Business-customer relations is a deliberate investment in building trust, loyalty, and long-term engagement to drive sustainable growth, retention, and competitive advantage. Unlike customer service, which focuses on resolving immediate issues, customer relations takes a long-term view, aiming to nurture loyalty and satisfaction throughout the entire customer lifecycle. To achieve this, some businesses often use customer relationship management (CRM) software to automate data collection, track interactions, and create actionable strategies for improving customer relations.
Most brands and organisations that are not proactive with their business-customer relations find out a customer is unhappy only once they have already decided to leave. Supap Limited, a United Kingdom-based technology company, is betting that the warning signs show up much earlier in support tickets, product usage, tone of feedback, and the small shifts in sentiment that precede a cancellation, and that catching them early is worth building a company around.
Customer churn is a persistent cost for subscription and service businesses: research from Bain & Company, cited by Harvard Business Review, found that increasing customer retention rates by five per cent can increase profits by 25 per cent to 95 per cent. Most retention tools respond only after dissatisfaction is already visible: a support complaint, a downgrade, or a cancellation request.
Supaps product, Retentifi AI, is built on a different premise: that sentiment change is directional and detectable well before a customer acts on it, and that businesses that can see the shift early have a real chance to intervene.
Retentifi continuously analyses signals across the customer journey conversations, feedback, support interactions, and product usage to flag when a customer’s sentiment is moving towards disengagement, and to route that signal to the right team before it becomes a lost account. Where most sentiment tools stop at telling a business a customer is positive, neutral, or negative, Retentifi is built to go further: connecting a sentiment shift to why it is happening and what action might recover the relationship, effectively asking what happened, why the customer is disengaging, and what should happen next.
That approach has been formalised as intellectual property: the underlying method, described as a Customer Sentiment Recovery Detection System with Specialised Business Routing for Retention Optimisation, has been granted a Nigerian patent, registered under patent reference RP: NG/PT/NC/O/2025/20237, and is independently verifiable through the official IPO Nigeria patent registry.
It is a rare enough approach that it points to genuine technical originality rather than a repackaged sentiment-analysis tool. The patent covers not just detecting sentiment change, but the routing logic that decides what a business should do about it.
Retentifi has secured paying customers on customised plans, with the product being tailored and continuously refined around their specific retention and customer-sentiment requirements. The platform already has thousands of users and over 150,000 requests, providing a measurable indication of market interest and engagement with the product. The combination of commercial adoption and independently recorded platform activity provides early evidence of demand while continuing to inform Retentifi’s development around real-world customer requirements.
The idea for Retentifi grew out of Gabriel Udo’s work building Supapbot, an earlier AI platform focused on helping SaaS companies detect frustrated customers through sentiment analysis. As the team developed the platform and spoke with customers, Udo and his co-founders realised that businesses did not simply need a smarter chatbot or another tool that could identify whether a customer was positive, neutral or negative. They needed a system that could help them understand what was happening in the customer relationship and determine what to do next. That realisation became a turning point for the product and led to its evolution into Retentifi, with a focus on identifying changes in customer sentiment, understanding the reasons behind those changes, and connecting emerging risks to appropriate business actions.
As co-founder of Supap Limited and product lead on Retentifi, Udo pushed the product in a direction most sentiment tools do not go, insisting that flagging a problem was not enough unless the system could also point to a likely cause and a next action. That decision shaped Retentifi’s core architecture: the sentiment recovery detection layer and the business routing logic that connects a flagged risk to a specific team or intervention.
This thinking is also reflected in the product’s later focus on sentiment recovery rather than sentiment analysis: identifying not simply whether a customer is unhappy, but whether their relationship with a business is moving towards disengagement and what can be done while there is still an opportunity to recover it.
Customer retention should not begin the moment a customer decides to leave. Our vision with Retentifi is to help businesses recognise the signals much earlier, understand what’s actually driving them, and act while there’s still a relationship worth recovering, Udo said.
He added that what he likes about Retentifi is that it helps businesses understand what happened during a customer conversation, not just whether the customer was happy or unhappy.
We can see how their mood changed throughout the conversation, and if something went wrong, the team gets a summary in Slack with a suggested follow-up message. That’s been really useful when someone chats with us and then disappears almost straight away instead of just assuming they were not interested; we have some context and a good reason to reach back out, he said.
Retentifi is aimed at SaaS and customer-facing businesses trying to shift from reactive support to proactive retention, treating sentiment not as a fixed score but as something moving in a direction, where even a currently satisfied customer may be drifting, and a currently frustrated one may still be recoverable.
As more businesses compete on the strength of their customer relationships rather than just their product, tools that catch that drift early and can point to why it is happening may become a standard part of how retention teams operate, rather than a niche add-on.
.Alumona is a writer and journalist based in Ibadan
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