows portfolio health at a glance
- Topics Analysis reveals trending themes across all customers
Business Use Case
Sarah, a VP of Customer Success, relied on quarterly business reviews and manual CSM updates to understand relationship health, often discovering issues too late. With the Gainsight-Staircase integration, Sarah starts each day with the Executive Dashboard that highlights:
- Accounts needing immediate attention based on sentiment shifts
- Emerging topics across customer communications
- Team performance metrics and workload distribution
This allows her to coach her team proactively and allocate resources more effectively before issues escalate.
CS Team Leaders
Key Challenges
- Balancing workloads across team members
- Identifying coaching opportunities
- Ensuring consistent customer experience
With Staircase and Gainsight Solution
- Team Stats reports show communication volume and response times
- Gap Analysis identifies relationship coverage issues
- Team Efficiency metrics reveal accounts getting too much or too little attention
Business Use Case
Michael, a CS Director, struggled to identify which team members needed coaching on specific accounts. After opting for Gainsight with Staircase integration, every Monday, Michael runs the Team Efficiency report to:
- Identify overserviced and underserviced accounts
- Pinpoint CSMs with long response times
- Uncover best practices from top performers
He uses these insights in weekly one-on-ones to provide targeted coaching and redistribute accounts when necessary.
Customer Success Managers
Key Challenges
- Limited visibility into stakeholder sentiment
- Reactive to customer issues instead of proactive
- Time spent manually tracking communications
With Staircase and Gainsight Solution
- C360/P360 Staircase Integration shows real-time communication insights
- Relationship Mapping identifies multi-threading gaps
- Topics Detection surfaces customer concerns between meetings
Business Use Case
Jamie, a CSM, manually tracked customer communications and relied on intuition to gauge sentiment. After using Gainsight CS and Staircase integration, Jamie's morning workflow now includes:
- Checking the Sentiment Analysis dashboard for any overnight changes
- Reviewing Relationships report to identify stakeholders needing engagement
- Addressing specific Topics mentioned by customers proactively
This allows Jamie to manage more accounts effectively while providing more personalized experiences.
System Administrators
Key Challenges
- Complex setup and maintenance of multiple systems
- User administration across platforms
- Ensuring data accuracy and consistency
With Staircase and Gainsight Solution
- Unified user management through Gainsight roles
- Pre-built dashboards requiring minimal configuration
- Automatic data synchronization between systems
Business Use Case
Alex, a System Admin, spent hours configuring separate systems and managing user access. With this integration, Alex benefits from:
- Setting up users once in Gainsight with automatic role provisioning to Staircase
- Pre-configured dashboards that require minimal customization
- Streamlined troubleshooting with a single integration point
This reduces administrative overhead and ensures consistent user experiences across both platforms.
For more information on admin steps to implement Gainsight and Staircase integration, refer to Implement Staircase AI Integration article.