CS Perspectives from Gainsight

Does anyone out there have experience with servicing customers with a "group" of CSMs instead of a single CSM? Our team is currently exploring the idea of grouping several CSMs together along with a more junior member and having this group collectively service a patch of customers. The thought here is that the more junior member would learn on the job by supporting the CSMs with the more tactical/day-to-day request while the more senior member focus on the strategic aspects: conducting EBRs, stakeholder engagement, adoption, etc. We're hoping that this would also help mitigate the friction/pains of account transitions when a CSM moves roles or leaves the company entirely. Instead of being assigned a completely new CSM, the customer would still have the familiar names and faces of their dedicated CSM group. Thoughts? Would love to hear if anyone else has experimented with this and/or has other ideas for reducing account transition pains. If so, would also be intereste

Hi Admins!Those of you actively working with SFDC Sandboxes may be familiar that Gainsight provides migration a tool to migrate assets from sandbox to production or production to sandbox.  Since the migration process may need the login access/credentials, are you hesitant about sharing Production access to the one who is doing migration? There’s an alternative for this.Are you aware also that this migration is also possible without using the conventional way of providing username and password?Won't you be excited to know that Gainsight provides an option of token generation to authenticate source and target environments?Here is how you can do it. Let’s consider a use case where you want to migrate an asset from Sandbox to production.So first I need to get a token from the Target org. Let’s see how to get it. In the Target org navigate to Administration -> X-org migration You will see an option to generate a token in the top right corner as seen in the image below.  When we click on

We are migrating to Salesforce lightning  and we are a NXT edition customer. Are there any issues/caveats we should be aware off during and after the migration when it comes to Gainsight? 

Is anyone using Einstein currently that could comment on functionality versus GS? I'm obviously going to do some research and have reached out to our GS CSM, but thought I'd try here too.

If you work in multiple Gainsight Nxt environments (ex: production, sandboxes, or other instances), you’ve probably lost your Chrome Tab along the way. Which tab is production and which one is the Sandbox? Where’s my sandbox tab? I’ve run into the same issue when administering multiple Salesforce environments and luckily, someone built an extension for that. Find out more about Salesforce Colored Favicons in my previous productivity hacks article here.Working in multiple tabs is pretty much standard nowadays. I can’t imagine ever being in Chrome and just having on tab open. Especially when I’m promoting changes to Production or copying changes over into another environment.In the past, I typically would have one window with all tabs in order. And if that was too confusing, I would open one window with all my sandbox tabs, and a second window for all my production tabs. It kept things a bit saner but I’m still human and would often confuse which window is which. This error is easy to ma

Background: We've created an Executive C360 for their sponsorship calls that summarizes key information rather than being the detailed CSM version (assuming that's a common scenario) Goal: We'd like to run a snapshot that mimics the same information in the same format we've provided in the C360. This way they can have this detail on paper at any point during their meetings if not directly in front of a computer (You know, the age old thing of true face to face interaction without screens? It's wonderful) Issues:  1) A) The C360 snapshot is pulling in views we're not utilizing and creating a prescribed view that carries useless information. See attachments for comparisons of summary (data not complete).. sorry for the scribbles     😎 Also missing other key sections besides scorecard.  2) Success snapshots does not allow me to mimic this information either. Not finding much use. If anyone has suggestions for this type of extraction and use case let me know

Does anyone use a customer survey before a renewal to understand propensity to renew or to get a pulse on customer sentiment? If so, what are you asking and when? We've heard of some doing the NPS survey at some # of months before renewal, but what other questions help you gauge risk?

As we continue to use Gainsight for Outreaches/Programs and Cockpit/Email Assist, we are running into a frequent situation where a participant has been added to the bounce list and then cannot be sent further emails through Gainsight - Journey Orchestrator or Email Assist. However, using the Email Validator under Administration > Email Configuration, we can typically find the email domain as blocking, reporting our sends as spam, or other errors that aren't indicative of an email address that no longer exists. As an Admin, I have permissions to view results of the Email Validator and remove emails from the bounce list one at a time. Our CSMs do not have this permission so they encounter a roadblock when trying to send an email in Email Assist or determine why a contact did not receive an email from one of our Programs (typically an operational notification). I can/have created a report of Hard Bounces and the message that was received (similar to email validator) but I can&#

We have used Gainsight for a few months primarily focusing on Timeline and our CSM dashboard. We are now creating our approach for success planning. Prior to finalizing our template and having CSMs leverage this functionality, we want to have a success plan example to share with CSMs that demonstrates a focus on a customer’s time-based goals and measurable outcomes. Does anyone have a success plan example they are willing to share? Thanks!!

Individual CSMs have been reaching to our admin team requesting for a bunch of CTAs that are no longer relevant for them to be deleted. What approval process have you implemented in your organizations to make sure your admin team gets documented approval to delete CTAs. We want to avoid a situation where we just delete CTAs and activities based on the CSM’s request without leadership visibility? What are some best practices you use or a process you’d suggest? Thanks!

I love using Gainsight on Chrome. It’s been said many times before that Chrome is the best browser to use now days for its security, ease of use, and speed. But the real reason I love Gainsight on Chrome is because of the extensions!Chrome extensions are small apps that are built to sit on top of Chrome and extend its functionality. They typically serve a small single purpose like ad blocking, password protection, or to easily schedule a Zoom meeting within Google Calendar. They are distributed through the Chrome Web Store and are all fully reviewed by Google.Why I love extensions is because you can customize Chrome to better suit your needs. And best of all, you never have to leave Chrome and open another app. Here’s my favourite Chrome extensions that I hope will make your life easier as well. My S3 BrowserIf you use an S3 bucket to load data to Gainsight, this is the easiest file manager to use. There are other apps that can be used like Cyberduck but I don’t find it as easy to use

Hi folks, Our customer base is quite atypical - we work with farmers. As you can probably assume, seasonality is therefore a huge factor in everything we do. As we begin to plan out the revamp of our health scorecard and think about our risk escalations, we are attempting to determine the best way of catering to the seasonality we know we face. For example, if usage is below X in January, that’s totally ok; but if it is below X in July, that is a huge red flag. To top it off, these seasons can vary between farms based on the type of crop they are focused on. That level of segmentation is a bit rough in our database, but I am working on making that information more useful as well. I would love to hear any ideas or thoughts on how to approach this!

To nail the post-sales to CS handoff with your new customers, there are several critical components. Some of our Gainsight leaders gathered their thoughts into a playbook to share with you in this recent blog post.The high level plan:1. Define a taxonomy of outcomes2. Create a simple way for sales to capture the client’s desired outcomes3. Operationalize a Success Plan to map to the pre-sales definition of outcomes automatically4. Build the Success Plan into the product5. Demonstrate valueCheck out the blog for the details on how to transform the CS journey across your company!

Nick Mehta, Gainsight’s CEO, recently shared a blog post about how the best CSMs are often naturally human-first in their approach to work. Specifically, they demonstrate the ability to: See clients as people (or a bunch of people!) Recognize different stakeholders in an org have different goals, and to look for opportunities to connect them Connect people and companies with others like them Drive career success for the people they work with in their current org and beyond Read more here, and also be sure to check out these upcoming webinars on related topics: The Customer Success Professional’s Book Club Discussion (July 29) Mastering Difficult Conversations (July 30)  

Our CCO, Ashvin Vaidyanathan, recently listened to a podcast with SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin about “16 Rookie Errors Founders Make Pitching to VCs”. Ashvin distilled his learnings from the session and applied them to CS professionals.  Here are a few highlights: Make that email to a customer count. Give props to their teammates whom you work with regularly. Share some value metrics (“YTD we’ve saved you $X in costs”). If you don’t have value metrics, share some adoption metrics (“your company is among the top 20 percentile of users among all our customers”). Ask for a minimal amount of time (“15-20 mins works best”) and offer something back to them for their time. Send your deck as a PDF and not a link. This also means your deck should present itself if you’re not there to present it. For example, each slide’s title should summarize the takeaways from the slide, and the story should flow smoothly to the reader. For an EBR, knowing you may lose an exec’s attention after the first 1

Is there any concession for unemployed CSM enthusiasts to get Gainsight certified?

Calling all admins! We’re looking for Gainsight game changers with big ideas to contribute to the newly announced Sightline Vault.   Sightline Vault is all about harnessing the power of our admin community to make your best practices available to all -- in just a click. Think: NPS JO templates, your favorite playbooks, healthscore configurations, and other Gainsight best practices you can’t live without and want to share with the world.    What’s in it for you:  Your name in lights! (...almost!) You’ll be credited on any of the solutions you suggest that we publish and we'd love to further showcase you as an admin! Your favorite template or configuration, built to help thousands of future admins The opportunity to influence an amazing program for customer success technologists   What we need from you: Share suggestions - favorite templates, configurations, dashboards - let us know what you think other admins would benefit from if they could just click “go!” Permission to showc

In the below document, I have explained how to calculate the every 6th month anniversary dates and store in a separate field so that we use it to send surveys( whenever you wants to send NPS survey who completed 6 months), use it in rules and reports wherever required. Since I am creating a formula  field in Sfdc and bringing it into Gainsight, this work-around will be applicable only customers on salesforce platform   Calculate the anniversary dates(every 6 months)

Missed our webinar last week on “Work Faster with Gainsight Features You Don't Know that You Already Have”? You’re in luck, you can find the full recording here:     In this two-part webinar, Josh Weber, Senior Client Outcomes Manager, will first introduce you to these features and how to use them to your advantage, followed by step-by-step setup instructions and a demo by Altamash Syed, Senior Support Analyst.  

Monthly CTA closure rate by Owner   It is important for a Customer Success Director to keep tabs on work performed by various CSMs. CTAs come in really handy to keep track of the tasks completed. Below is a rule that can show you CTAs completed by each CSM on a monthly basis and if they were completed by due date or have been overdue.    Rule Name: GS : CTA overdue percent   Rule Flow Diagram:     Flow of the rule as follows, Fetch CTAs (Fetch Task) - Fetch required fields from Call To Action object,     Extract Due Date as Date (Transformation Task) - Due Date is Date Time field, in this transformation I’m generating a new date field Due_Date using date function on Due Date field.     Extract Due Date Month (Transformation Task) - Extract month value from the prior generated Due_Date field     Get Total Due CTAs monthly (Transformation Task) - Get the total number of CTAs due for each owner on a monthly basis - no filters are required here  

According to our latest survey of top SaaS CXO’s, the focus of customer success is currently all around retention and scaling with clients. To achieve scale, companies are honing in on: Preventing Churn: Moving from Usage to Value Better Churn Forecasting: Early Renewal and Stakeholder Alignment Understanding Product Usage: Product Telemetry Increasing Product Adoption: Implementing “Tech Touch” Preventing Churn: Moving from Usage to Value In good times, customers buy technology because it’s “cool.” In tough times, they only renew products that add value. While the early days of Customer Success were all about product usage (“are they logging in?”), sophisticated Customer Success operations have implemented a Success Planning process. They capture the client’s desired outcomes during the sales process and then use Success Plans to drive the entire post-sale motion toward the clients’ goals. Then, during the next Executive Business Review, the conversation isn’t about features and

Hello Gainsight Admin Community! This article about Adoption Explorer layouts will cover the basic steps of how to get started and what are the insides of it. Bringing in the Usage data and drawing insights from it is made easy with Adoption explorer. As per the business requirement Usage Layouts with Usage sections can be configured.  The Usage section is similar to a report with Adoption explorer objects as the source and Layout is similar to a Dashboard holding Usage sections. To edit/create a new layout - click on the +icon available in the right corner.   To Analyse the usage data let us begin by choosing one of the Usage sections. For more information refer - here Proceed by choosing the usage section type to be as “Analytics”   In the next step select required measures of any Data source (Company usage info/person usage info etc…) In the show section select the measures accordingly   The below screenshot shows an example of “Total, Open and Clicked En

Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta recently talked to Lorna Henri, Global Vice President of CS, TAM, and Support at Mapbox, about how they used the Gainsight CS application to help them standardize their best practices and scale to match their customer growth. The Mapbox customer success team needs to be highly technical so they can understand and speak to developers on a code-base level, as well as be able to talk to stakeholders to define and deliver ROI on a broader, strategic business level. Previously, their teams were taking notes in various places, and the CS playbook varied from team member to team member. Today, because of Gainsight, they have a better, more automated picture of account health that includes usage data. It shows up in their Customer360, and is referenced throughout Timeline. They’ve also automated outreach, and the entire team has expansion and QBR Playbooks. Lorna built a one-to-one dashboard for each TAM that she reviews in weekly meetings, too. To hear more about L

We wanted to help CSMs and all customer-facing roles do what they do, but better. How can we do that? Improve your productivity by giving you access to core Gainsight functionality within the solution you use the most—email and calendar. Gainsight has introduced an email integration as part of our GS Assist feature. The new Chrome plugin allows Gainsight users to access Gainsight email templates from their Google or Outlook inbox, allowing them to quickly send the right message to their customers.  CSMs can log customer emails to Timeline directly from their inbox, making it even easier to capture this context.  Gainsight also offers calendar integration in Cockpit. You can sync upcoming Calls-to-Actions (CTAs) and view them directly in your Google or Outlook calendar. By monitoring customer data and triggering CTAs, you will know when action is needed on a customer account. Click here to read more about our workflow optimization tools. 

Gainsight surveyed executives back in March to understand their concerns related to COVID-19 and again a few weeks ago, to see how their focus is evolving. Customer retention remains top of mind, of course, but what does that actually mean in terms of their company’s priorities and the impact on renewals?  The latest survey findings: Churn Rates Are Going Up, But Not As Much As People Thought Net Retention Rates Are Also Getting Worse – But Not As Bad As People Thought Companies Are Keeping Or Growing CS Teams  Churn and Product Are Top Focuses for Companies We also asked respondents about what top actions they’ve taken since COVID-19 started, and what they see as the next challenges facing CS. Click here to read Nick Mehta’s blog post for the detailed analysis.