Content Themes
Content Themes (Beta) are recurring conversation topics that FunnelStory's AI has identified and curated specifically for your workspace, surfaced as needle movers under a dedicated Discovered tab. Look here when you want to catch signals that don't fit FunnelStory's standard Needle Mover Types — patterns specific to your business that a fixed taxonomy would miss.
How it works
Every conversation and support ticket is first labeled against FunnelStory's standard content types — Pricing, Competitor, Personnel Change, Feature Requests, and Task/Issue/Bug. Content Themes is a separate layer on top of that: FunnelStory's AI continuously looks for recurring topics that don't fit any of those standard labels, proposes them as candidate themes, and measures how strongly each one correlates with churn or expansion outcomes across your accounts.
Each theme is either Active or Incubating. Only Active themes are used to label content and generate needle movers; Incubating themes — including candidates FunnelStory proposes — stay out of the Discovered tab until someone activates them. The FunnelStory team curates an initial set, and users with Configuration access can add, activate, and tune themes themselves (see Configuration).
What you see
Open Needle Movers and select the Discovered tab (marked Beta, with a note that results may still change) to see needle movers sourced from Content Themes only.
A Discovered needle mover opens in the same detail view as any other needle mover — AI summary, Overview metadata, Activity Timeline, and the same comment, assignment, and outreach actions described in Taking Action. The Type shown is the specific theme (for example, "Onboarding Friction") rather than one of the standard types.
Why this impact
A Discovered needle mover's impact combines the AI's read of the conversation with how much weight the theme has earned from past outcomes. Hover the info icon next to the impact icons in the detail view to open Why this impact:
- When the theme has a learned weight, the tooltip shows the AI-assessed signal, the Learned importance multiplier (with how many accounts it was learned from), and the resulting Calculated impact, followed by one sentence on how accounts that mentioned the theme turned out. That sentence matches the needle mover's direction: a risk explains how much more or less likely those accounts were to churn, and an opportunity explains how likely they were to renew or expand — an opportunity never shows a churn figure.
- When the theme doesn't have a learned weight yet, the tooltip reads Still learning how this theme relates to outcomes. If there's some outcome history, it adds how many accounts churned and were retained in the learning window, noting that isn't yet enough evidence to change the impact.
Browsing themes
To browse themes without changing anything, open Other views → Themes. The Themes & Lift tab shows a card for each Active theme:
- How many accounts mentioned it (or Learn has not run for this theme).
- A risk badge with the theme's lift as a percentage versus your portfolio (for example +40% risk), and an opportunity badge when a positive lift has been published. Hover a badge for one sentence comparing accounts that mentioned the theme against the portfolio baseline.
- An example quote or the theme's description, and View Conversations →.
A lift isn't published until the learning window has at least 10 churned and 10 retained accounts; until then the risk badge reads Risk —. The Conversations tab lists the conversations tagged with a theme.
Configuration
Users who can see the Configuration menu (it's hidden for the Account User and Manager roles) manage themes from two places:
| Where | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Configuration → Themes | Search and filter themes by status; create a theme with New theme (slug, display name, description, optional examples, and a starting status); Activate an Incubating theme; set an importance multiplier that overrides the learned impact weight; view a theme's mentions; and Recalculate lift over the past 90 days, 180 days, or year to refresh each theme's outcome statistics. |
| Configuration → Features → Needle Movers → Themes | Turn on scheduled theme investigations, which periodically check your accounts against each Active theme and create Discovered needle movers from what they find. Off by default. |
Because it's Beta, expect the set of themes and how they behave to change over time.
Related
- Needle Mover Types — how Content Themes fits alongside the standard types.
- Needle Movers overview
- Managing Needle Movers