Staircase Newsletter May 2026

Topic Trends adds growth metrics and time-series views to the Topics report so you can spot emerging patterns before they become bigger issues.

You can now download Risk and Expansion Analysis reports as formatted PDFs directly from the Accounts page, making it easy to share insights with stakeholders who don't have platform access.

Here's what's new:

• Expansion Analysis PDF includes opportunity breakdowns, confidence levels, and evidence quotes
• Risk Analysis PDF includes risk reasons, severity levels, playbook details, and stakeholder cards

Why this matters: Share Staircase insights in a clean, portable format without sending anyone a platform login.

Admins can now manage multiple email addresses for a single user profile, covering scenarios where users change companies or have more than one email on file.

How it works:

• Admins can update a user's primary email and designate which address takes priority
• All associated emails are now visible in the UI for easier identification

What you'll notice: Fewer support headaches when users switch companies or email addresses. Everything is visible and manageable in one place.

If you're writing Staircase health, sentiment, and engagement scores into your Gainsight instance, the community consensus is clear: daily snapshots, not weekly.

Staircase scores update multiple times a day, so a weekly snapshot smooths over the dips that matter most. A sudden sentiment drop or engagement fall could go unnoticed for days — and by then, it's harder to act. Daily snapshotting means you catch meaningful changes within 24 hours and can trigger the right response before it becomes a churn risk. The simplest implementation: add the Staircase score update into your existing daily rule chain alongside your other Gainsight scorecard measures.

Beyond cadence, it's also worth revisiting how Staircase scores sit within your broader health score setup. A pattern gaining traction in the community: replace your legacy CSM Sentiment score with the Staircase AI Health Score as your qualitative measure. Since Staircase derives sentiment automatically from actual customer communications, it removes the subjectivity of manual CSM input. To make this work well, consider building a Measure Group that surfaces all four core Staircase scores together — Sentiment, Engagement, Open Items, and Response Time — giving CSMs a single, coherent AI-driven view.

If your team manages customer communication through a shared Distribution List email, you might assume Staircase can't track it — since DLs don't have a traditional mailbox object. Community member Samartha raised exactly this concern after working with Gainsight Support.

The good news: no workaround needed. Distribution lists automatically forward emails to the individual members in the group. Staircase tracks those individual mailboxes — not the DL address itself — so as long as each person in the distribution list is synced, customer communications are captured as expected.

If you run a pooled or shared CSM model, the check to do is simple: confirm each individual in your DL is synced in Staircase, rather than looking for the group email address directly.
 

Want to target dark or unresponsive accounts in a Journey Orchestrator program? There's a workaround worth knowing right now — and a native solution coming soon.

Community member SnowRider flagged that Staircase's 'Accounts Dark' analysis couldn't easily feed into JO as an audience. The community's workaround: use the 'Last Engagement Date (Staircase)' field in Gainsight. Filter by the MAX value across all contacts at a company — if it exceeds 30/60/90 days, classify the account as dark and build your JO audience from there in Data Designer.

The bigger news: Gainsight's Brady Bluhm confirmed 28 days ago that OOB syncing of health scores, sentiment, engagement levels, and date fields is coming this quarter — making the Accounts Dark signal natively available in Data Designer for JO audience building.

The Q1 release packed in a lot. If you missed the live session, the recording and recap are now available.

Have questions about Staircase AI? Join our weekly Office Hours sessions—open to all customers.