Ellucian Builds a More Connected, Data-Driven Customer Success Organization

Ellucian, a leading higher education technology solutions provider, needed a better way to surface customer health signals, identify churn risk, and create greater visibility across a large, complex customer base. Leveraging Staircase AI within Gainsight CS, they centralized customer health signals and key developments into a single view that not only made them more operationally efficient, but also generated more accurate customer data and improved their risk assessment.

Managing a large and diverse customer base presented significant complexity for Ellucian’s Customer Success team. With more than 2,800 customers and 20 million student end users across 50 countries, gaining a consistent, reliable view of customer health while aligning teams around it was critical. While Salesforce served as their primary system of record, it did not provide the structure, workflows, or best practices needed to effectively manage customer success at scale.
At the same time, multiple teams—including Customer Success, Professional Services, and Sales—were engaging with customers independently, each using their own systems to track interactions. This made it difficult to create a unified view of the customer or consistently identify risk.
“Customer insights were handled across various systems of record. We didn’t have well-established processes for spotting churn risk,” said Melissa Young, Senior Business Analyst at Ellucian.

Insights often surfaced inconsistently, with little standardization in how teams captured or acted on them. As Ellucian continued to evolve its customer success approach, there was a clear need to bring more structure, consistency, and visibility to how customer health was managed.

To support this shift, Ellucian focused on building a more unified and actionable view of the customer by bringing together structured data, cross-functional insights, and AI-driven signals.

With Gainsight CS and Staircase AI, Ellucian created a centralized system that enables teams to better assess risk, align around customer outcomes, and operate more consistently across the business.

In 2020, Ellucian implemented Gainsight CS to introduce additional structure and consistency into its customer success processes. The platform enabled the team to standardize workflows, centralize customer data, and automate key administrative tasks.

Over time, this allowed Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to work with more consistent data, including sentiment scores, engagement metrics, and health indicators—creating a shared, reliable view of the customer across teams. This shift gave teams and leaders a common, authoritative view of the customer rather than fragmented insights spread across multiple systems.

Built-in AI functionality within Gainsight has also helped teams more quickly understand customer context. For example, Gainsight AI Cheat Sheet uses generative AI to create a narrative summary of a customer’s strategic priorities, risks, and key initiatives, making it easier for teams to prepare for customer engagements and act on insights.

“Gainsight has helped our CS team build that muscle of being outcomes-focused—we’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we were,” said Young.

The introduction of Gainsight also helped shape how teams approached customer success more broadly.

“It forced our teams to start looking at the business a little bit differently,” Young explained.

By embedding best practices into the system, Ellucian was able to move from inconsistent, reactive processes toward a more structured, repeatable approach to managing customer success.

Expanding Visibility with Unstructured Customer Insights

To further improve visibility into customer health, Ellucian introduced Staircase AI to capture and analyze unstructured customer communications across the organization in 2025.

Before Staircase, customer interactions across teams were tracked in separate systems, making it difficult to fully understand the breadth of customer engagement.

“With Staircase, we’re able to get a holistic picture of all the engagements that are happening across the company,” said Nicholas Anagnost, Manager, CS Ops at Ellucian.

Staircase added a layer of visibility Ellucian didn’t previously have, capturing insights from customer conversations that were never formally tracked. These insights are now built into Gainsight, where teams can access them within the Customer 360 view to analyze signals in context and take action within a single system.

“Gainsight CS provides structured data on the customer, while Staircase provides an unstructured communication layer. We definitely see them working together,” Anagnost said.

They now have embedded insights and dashboards from Staircase into Gainsight’s Customer 360 (C360), establishing a workflow where Staircase provides early risk signals that are reviewed by CSMs, with CTAs created only after human validation.

“We have started writing back Staircase-generated customer data to Gainsight CS,” said Anagnost. For a more streamlined user experience, the majority of users interact with Staircase through Gainsight CS, rather than operating in two separate tools.

Ellucian is also using Staircase AI Topics Reports to identify patterns across defined groups of customers. By analyzing conversation topics at a segment or regional level, leaders can quickly understand topics and themes customers are discussing most without reviewing individual interactions.

“We don’t have to go back and rehash conversations with the customers around their goals,” Anagnost explained. “We can ask Staircase about things that customers have already said, and then go and validate rather than start from ground zero.”

With Gainsight CS and Staircase AI, Ellucian has improved how it captures, analyzes, and acts on customer data, creating more consistent visibility across teams and leadership.

By centralizing customer signals and insights, teams are better equipped to identify risk earlier, align around a single source of truth, and scale their customer success operations. Ultimately driving better customer outcomes. As Ellucian continues its transition from an on-premise model to SaaS, this level of visibility has become increasingly important to reducing risk and ensuring customers realize value. The ability to quickly access and understand customer data has also improved executive visibility. Leaders can now easily prepare for engagements using real-time insights.

“Our CEO was recently in Iowa for a symposium and requested a rundown of all the Iowa customers that were going to be there,” said Anagnost. “We were able to leverage Staircase to look up key insights for those customers.”

This level of visibility enables faster, more informed decision-making and helps teams better understand trends and opportunities across the organization. Ellucian has also seen measurable efficiency gains in its success planning process. By leveraging insights captured in Staircase and Gainsight, the team has reduced the time required to prepare success plans.

“We’re getting about an hour’s time savings in terms of prep time for each success plan we create,” said Young.

Ellucian plans to continue maturing its workflows, particularly around risk signals and cross-functional alignment. The team is focused on refining processes that combine AI-driven insights with human validation to ensure accuracy, consistency, and actionability.

“We have risk signals going to a dedicated Slack channel where various cross-functional leaders can review and act on those,” explained Anagnost.

At the same time, Ellucian is exploring how customer sentiment and engagement signals may inform adjacent sales and renewal workflows, while maintaining human validation and clear ownership of follow-up actions.

As adoption continues to grow, Ellucian is building on a more unified, data-driven foundation for customer success, enabling teams to work more proactively and stay aligned around customer outcomes.

“We’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we were,” said Young, reflecting on the team’s progress toward a more outcomes-focused approach.