What is Multi-Threading in Customer Success?
Definition
In the context of Customer Success (CS), multi-threading refers to the practice of establishing communication and building strong relationships with multiple stakeholders across an organization, rather than relying on a single point of contact (single-threaded).
In B2B SaaS, the relationship doesn’t stop at the budget holder or decision-maker. By engaging with a range of roles, from executives to operational teams to end users, CS teams can better understand the broader needs of an organization and drive success more effectively.
Key elements of multi-threading:
Connecting with different roles and departments
Avoiding dependency on a single person or team (this counts for your side too!)
Building a holistic, organization-wide partnership
Why is Multi-Threading Important?
1. Mitigates Risk
Relying on a single point of contact can put the relationship (and therefore, revenue) at risk if that person leaves, changes roles, or becomes unavailable. Multi-threading spreads the relationship across the organization, making it more resilient to changes in personnel or strategic direction.
2. Drives Stronger Customer Advocacy
The more touchpoints you have within a customer organization, the more advocates you’ll create. These advocates can help with retention, upsell opportunities, as well as case studies and referrals.
3. Gathers Holistic Insights
By speaking to multiple stakeholders, you gain a clearer, more comprehensive understanding of your customer’s goals, challenges, and pain points. This allows your CS team to proactively offer solutions that address a wider set of needs, improving customer satisfaction, outcomes, and retention. You will also have more voice of customer (VoC) data to analyze and implement.
4. Accelerates Product Adoption
Different stakeholders may use different features of your SaaS product. By involving various teams, you increase the likelihood of your product being adopted across different departments, not just the one that originally signed the deal (creating stickiness across the broader organization).
The Pillars of a World-Class Multi-Threading Strategy
A comprehensive multi-threading strategy for Customer Success revolves around three key pillars: Breadth, Depth, and Height. Here’s how each one comes into play:
1. Breadth: Expanding Across the Organization
Breadth is about spreading relationships out across the broader organization (think a mile wide). This doesn’t mean random interactions. A good strategy focuses on intentional engagement with key roles across departments that interact with or could benefit from your product or service.
This ensures you aren’t caught off guard by team changes or questions of value/ROI stemming from a limited user base. It also allows you to keep a pulse on different aspects of the customer experience and how their pain points evolve.
2. Depth: Building Stronger, More Meaningful Relationships
Depth refers to the strength of the relationships you have with the stakeholders you engage (think a mile deep). It’s not just about the number of people (quantity) but how deeply you engage with them (quality). A deeper relationship means that you understand their individual challenges, goals, and how your product fits into their larger strategy. The biggest lever you have toward strengthening your relationships is to ensure your engagements always provide direct and personalized value.
When you develop deep relationships, you gain trust, loyalty, and insight that goes beyond transactional exchanges. This makes customers more likely to stick with your product, renew their contracts, and expand their usage. And best of all, tell you about any problems before they snowball into churn.
3. Height: Climbing the Staircase
Height is about engaging at every level of an organization's hierarchy. From end users, to champions, to mid-level managers, all the way up to C-level executives. This ensures that you're not just having tactical conversations with the day-to-day users, but also strategic discussions with decision-makers who influence the company’s direction. It’s these relationships that are more likely to result in renewals, expansions, and long-term partnerships.
By climbing the hierarchy, you not only secure buy-in across the entire organization but also ensure that your relationship isn’t vulnerable to any one individual. Engaging with C-level execs gives you a seat at the table when it comes to high-level decisions, while connections at the operational level ensure your solution is woven into the daily workflows and culture of the business.
Staircase AI Best Practices: Multi-Threading Use Cases
Effective multi-threading is a key strategy for ensuring long-term customer success. With Staircase AI, you can take a data-driven approach to building and nurturing relationships across your customer organization.
1. Identify, Tag, Track, & Nurture Relationships with Key Stakeholders
The foundation of multi-threading is knowing who your key stakeholders are and tracking each relationship closely.
Label Stakeholder Roles: On your CRM or Gainsight CS, identify and tag each important stakeholder by their role (Champion, Decision Maker, Executive Sponsor, etc.) within the organization using a single select picklist field at the contact level.
Map Stakeholder Roles into Staircase AI: In Staircase, under Settings > Configurations > Fields > Stakeholder Fields, map in your stakeholder role field.
Set Touch Frequency by Role: Under Settings > Configurations > Stakeholder, set a global touch frequency per role designation (weekly for Champions, monthly for Decision Makers, quarterly for Exec Sponsors, etc.). Higher-level executives might require fewer but more strategic touchpoints, while operational leads may need more frequent communication.
Create Alerts for Dark/No Reach-Out Stakeholders: Create notifications for your team or specific account owners to be alerted in real time when any of their key stakeholder contacts go beyond the desired nurture cadence so they can take advantage of the reminder to connect with their contacts.
Gap Analysis Report: This report tracks: 1. have you identified each key role at each account and 2. where you have identified these roles, are you engaging with those stakeholders at the desired cadence? Schedule this report for a weekly email drop to get a punch list of customer stakeholders you have the opportunity to connect with that week and/or stakeholder roles you still need to identify or replace.
2. Multi-Threading Alerting & Reporting
Relationships Report: Schedule this report for a monthly drop to identify accounts where there are 0 or 1 relationships on either side of the partnership and use that list as your focus area for the month as to which relationships you need to strengthen and nurture. Prioritize accounts where you have 0 or 1 customer stakeholder in the engagement and then move on to the list where you only have one team member on your side engaging.
Account Not Multi-Threaded Alert: Powered by the Relationships Report, enable this notification to get an alert any time a relationship slips out of the minimum threshold (3 exchanges between two people in the past 90 days) causing an account to move into a single-threaded status. This alert monitors for single-threaded status on both sides of the partnership.
3. Elevate Visibility with Executive Dashboards & Lifecycle Tracking
Exec Dashboard Cards (Leadership Visualization): Ensure you have the following cards on your Executive Dashboard view:
Single Threaded Accounts: which accounts are currently not multi-threaded (prioritize based on ARR/Renewal Date first). This is provided OOTB.
Accounts with Recent Exec:Exec Engagement: Provides a quick list of all accounts that have recently had an executive:executive touchpoint. This card needs to be created in the UI. *Requires stakeholder roles to be populated.
Accounts Owed an Exec:Exec Engagement: Provides a list of all accounts that are overdue for an exec:exec touchpoint (driven by stakeholder frequency + Settings > Configurations > Executive setting). This card needs to be created in the UI. *Requires stakeholder roles to be populated.
Exec:Exec Lifecycle Event Tracking: Use the Lifecycle Events report and filter on Exec:Exec to see a list of accounts with recent exec:exec engagement.
Create Exec:Exec Connect Due Alert: Set up automated alerts when it’s time for executives from both sides to reconnect, ensuring alignment at the highest level.
4. Strengthen Relationships with Sentiment, Engagement, and Heat Maps
Heat Map (Relationship Strength): The Staircase AI Heat Map displays your highest volume relationships between your team and customer stakeholders for each account (use the filters to adjust who appears on the Heat Map but do note, if that individual has no current relationships, they may not appear). Use this view to see who has relationships at each account, which are the strongest, and which may need some nurturing to improve/strengthen. The color indicator will provide the current relationship score based on several factors (tone, engagement, sentiment, etc.). A missing indicator means those two people have not met the minimum bar for a "relationship" (3 exchanges between two people in the past 90 days).
Relationship Summary: From the Heat Map view, click any relationship indicator and a window will appear on the right side of the screen containing all recent interactions between those two people as well as a generative AI summary of the relationship between those two people based on those communications.
Schedule Stakeholder Report (Sentiment + Engagement): Send information to your marketing, product, and sales team about happy and engaged stakeholders who may be ripe for case studies, referrals, advisory boards, customer feedback sessions, etc.
Tying It All Together
A world-class multi-threading strategy isn’t just about having more conversations; it’s about having the right conversations at the right level with the right people. By focusing on breadth, depth, and height, B2B SaaS companies can ensure their customer relationships are robust, resilient, and positioned for long-term success.
By using these best practices in Staircase AI, you’ll be equipped to manage your multi-threading strategy with precision. Ensuring stronger, more resilient customer relationships across all levels of the organization. Empower your Customer Success team with actionable insights, automated alerts, and data-driven strategies to maximize account retention, satisfaction, and growth.