CS Perspectives from Gainsight

I have a unique team of CSMs who work directly with our New Business (Hunter) reps, who are solely responsibly for running and converting Proof of Concepts. In this unique position the CSMs bridge the gap between more traditional Growth CSM metrics (like upsells or Growth on Retained) and New Business Sales (bookings).I am curious if others in the industry have a specific team like this and what time of performance metrics CSMs have (revenue, retention, KPIs, etc). Ideally, I think there should be a way to strike the balance between rewarding CSMs for revenue growth at the time the POC converts, with the core responsibilities of a CSM (retaining customers through proactive account management and exceptional customer support/insights). Would love to hear what others are doing!

Monthly, Manager-CRM Strategy Meeting Notes.Does anyone have any suggestions, thoughts or current processes using Gainsight on how to record important monthly strategy meeting notes between Manager and CRM regarding next steps for aspects of their portfolio? The purpose is to help managers manage, review and refer back to the next action steps agreed to within these strategy meetings We currently use a spreadsheet but would love to hear from users a creative way to do this within the Gainsight platform.

Question for all my admin friends! We are sending out automated emails from the CSM at certain days of the customer lifecycle. We have them spread out so that they don't interfere with scheduled events the CSM completes, but obviously, there are times where the CSM may not complete one on time and run into the window of the automated email. My VP is asking if there's a way to prevent the automated email if a CTA was closed within a certain time period. I can do that obviously, but it definitely gets complicated. So, I'm wondering how others handle this situation. Do you just go ahead and have the email send or do you prevent them if another "live" action happened?

Hi Community! Our office is located right in the heart of Silicon Slopes, and we are wondering if a Utah meet-up group for company's using Gainsight in the area is something that has been done before? If not, would people be interested in coming to one if we were to set something up? It would be great to sit down with other company's similar in size to see how everyone is using Gainsight and to see if there are any insights that can be shared. Interested to hear your thoughts!

Hi there, As part of linking timeline to the health scorecard, i'd like to get a better understanding as to why capturing the client sentiment over time (which in turn produces an average score that summarizes the overall client relationship) is a best practice instead of capturing a "point-in-time" sentiment. Is there evidence based research on the topic of Customer Sentiment Analysis that either argues for or against a point in time metric. Thank you in advance, Jasmine

Hi everyone, We have recently moved to Zendesk to handle our support, Salesforce to handle Sales, Gainsight to handle Customer Success and Onboarding, and Acuity to handle training. We also use Pendo to collect Product info. Just wondering, for those folks out there that have several internal apps at play, do you have a team dedicated to the administration and implementation of these apps? Does your product or engineering team play a role given that coding is no longer required? We are considering have one person from each department handling admin and development of each app, but we feel that some sort of 'CRM Manager' who has oversight of internal systems might be necessary, for technical expertise, to keep cohesion and ensure best practice. Would be really interested to know how other companies are managing internal tools as I guess everyone is now moving away from in house solutions. Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

I'm struggling with how the Gainsight NPS renders in Outlook. I really like the in-line response. but we also are asking a follow-on question and it's not obvious that the recipient should click on the highlighted number (see linked image). I've been told this is a known issue but has anyone found a good workaround? How it looks in Outlook (Office365)

I am wondering which apps are being used by GS customers to visualize your customers' org charts and maps? There are a few to choose from in the AppExchange, OrgChartPlus from SalesMethods being one: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000004fjGWEAY. But is there anything native in GS? I don't think Relationships is intended for this.

The latest release now gives the Admin the ability to create custom Timeline Activity types. Our CSM's are heavily leveraging the Timeline feature but we are struggling to determine what level of detail we go into for differentiating the types of activities that are logged. Anyone have thoughts on what has worked well when creating these custom activity types? 

What should omnichannel customer success for entreprise software look like when levraging gainsight with possibly other tools?

Would love to know what people are thinking in terms of processes and Gainsight configuration associated with them. A customer of mine has multiple SKUs and a subset of these get sunsetted every year. If they use automation, it is hard to define a programatic approach towards it because a CSM has to get on a phone and let the customer know that this option is being sunsetted.

Hi, not sure if this question has been asked before, or if anyone is has done this. We have our tactical measures on our scorecard and know want to get more strategic about interpreting the information. Basically do the measures we have on the scorecard really act as a prediction for whether an account will renew or not and to be able to use that dat with some certainty. So, I would like to look at scorecard trends and map that to when a renewal is due to see if there is any correlation between the account health at that time and the accounts propensity to renew and then look at this across a number of accounts/segments to see what trends we can see. It willalso help us to decide if we need to include other measures. I'm at a bitof a loss where to start - has anyone done anything similar? Anyhelp would be appreciated!

Looking to have an option to collaborate with customers the way I can do in Quip, i.e. enable external parties access to certain pages and folders and have them comment and edit the text.

Hi all, Happy Lunar New Year! I need to provide some documentation for an upcoming assignment and wanted to know if it is possible to export survey question to a pdf or word document. Thank you in advance, Jasmine

I was having a conversation with my CS Ops director today around goal planning. To be honest, we found ourselves a bit stuck. I was curious what Gainsight or other organizations have come up with as it pertains to goal setting for Gainsight Administrators?

How have you handled notifying a customer who has a dedicated/named CSM, if that particular customer no longer meets the criteria your org has established for having a named CSM? We have 4 CSMs (approximately 75:1) and approximately 3,000 customers. We have recently adjusted our segmentation and the criteria a customer must meet in order to be assigned a CSM, which leaves me with quite a few customers who need to be notified that they are essentially losing their point of contact and will need to channel any questions/escalations through our technical support team first. Looking for suggestions on how that's been communicated and talk tracks that have been used. Thanks in advance!

Hello, interested to learn what data points others are putting into gainsight from LMS (we use Docebo). Some ideas we have are: # of active users per enterprise, # of learning content viewed at the enterprise level, etc. 

Hi, I was able to download Success plan in Ppt format. Wanted to know if we can have few more layouts added in downloaded Ppt like in Plan Info o Description o Company Highlights o Action Plan Any possibility of add attachments in success plans. Reason being needed to add new contacts in Success plan for showing it to customer

Good Afternoon- I'm the new Gainsight admin for my company, and we're almost ready to roll out some new features to our CSM team.   One of the last steps before roll-out is to define which lifecycle stage (New Client, Onboarding, Adoption, Expansion, Renewal, Retention Roadmap, etc.) each customer currently resides. What are best practices for which database (GS or SFDC) this type of information should live in? What are pros/cons of each location? We're running with relationships if that makes any difference in best practices. Thanks for the help! -Jim

During Pulse Europe, 2018 (https://www.gainsight.com/pulse/europe/2018/) the Gainsight Client Outcomes Team organized a Circles of Success Program, featuring group discussions for the attendees focused on key topics and challenges. We wanted to keep the conversation going on Community. One of the topics we discussed was Advocacy Management. Here are a few of the questions and the corresponding topics that we discussed: 1. What customer activities do you consider advocacy? Who owns advocacy? 2. What creative things have you implemented to drive advocacy? 3. What about your customer experience creates advocates? 4. How do you leverage your customer advocates? 5. What points in the lifecycle or touches do you identify advocates? 6. How do you prevent “reference fatigue”? 7. How and where do you track advocacy events? 8. Do you provide any incentives for your customers to become an advocate? Which incentives have you found more useful than others? 9. Do you expire advocacy assets

We are looking to track Customer Sentiment on a more regular, ongoing basis and use this as part of our health score. Currently: CSMs will choose red/amber/green manually upon gauging customers' likelihood to renew on each interaction (e.g. EBR, Escalation etc). The score will go stale after 30 days as CSMs should be interacting with each customer at least once monthly. Ideally: Every time a customer interacts with support, we can also track the sentiment of the call. This would aggregate and we could show rolling averages which could be used to update the health score and create risk/expansion CTAs. We send out a CSAT after email/chat/phone support cases but this has a very low response rate so isn't particularly reliable. Is there a more effective way of tracking customer sentiment and do you ask the customer to record this or the support agent?

During Pulse Europe, 2018 (https://www.gainsight.com/pulse/europe/2018/) the Gainsight Client Outcomes Team organized a Circles of Success Program, featuring group discussions for the attendees focused on key topics and challenges. We wanted to keep the conversation going on Community. One of the topics we discussed was Compensation and Incentives. Here are a few of the questions and the corresponding topics that we discussed: 1. Does your company incentivize CSMs on individual or team targets? 2. What metrics are CSM incentives based on? (Examples: retention, satisfaction, adoption and advocacy). 3. Have any organizations implemented CS-oriented bonus plan? Does variable compensation model works best for Customer Success Managers? 4. Are CSMs incentivized based on expansion or advocacy targets? 5. How are the CSMs targets tracked? 6. What are the leading (adoption) and lagging indicators (renewal) that you track to know a CSM is on track to achieve their quota? 7. W

During Pulse Europe, 2018 (https://www.gainsight.com/pulse/europe/2018/) the Gainsight Client Outcomes Team organized a Circles of Success Program, featuring group discussions for the attendees focused on key topics and challenges. We had such engagement from our customers we wanted to keep the conversation going on Community. One of the topics we discussed was Health Scoring and Risk Management. Here are a few of the questions and the corresponding topics that we discussed: What health scores have worked best for different organizations? Do you see trends based on the industry? · On-Prem customers use: Using proxy for usage data as usage data is not available support cases, webinar attendance, etc. to look at who are healthy customers. They can easily identify unhealthy but healthy is harder. Onboarding CSAT is also a measure that is used for customer health · For SAAS customers: utilization metrics · NPS as a part of health scores: Interestingly, in EMEA, culturally some custo

We really appreciate all of the product inputs that our customers take the time to share with us on the Community. Your feedback helps us build better products and services, and stay in tune with what customers want, need and expect. We want you to know that our product team listens and carefully considers your ideas and concerns. In our November Release v5.20, I'm happy to report that we implemented 11 of your suggestions! Here's the complete list.

Good morning fellow Gainsight Admins! I am starting a project to determine the best method(s) of communication with CSMs when there is an issue with Gainsight and am curious what methods other businesses use. We currently have a mix of informal (Slack, email) and formal (Confluence, Jira) methods that serve different purposes. I am looking to create something that will better meet the CSMs where they are already working and meet acceptance criteria around visibility of issue status, workarounds, and details. Is anyone else leveraging tools like Knowledge articles, chatter, or cases to communicate with CSMs about Gainsight issues? How do you determine which communication method to use, for example, do you do something different based on the severity or priority of the issue? Thank you for your input!