Branch Enhances Customer Insights and Churn Management with Staircase AI

Branch, a leading provider of mobile growth and attribution solutions, implemented Staircase AI by Gainsight to enhance its customer experience strategy. Within a week, the platform was fully operational, offering immediate, qualitative insights previously unavailable to the team. Key benefits include deep churn analysis, flexible insight tracking, and seamless integration with existing tools.

Missing Early Churn Signals in Customer Sentiment

Before implementing Gainsight’s Staircase AI, Branch’s customer experience team faced a critical gap: a lack of qualitative insights into customer sentiment and early churn indicators. While traditional dashboards provided quantitative metrics like revenue and customer counts, they failed to answer deeper questions such as: What’s the actual customer experience like? and What signals indicate churn risk before it’s too late?

Leadership often found themselves in a reactive position, addressing churn only after it had already occurred rather than taking preventative action. This lack of foresight resulted in missed opportunities to proactively engage customers showing early warning signs of dissatisfaction.

Branch relied on tools like Looker for reporting, which provided a static view of historical data but lacked the ability to uncover underlying trends contributing to customer attrition. Teams were forced to manually piece together fragmented insights, making it difficult to identify correlations between customer interactions and eventual churn.

“As a customer experience leader, churn is like a knife to the heart,” said Stephanie Herndon-Rasse, Head of Customer Experience at Branch. “Before Staircase AI, we were constantly asking ourselves: What did we miss? What could we have done differently? Now, we finally have the visibility to answer those questions before it’s too late.”

Turning Data Into AI-informed Action

Branch needed a proactive approach to customer insights. They sought a solution for real-time sentiment tracking, deep churn analysis, and actionable insights—without the hassle of complex implementation. Staircase AI emerged as the ideal choice, delivering immediate impact and enabling the team to move from a reactive to a predictive customer success model.

Within one week, the platform was fully integrated, allowing Branch to uncover hidden customer sentiment, improve decision-making, and drive strategic initiatives that would have otherwise taken months to identify. Time-to-value was as quick as the implementation, with the platform providing the team with visibility into customer sentiment and engagement patterns in just a few days.

Churn Report with Multi-Level Attribution

One of the most powerful features Branch gained through Staircase AI was the churn report, which provided multi-level attribution for customer losses. Traditional churn reporting often reduced departures to a single reason, failing to capture the full picture. Staircase AI, however, connected multiple data points, revealing patterns and leading indicators of customer dissatisfaction.

“The churn report is a game-changer,” said Herndon-Rasse. “Instead of wondering why a customer left, we now see all the touchpoints that contributed to churn. It’s given us the ability to take action long before a customer reaches that decision.”

Customizable Insight Tracking with Cards

Before Staircase AI, Branch struggled to surface critical customer signals buried in scattered data. With its customizable insight tracking, Staircase AI enabled the team to create tailored cards that flagged key patterns—such as customers showing high engagement but low sentiment. Leveraging these customizable cards, their team was able to track key insights that were previously difficult to surface. 

One of the most impactful discoveries was identifying customers who displayed high engagement but low sentiment—a red flag that had been overlooked in the past. By configuring Staircase AI to flag these trends, Branch gained a proactive way to intervene before customers became retention risks.

Driving Strategic Initiatives

Another major benefit of Staircase AI was its cost-to-serve analysis, which inspired a company-wide initiative at Branch. By surfacing data on the true cost of servicing different customer segments, the platform empowered RevOps and finance teams to refine their profitability models. This led to strategic adjustments in resource allocation across global teams, ensuring more efficient customer support and account management.

Deeper Insights, Smarter Retention

Staircase AI gave Branch deeper visibility into customer health, allowing the team to take a more strategic approach to retention. The platform has streamlined workflows, enhanced reporting, and empowered teams to act on critical insights.

Proactive Churn Reduction

With early detection capabilities powered by Staircase AI, Branch has shifted from a reactive to a proactive approach in managing churn. Since implementation, Branch has seen a significant improvement in churn reduction, allowing the team to retain more customers and build stronger long-term relationships. By identifying early warning signs—such as shifts in sentiment or engagement—before they escalate, Branch can now take preemptive action to retain at-risk customers. 

Increased Team Accountability

The structured alerts and engagement tracking within Staircase AI have ensured customer success managers take timely, proactive action. Managers and account owners now have clearer visibility into customer interactions, ensuring follow-ups happen in a timely manner. By embedding these insights into daily workflows, teams can respond faster and with greater precision to customer needs, leading to improved satisfaction and retention.

Enhanced Leadership Reporting

The multi-dimensional insights provided by Staircase AI have strengthened leadership reporting at Branch. Instead of relying on static churn data, executive teams now receive rich, detailed reports that highlight trends, early indicators, and actionable insights. This enhanced level of visibility has empowered leadership to make more informed decisions, aligning customer success strategies with broader business objectives.

Real-Time Alerts for Proactive Engagement

One of the most immediate benefits of Staircase AI was its ability to deliver real-time alerts through Slack. This ensured that customer success managers and leadership were instantly informed of key customer sentiment changes and potential risks. Instead of manually tracking trends, teams could act immediately on insights, significantly improving response times and intervention effectiveness. By embedding this functionality into their daily workflows, Branch created a culture of proactive engagement, reducing the likelihood of churn and ensuring more meaningful customer interactions.

Branch plans to expand its use of Staircase AI by driving greater leadership adoption, ensuring that teams consistently rely on the platform as their primary customer intelligence hub. Additionally, the company aims to refine its cost-to-serve analysis by integrating more detailed profitability metrics. Looking forward, Branch is also exploring automated next-step recommendations, enabling teams to act swiftly on insights and further streamline customer success operations. With these advancements, Branch is evolving toward a fully predictive customer success model, enhancing retention, efficiency, and overall satisfaction.