Authored by Juli Clark, Chief Customer Officer, Exterro

As Chief Customer Officer at Exterro, my primary job isn't just to look at health scores, renewal rates, or support tickets. While those metrics matter, they don't tell the whole story. They can't capture the real, unfiltered reality of what legal, compliance, and IT teams face every day. To truly understand that reality, you have to sit across the table from people and listen to what they have to say. 

That is exactly why we invest heavily in our Regional User Groups (RUGs). I recently attended three of these in-person forums in Dallas,  Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., meeting with almost 60 customers and Exterro users from industries including financial services, retail, government, telecom, and energy sectors. If you haven’t had the chance to attend one, these RUGs aren't sales pitches in disguise. They’re part training session, part peer group,  and always listening sessions for us. They help hold us accountable to you and show us exactly where we are helping and where we need to step up.

Now, as we’re starting to gear up for our upcoming user conference, XChange Nashville, I thought it would be valuable to share the three biggest themes I’m hearing on the ground from you, our customers, and what we’re doing to respond to them. 

The Reality of "AI Fatigue" (and How to Cure It)

If you feel overwhelmed by the constant pressure to adopt AI, you are not alone.

Across our regional groups, we saw a fascinating paradox. In Atlanta, roughly 80% of attendees noted they have strict, top-down mandates from leadership to implement AI. Yet, in D.C., regulated organizations like the FDIC, T-Mobile, and JPMorgan Chase shared that internal approval cycles for any new AI tool take anywhere from three to six months. There’s a need to move fast, but it’s constrained by guardrails imposed before the AI boom took off just a couple of years ago.

Customers aren’t resistant to AI—they are fatigued by the gap between AI hype and organizational reality. Many lack the foundational data governance, mature retention schedules, or prompting confidence needed to deploy these tools responsibly.

Our takeaway is this: We want to meet you where you are. If your organization has extensive vetting requirements for AI applications, we understand and want to work with you. We are focusing on high-value, low-approval-burden use cases, like human-in-the-loop workflows in Early Case Assessment (ECA) and agentic-powered investigations with ARMOUR for FTK, so you can secure quick, compliant wins. 

Furthermore, we realized that if you're using external tools like Claude just to learn how to interact with our systems, we have a gap to close. That’s why we’re accelerating Project Clarity, our AI-powered self-service knowledge base, to give you immediate, reliable guidance right when you need it.

Breaking Through the Communication Noise

One of the most humbling realizations from these sessions was that we are sometimes guilty of shouting into the void. For example, we’ve put immense work into features like AgentMode, designed to streamline complex workflows. Yet, most of the customers I spoke with weren’t aware of AgentMode before we sat down to walk through it in person.

That isn't a user problem; it’s a communication problem on our end. We need to stop relying on standard product update emails and start delivering clear, personalized communications that actually cut through the digital noise. Whether that means having our customer success team explaining what’s coming up in their touch bases with you.   

We are also planning to implement a bi-weekly communication to update you on What’s Happening at Exterro.  

You asked for more ways to connect — and we're delivering. Introducing the Exterro Virtual Regional User Group (RUG) program, our new quarterly initiative built to bring customers together across regions for networking, best practice sharing, and exclusive product insights. Everything you need to know is in one place. 👉 Check it out here.

See the dates and times of our the upcoming Virtual RUG sessions below — and if a different region or time fits your schedule better, we'd still love to have you. Sign up wherever works best for you! Click the links to learn more and sign up!

• ‍Public Sector / FED / SLED Virtual RUG, August 4th, 9:30 am EDT
• East Coast Regional Virtual RUG, August 5th, 9 am EDT
• Mid-America Virtual RUG, August 5th, 10 am CDT
• Central Virtual RUG, August 6th, 10:30 am CDT,
• West Coast Virtual RUG, August 12th, 8:30 am PDT
• APJ Virtual RUG, August 25th, 3:30 pm AEST
• EMEA Virtual Rug, September 3rd, 10:00 am CEST

What We're Fixing Next

True partnership means being just as transparent about our flaws as we are about our successes. On one hand, our support teams earned incredible validation. Hearing a client like Hilltop IT tell us that we deliver the best support experience of any vendor in their portfolio is a massive point of pride for us. But the RUGs also highlighted a clear area for improvement: P3 (non-critical) follow-through.

While our team's intent and goal is to handle critical P1 and P2 issues with immediate urgency, we’re not being proactive enough in communicating with you and we are addressing this. We heard you feel like you have to come to us for updates–and we need to be reaching out to you. That's an inconsistency we are actively addressing. We're even adopting practical, customer-led ideas from our D.C. event, like including explicit priority levels in ticket subject lines to give you instant visibility into where your issue stands.

Delivering on the Reporting Framework

We also heard your feedback regarding our new reporting framework. The enthusiasm across Dallas, Atlanta, and D.C. was unanimous, with users eager for advanced filtering logic (like OR/NOT conditions), role-based scheduled deliveries, and AI-generated queries.

But we also heard the underlying anxiety: What happens to my existing Jasper reports? Let me be clear: Jasper will not be retired until every single one of your reports is successfully migrated. We are rolling out a structured update plan with historical data and Boolean filters, followed swiftly by role-based scheduling, because a smooth transition is non-negotiable.

For those of you involved in the reporting beta - I’ve heard loud and clear that you are looking for more frequent communication and starting this week we will be sending a weekly progress update on areas we are focused on improving and releasing.   

Building up for XChange

The ultimate value of these regional groups isn't just the 30-plus open action items my team brought home to solve. It’s the magic that happens when peers talk to peers.

In Washington D.C., Kim from Altria kicked off a session with a level of radical honesty you rarely see in corporate spaces: "We almost got a divorce. Here's how we solved it." That kind of trust can’t be manufactured on a generic webinar.

In Dallas, when Hilltop shared how they successfully replaced Relativity, insourced their review function, and gained total clarity into outside counsel billing, you could see the lightbulbs go off for everyone else in the room. In fact, Kimberly Clark requested a follow-up conversation that very afternoon to learn how to replicate that success.

When we give our community a space to speak without a filter, you teach each other—and you teach us.

If you weren't able to make it to a local Regional User Group this year, don't worry. We are taking all of these insights, conversations, and real-world solutions and bringing them to our main stage at XChange Nashville this September. I hope to see you there, sitting across the table from us, helping us build the future of governance and compliance together.

Learn more about XChange here.

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