I’m not fully sure how this would work, but here’s the general premise:You can set up custom topics to trawl for in communications in Staircase, which is great. You get topic breakdown reports, see which accounts are mentioning it, etc.However, unless it’s also tied to something like a churn risk or negative message type of insight, you can’t create alerts off of them, nor are they reportable in CS.Ultimately, here is what we would like to be able to do:Have these signals more visible in CS Be able to fire alerts on topics (e.g., when a competitor is mentioned) Be able to configure when to fire a CTA in CS when certain topics appear under certain conditions in CS. For numbers 2 and 3, ideally, you’d also have some of the context aka evidence (link of the comm + snippet) so you don’t have to hunt down the origin.I use competitor mentions as an example, but it obviously wouldn’t be limited to just that. And while understanding the context of when to send these alerts might be a bit of a challenge for an org, having the capability would be valuable.For example, if you’re in the middle of a renewal period, and your customer is dropping mentions of competitors in emails/calls, that could signal a problem.Today, you have to rely on the topic reports, or topic section of an account page, which is fine, but it’s not a proactive alert, it’s passively there.

Expert ⭐️

Question

Staircase: Topics Should be Insight/Eventable

Forum|Forum|1 day ago
August 20, 2026
6 replies
23 views

I’m not fully sure how this would work, but here’s the general premise:

You can set up custom topics to trawl for in communications in Staircase, which is great. You get topic breakdown reports, see which accounts are mentioning it, etc.

However, unless it’s also tied to something like a churn risk or negative message type of insight, you can’t create alerts off of them, nor are they reportable in CS.

Ultimately, here is what we would like to be able to do:

Have these signals more visible in CS
Be able to fire alerts on topics (e.g., when a competitor is mentioned)
Be able to configure when to fire a CTA in CS when certain topics appear under certain conditions in CS.
For numbers 2 and 3, ideally, you’d also have some of the context aka evidence (link of the comm + snippet) so you don’t have to hunt down the origin.

I use competitor mentions as an example, but it obviously wouldn’t be limited to just that. And while understanding the context of when to send these alerts might be a bit of a challenge for an org, having the capability would be valuable.

For example, if you’re in the middle of a renewal period, and your customer is dropping mentions of competitors in emails/calls, that could signal a problem.

Today, you have to rely on the topic reports, or topic section of an account page, which is fine, but it’s not a proactive alert, it’s passively there.

dcassidy

Helper ⭐️⭐️

This is a really great idea. We ran into a similar problem for our Product team recently. We have around 200-225 beta/private preview customers who have specific products. The Product team wants quotes from these customers for their marketing and decks and whatnot. The Topics report was okay but didn’t get them too far.

I solved for this (hopefully temporarily) by adding the specific PM team members to a Slack channel, creating a canvas with the beta/private preview customers in a list format. Then, I set up the Highly Positive Message notifications to post to that channel. From there, I set up Claude to review the channel every day, compare the canvas of beta customers to the HPMs posted to that channel, and then reply in thread, @-mentioning the PM team members to let them know there’s an HPM they should look at.

This didn’t take a lot of time or effort, but Bradley’s idea is a much better and cleaner version of this. Where you’d (once again) run into frustration is if you’re looking for a specific topic mention and your Sales/Marketing team (if you’re capturing their emails in Staircase) goes on a blitz and mentions X thing.