Alation Reinvents Support Efficiency and Escalation Management with Momentum

The Challenge

As a leader in data intelligence, Alation’s commitment to customer success is central to its business. But as the company scaled, so did the complexity of managing technical support cases. Escalations often involved multiple Zoom calls, multiple engineers, and fragmented notes—making it difficult for anyone to get a clear, consistent picture of what was actually happening within a case.

“It’s really hard for the technical support engineer to summarize details effectively for our customers,” said Daniel Rose, VP of Global Customer Experience at Alation. “We needed to find a way to streamline how we capture and share context across support calls and teams.”

The gaps weren’t just operational. Alation’s executive team also needed real-time visibility into at-risk accounts—but that insight often came too late. Support teams were left in reactive mode, and escalations sometimes reached leadership only after issues had already intensified.

On the support strategy side, Kalanea Robinson and her team faced similar friction. Support tickets could span four or five calls, but there was no centralized summary to track what had been done. “There was no cohesive story,” she explained. “It made it difficult for anyone jumping in—whether a team lead or another engineer—to understand where things stood or what still needed to happen.”

The support team needed a better way to manage multi-call cases, uncover early warning signs of risk, and keep leadership aligned—without slowing down their already busy engineers.

A New Layer of Visibility and Intelligence

Alation turned to Momentum to bring structure, insight, and automation to its support operations—starting with one of its most time-consuming tasks: summarizing Zoom calls. With Momentum, every support call is automatically transcribed and summarized into a clear narrative that includes technical context, troubleshooting steps, decisions made, and agreed-upon next actions.

“We were really impressed that it captured all the way to the technical aspect of it,” said Kalanea. “What the issue was, what steps were done, and ultimately the next action steps—it was all there, automatically, and consistent every time.”

That consistency quickly became a game changer. Rather than piecing together call notes or relying on team memory, support engineers now had a reliable, centralized summary for every case. Cases that once felt fragmented became cohesive, even across multiple teams and touchpoints.

These summaries were pushed directly into Salesforce, giving stakeholders across support, sales, and customer success immediate access to the latest updates. Momentum’s low-code flexibility also made automation easy to build and adjust. “It’s really click-and-go,” Kalanea said. “All the fields we integrated are there already. You just select the right one, modify the message, and it’s live. You can test and edit literally within seconds.”

Acting on Risk Before It Escalates

But Momentum didn’t just improve internal coordination—it helped Alation get ahead of customer risk.

Daniel’s team uses Momentum to automatically flag key risk signals from call transcripts—such as negative sentiment, repeated issues, or frustration cues—and route them to the right internal teams, including executive leadership. This gave sales and customer success teams the ability to respond quickly to emerging problems before they escalated.

“We use Momentum to listen for key qualifying risk words or details on any call,” Daniel explained. “That means leadership can intervene faster. We’re not reactive anymore. We’re in front of it.”

Kalanea saw the value of that shift almost immediately. “Within a week of using Momentum, I was already getting kudos from leadership,” she said. “They could finally see what was actually happening in those calls—within minutes after they ended.”

This visibility also helped teams prioritize. With early warning signals and sentiment analysis built into their daily workflows, support and CX teams could allocate resources more strategically, rather than treating every ticket the same.

Measurable Impact on Speed and Satisfaction

With Momentum in place, Alation quickly began seeing measurable improvements across its support organization.

One of the most significant gains was in speed. The support team reduced time to resolution for at-risk accounts by 35%, enabling faster interventions and improving the overall customer experience. “Momentum allows us to move faster to find the customers that need our attention,” Daniel said. “We’re not wasting time figuring out what happened or who last touched the case—we just know.”

Customer satisfaction also hit new highs. Alation ended the previous quarter with a 99% CSAT score, the highest in its competitive set. “We’re incredibly proud of that,” Daniel said. “Momentum is one of the foundational tools that helped us get there.”

A True Partnership, Not Just a Platform

Beyond product capabilities, both Daniel and Kalanea emphasized that what sets Momentum apart is the partnership.

“The support we get from Momentum is the best we receive from any vendor,” said Daniel. “They’re with us every day on Slack. They overcommunicate any changes and have been incredibly flexible with how we use the platform. It’s more than we could have imagined.”

Kalanea described the working relationship in personal terms: “I consider them like family. They’re not just a product we subscribe to—they’re our partner in making our business successful.”

Looking Ahead

For Alation, Momentum has become more than a call summary tool—it’s a core layer of intelligence and visibility across the customer experience. It’s helped the team scale without sacrificing quality, surface risks earlier, and empower both frontline engineers and executive leaders with real-time context.

“If any part of your process is still manual,” Daniel said, “and you’re solving problems with humans instead of process, automation, and AI—you should look at Momentum. The intelligence you can surface from your data is limitless.”

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