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Molly.McQ
Helper ⭐️
June 6, 2025
New Idea

Enable Gainsight CS Timeline Data Integration with Staircase AI

Related products:Staircase AI
  • June 6, 2025
  • 29 replies
  • 636 views

Staircase AI currently does not factor in any data from the CS Timeline, which is a significant gap in communication intelligence and customer context. According to recent guidance from our Gainsight/Staircase Solutions Consultant:

“Gainsight CS Timeline is not factored into Staircase at all. All communication is conducted based on Staircase integrations with email, meetings, tickets, and chat, if these are configured. You cannot currently manually enter calls, notes, or other communications into Staircase.”

This was not made clear to us during onboarding. In fact, I incorrectly assumed Timeline data would be considered because it is such a foundational and expected capability in any native integration like this. Unfortunately, we later learned this isn’t the case, leaving a major blind spot in how Staircase perceives customer activity and sentiment. 

Staircase should support ingesting and analyzing CS Timeline data; at minimum, allowing structured notes and manually logged customer interactions to inform sentiment scoring, engagement patterns, and health insights.

This would allow Staircase to factor in high-value interactions such as:

  • Strategic conversations documented during QBRs/EBRs
  • Risk escalations or renewal save actions and updates captured by CSMs
  • Notes following non-digital customer engagements (e.g., calls or in-person meetings)

While there are many benefits and use cases to support the prioritized implementation of this request, here are some key benefits to consider: 

  • Ensures sentiment and health scores reflect the full customer relationship (not just synced communication channels)
  • Honors the critical strategic documentation that’s already happening in Timeline
  • Reduces blind spots where accounts may appear disengaged despite high-value interaction 
    • NOTE: This is an ongoing issue for us as we are constantly battling data sync issues due to Staircase incorrectly flagging these for no recent communications. This undermines the value of the tool and leads us to question the validity of Staircase insights. 
  • Enhances Staircase’s utility for teams with mature Gainsight implementations

Again, this is a very basic integration expectation for a tool that is supposed to analyze “all customer communication to accurately spot at-risk customers and make customer success automatic.” Why would we exclude and not consider Timeline updates and insights? 

If Timeline data is important to your teams customer intelligence, please upvote and share your use case.

29 replies

bradybluhm
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
August 6, 2025

Giving Staircase direct access to all of our Slack channels and full access to our email is basically a non-starter based on our security and legal teams’ review processes.

​@dayn.johnson on this… Staircase never gets access to all of your slack channels or all of your emails.
-  re:Slack - Staircase will only read from external slack channels with customers that are added and the app itself has to be added manually to that channel by one of your teammates and then connected to the account in Staircase for that to be possible. It is very secure and follows all of our privacy guidelines for exclusion lists as well.
- re:emails - Staircase only pulls and processes emails that have a customer in the to, from, cc line. No other emails are touched and we get through some very tough security processes. 

You might want to relook at running a security review, especially with our recent addition of PII Anonymization.  Unless you have very strict HIPAA compliance or Workers Counsel (EU/Germany) requirements, we have all our t’s crossed and i’s dotted.

I do agree that Email Auto-log adds the most value for CS only customer, but know that CS customers will not get the AI analysis of emails at all; just email clean up and logging to CS (via Staircase).  Joint customers will get the Email Logging AND full AI analysis and processing of AI signals to Staircase for actioning that is AI driven.  Having the emails is one thing… knowing which ones matter is a different thing. I think you’ll want to add Staircase into the mix to really get the full value out of it.

AI on my mind!
bradybluhm
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
August 6, 2025
  • Sensitive communication channels - as noted above, there are some privacy restrictions that prevent some users from having emails ingested at all. This could be an account-specific request, or relate to any established data protection regulations. Timeline is the only way to capture those insights and interactions.
  • Strategic notes - internal planning sessions, renewal strategy discussions, feature request details, success plans, etc., live in Timeline and these updates often contain insights and signals that email auto-capture tools miss entirely.  

​@Molly.McQ  These are great insights. We are prioritizing shared out of the box fields between CS and ST and I am adding ingestion from Timeline as a requirement in the MVP. I agree with your reasoning and feel that if we were to pick one source from CS to ST that we should prioritize to add CS insight into the mix, it should be TL entries as that will give you the most flexibility to generate useful context for the overall account and AI intelligence.

Anyone want to join a feedback session on Data Objects between ST and CS?? Like this comment and I will include you when I start the deeper discovery and customer feedback on this.

AI on my mind!
heather_hansen
VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 6, 2025

​@bradybluhm you know I’m in. 

dayn.johnson
VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 7, 2025

Giving Staircase direct access to all of our Slack channels and full access to our email is basically a non-starter based on our security and legal teams’ review processes.

​@dayn.johnson on this… Staircase never gets access to all of your slack channels or all of your emails.
-  re:Slack - Staircase will only read from external slack channels with customers that are added and the app itself has to be added manually to that channel by one of your teammates and then connected to the account in Staircase for that to be possible. It is very secure and follows all of our privacy guidelines for exclusion lists as well.
- re:emails - Staircase only pulls and processes emails that have a customer in the to, from, cc line. No other emails are touched and we get through some very tough security processes. 

You might want to relook at running a security review, especially with our recent addition of PII Anonymization.  Unless you have very strict HIPAA compliance or Workers Counsel (EU/Germany) requirements, we have all our t’s crossed and i’s dotted.

I do agree that Email Auto-log adds the most value for CS only customer, but know that CS customers will not get the AI analysis of emails at all; just email clean up and logging to CS (via Staircase).  Joint customers will get the Email Logging AND full AI analysis and processing of AI signals to Staircase for actioning that is AI driven.  Having the emails is one thing… knowing which ones matter is a different thing. I think you’ll want to add Staircase into the mix to really get the full value out of it.

 

Thanks for the 🔥 response, ​@bradybluhm! Going to defer to ​@kstim and ​@Dave Sousa to evaluate whether Staircase aligns with our directions and security/legal posture, I’ve been laser-focused on the new AI Agent, and think we’re close to getting that approved. Agree that Staircase has tremendous value.

Oh yeah, and I’m absolutely interested in joining a feedback session. Would love to hear more about how everything is integrated.

Staff CS Content & Comms Manager, 2x Gainsight CS Ops Product Council Member
Molly.McQ
Molly.McQAuthor
Helper ⭐️
August 7, 2025

That is fantastic news, ​@bradybluhm, and I’d love to participate!

Scientia potentia est
romihache
VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 7, 2025

Count me in too ​@bradybluhm!

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection
Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 8, 2025

whilst the implication of Data privacy are of real concern here, and yes would want Staircase to read from timeline ie responses to digital JOs,  to take this a further step to automation for the CSM,

 

  1. why cant Staricase add the email (if it comes from the CSM) TO the timeline 
  2. Staircase to read survey results (assuming sent via Gainsight) 

Staircase is about customer engagement and therefore this needs to be all -encompassing 

bradybluhm
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
August 11, 2025

​@smartin I love your thinking!! 

1. We have actually started the work already for syncing emails from Staircase to Timeline. The feature is internally named “Email Auto-Log”.  Expect it to land by the end of the year and we will likely have a closed beta to test capacity and work out any bugs pre-GA roll-out.
2. Survey ingestion and analysis with Staircase is on our roadmap plan! We will definitely be doing this and view it as a way to significantly improve Staircase’s capabilities with the long-tail / tech touch customers. If I had to guess based on our immediate roadmap being pretty hefty, I would expect Survey’s to come right after improved Product Usage ingestion / analysis.

Also, on a similar note, we have planned in near-term to leverage the Email Auto-log to CS timeline to associate and track if a customer responds to JO emails and to allow that to be a trigger in JO.

Exciting stuff!

AI on my mind!
Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 11, 2025

when are you going to share a roadmap for the next 2-3 quarters so we can start planning our initiatives to align to Staircase releases ? 

Apprecaiate the connect you and I had post implementation but we still unsure about next phases and how that can improve our Customer insights and CSM efficiencies