Untapped Signals: Why Unstructured Data Is the Key to Retention & Expansion

According to a 2024 Forrester survey, renewals and expansions already account for 61% of B2B revenue, but less than half of organizations feel confident they can capture the behavioral signals that drive them (Forrester, 2024).

That gap means most teams are surrounded by intelligence they don’t know how to use.

Unstructured data isn’t only about spotting risk. It’s about uncovering opportunities. For Customer Success teams, unstructured data is the constant undercurrent of the customer relationship, the details scattered across Zoom recordings, Slack conversations, Jira tickets, Zendesk logs, Salesforce notes, and email threads. 

Unlike structured fields in a CRM, this information doesn’t fit neatly into a dashboard, so it’s often overlooked. Yet it contains the earliest, most actionable signals of both churn and expansion. When brought together, it turns fragmented noise into a coherent story about the customer’s trajectory.

At Noded, we saw this in action with Silverfort. Their Customer Success team wasn’t struggling with adoption metrics, they had those. The challenge was that customer frustrations, feature requests, and emerging opportunities were scattered across calls, Slack, and email.

Once these signals were connected, Silverfort’s leaders could anticipate renewal risks weeks earlier, but more importantly, they began to see clear expansion triggers such as repeated feature interest across accounts, early signals of upsell readiness, and product feedback tied directly to revenue impact.

This wasn’t just CS efficiency. It was Customer Success as a growth engine.

Here’s how CS leaders can turn unstructured signals into revenue:

• Centralize fragmented insights. Bring transcripts, emails, Slack, and notes into one accessible layer.
  
  
• Connect qualitative and quantitative data. Tie unstructured signals to structured outcomes (renewal, expansion, churn) to show leadership why metrics move.
  
  
• Operationalize foresight. Turn recurring signals into triggers: a pattern of product requests = expansion readiness, a tone shift = early churn risk.

Unstructured data is no longer “nice to have.” It’s fast becoming the most strategic asset for CS leaders who want to own not just retention, but expansion.

The next era of Customer Success will belong to those who move beyond monitoring accounts to truly understanding them. Leaders who bring the voice of the customer, the unfiltered, unstructured signals, into boardrooms will not just protect revenue, they’ll shape it.

In our recent post, “Transforming Customer Journey Mapping”, context is the missing link between data and outcomes.

The companies that win the next phase of growth will be those that treat unstructured data not as noise, but as foresight.

Noded AI gives Customer Success leaders the ability to see retention risks earlier and expansion opportunities faster, without waiting for the numbers to tell the story too late.

Be the CS leader who doesn’t just manage accounts but shapes growth. 

Get early access to Noded AI and see how unstructured data becomes your competitive edge.