CS Perspectives from Gainsight

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!The most interesting admin in the world!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 all go through a full review process by Google.Why I love extensions is because you can customize Chrome to better suit your needs in administering Gainsight. And best of all, you never have to leave Chrome and open another app. Here’s my favorite Chrome extensions that I hope will make your life as a Gainsight admin easier as well.  Salesforce Colored FaviconsIf you work in Gainsight on SFDC and/or work in multiple Salesforce environments because you also

“A good first impression can work wonders.”  - J.K. Rowlings. The first experience with your team and product sets the tone for the entire customer journey. This is your chance to provide your first point of value. Do you miss this opportunity? You might be asking “How do I ensure every time an opportunity closes the customer receives a welcome email? That seems like a lot of work for my team.” You’re right. It can be a lot of work for your team if you’re manually triggering each welcome email. One of the first places to start scaling your customer lifecycle is the Welcome experience. Below, I’ve outlined a few things to consider when you begin your welcome email. A step-by-step guide to implementing an automated Welcome Email:1. Segmentation and Target Audience:Define the customer segmentation and target audience for the welcome email. This should align to the decision with onboarding strategy and customer personas. When segmenting customers, consider their unique needs and collaborat

Scenario - If you are having a dedicated team of CSMs (Pooled CS team) responsible for handling the long tail customers or small to medium business, that comprises of 100-400 customers and the CSM to account ratio is 1:50 (approx),What’s your strategy to;track engagement of such customers? maintain contacts hygiene?Let’s brainstorm and share ideas in the comment section below👇🏻

Pulling together a few conversations on automating EBRs to create a different and better experience for your customers that scales.Here’s a Recipe - the key ingredients and steps to define, set up and execute 100% automated EBRs via personalized email w/ embedded reports. This is meant to be a starting point to design what will work for your team and customers.  Do you run Digital EBRs via email today? Or other tools? What do they look like?  What do you wish you had known before you started? Survey Design: Define and design a Gainsight CS survey to capture customer's recent successes, ROI, and priorities.What key information do you need to understand the customer's perception of value? What topics are relevant to the majority of your customers? How can you phrase questions to get quantifiable responses? Example: Your survey might include questions like "How has our product impacted your workflow in the last six months?", "Can you quantify the ROI you have achieved through our product

'When strategizing the best way to use Gainsight PX and CS together, it can be difficult to decide where to start. Both Gainsight PX and CS offer a number of benefits to various teams and when putting the two together, the possibilities are endless (and potentially overwhelming)! A suggestion when implementing a PX+CS use case is to first consider your pricing model, or as Jerry Maguire would say, “Show me the money!”  Most SaaS customers generate revenue by charging per user/license or by feature utilization.User-Based  In a User/License based pricing model, customers are charged by the number “seats” sold per organization. Take Gainsight as an example. Gainsight CS is sold to customers in terms of the number of licenses purchased and Gainsight PX determines the price per customer based on the number of monthly active users (MAUs). In these scenarios, it is important to track the number of users logging into the product to understand health and risk, as well as to measure growth of us

📚 Excited to announce the release of my new book! 🎉 "Gainsight: Governance Guide" where I explore two of my professional passions: Customers Success and Data Governance. Get ready to dive into a world of CS that will leave you inspired and enlightened. Join me in this literary adventure, available now on Amazon. #NewBook #customersuccess #datagovernance #csms https://a.co/d/6k8scfk 

Like most best practices, it depends.  You need to figure out which NPS scores matter most and why. Thrilled to say that Admin NPS *is* correlated with GRR.  It’s narrowed over time, but still quite meaningful. This is the reason and the evidence for the Admin/CS Ops Community Programs. We saw the gap in NPS scores, identified root causes and work every quarter to reduce/remove.   

In our monthly meetup group about the CS Ops of Digital-Led Customer Success, we spoke in February 2022 about pooled CSMs being proactive instead of only being able to react to incoming customer questions. Brian LaFaille of Google kicked us off with a presentation and Q&A session.Here is the slide deck. Brian mentioned additional slides about how to actually execute the transition to a pooled CS model, which you can see here.Plus, participants shared some of their takeaways from their breakout room conversations:Working with customer data, and having reliable data, getting it right is often difficult We discussed leveraging a ticketing system (similar to support) to help with client experience in a pooled CSM model. Where some have the intention of getting off the phone and solving issues as quickly as possible, others are using the time on the phone for land and expand opportunities. A question to guide your efforts: is this scalable? Internal alignment Having a support team and r

Lead generation for upsells, cross-sells and expansions can be very time-consuming and inefficient. There are quite often times when customers don’t realize the additional value they can get from your product or service.By leveraging the power of Gainsight PX and CS, you have the ability to provide customers with tailored, automated, and scalable messaging for when they need to upgrade their contact/s. This has the added benefit of the customer coming to you to discuss pricing. After all, a customer coming to you to buy a product is much more likely to close than you reaching out to the customer.Here’s my #2MinHowTo video on how it all works: This post is part of our #2minHowTo campaign. Make sure to check it out and encourage others to share their expertise! I am nominating @arminfpop  and @lane_h to take up this challenge next.I hope you found this useful, if you have any questions or additional use case ideas, please do share them in the comments below.

What goes better together than peanut butter and jelly? French fries and ketchup? Ted Lasso and Coach Beard? Nick Mehta and Taylor Swift? Perhaps the best pairing of all is Gainsight PX and CS. Combining PX user analytics with CS Customer Success solutions unlocks a myriad of possibilities to increase customer health, retention and experience overall.   Check out the PX+CS Maturity Model of use cases below for a quick look into how customers are using the combined powers of the two platforms to understand adoption trends, proactively enable end users, and course correct where needed.  Which of these use cases would make the biggest impact on your organization’s business goals? Got an idea? Share inspiration for how your company uses PX and CS together.Join me on Tuesday, June 20 at 9am PT for The Power of Working Better Together with Gainsight PX and CS Webinar to learn more about unlocking the potential of PX+CS. Register Here!  

Hello - We’re moving our data portal to a new platform that no longer has a means to load usage data into GS. From a health score perspective, we’ll get very limited data - # report executions and # logins (without identifying the user). Brainstorming ideas on how to get a usage score for customer health with limited data and without having a data feed into GS?? The only way to get it in would be manual and that’s not an option. How are you measuring usage of your tools/platforms from a customer health perspective?

In our monthly meetup group about the CS Ops of Digital Customer Success, we spoke in May 2023 about identifying and capturing data. Here’s what we learned!  📝 Note-taking slides from the breakout rooms Learn about these meetups in the future by signing up for the monthly CS Ops Newsletter.

Challenge accepted! @aaronhatton @Sruthimalla !Here is how I use Gainsight as a Director of the CS team  Few things that I focused on: 1. Lack Of Visibility - Reports & Dashboards ( lack of activity, visibility into core KPIs, RC, CI )2. Unexpected Churn - WBR ( Risk Process / Management )3. Scale & Efficiency - C360, Playbooks, Cockpit, TimelineThis is just a glimpse, and excited to get into deep dives as needed.! 

Has anybody created a formal governance model for Gainsight that they'd be willing to share? As we add more Admin users and groups outside of Customer Success into Gainsight it's becoming clear that we need to create a formal governance model/support structure. I've started to create something which I'd share here but it's a .ppt and I can't figure out how to attach a doc? Sorry! Does anybody else have anything they'd be willing to share?

If you do not know how to use Generative AI, you are really missing on something big! How much do you agree with me on the above statement? - I do believe AI can empower admins workflows, optimise CSMs workflows and AI integrated product + Digital Customer Success can do wonders! If you were are Pulse 2023, you might be aware of some of the cool AI driven features that Gainsight will be having in the near future“What’s the one thing that you want AI to do for you in Gainsight?”  Note: This is a post-webinar discussion thread. During Crank Up Technicalities webinar we posted this question and asked folks to share thoughts over here.

We just released our CS Compensation report and are showcasing the results for North America and EMEA in webinars earlier this morning and next week for EMEA. A few common questions emerged - how are you solving this today? What other CSM comp questions do YOU have? Answer/ Add as responses to this post!I’ve added a few of my answers in bold Regarding bonus compensation, do you have any insights on the prevelence of quarterly vs annual calculations/targets and payouts? Seeing more shifting to Quarterly (including Gainsight!) or semi-annually - more flexibility/cash flow for CSM, more flexibility to adjust the plans as year evolves I’d like recommendations or resources for identifying a comp structure for a CSM who’s sole role is upselling to existing customer base please How do you adjust comp model based on size of BoB per CSM. I’d say we tend to land at a much higher customer count per CSM than what’s the industry average.  For smaller organizations, where CSMs are taking on churn r

Let me also hop on and take part in the hottest topic of discussion these days - Digital CS! Want to know what’s the Gainsight’s way of managing Digital Led CS? No worries, I will be sharing all about Digital led best practices on 4th of April 2023 at 8 AM PST.Be a part of the discussion by registering 👉🏻here!One hour couldn’t just be enough to talk all about the most important topic these days. Let’s start the discussion now in the comments section!Post your questions/thoughts in the comment section below 👇🏻 and we will do our best to cover them during the session! 

Gainsight has been creating a ton of great content around Digital Customer Success, and walking the talk on Digital CS motions. One of the coolest things we’ve done on this initiative is create our new Digital CS Destination in the Gamechanger community - which is now officially live on our site!As you check out the new page (and maybe even bookmark it for later reference! 😄) I wanted to share why we built this page and how we did it using Gainsight functionality.  NEW! Digital CS Custom Page on the Gamechanger Community  The Challenge/NeedOur community already has a ton of great content tagged to ‘digital CS’ or ‘digital-led’ programs - but, that content is posted (just like this article!) in other forums like CS Inspiration. And its great content to have here - but, harder to surface if you are looking for a subset of topics around Digital CS. We wanted to find a way to:Make it easy to find Digital CS tagged content, quickly. Avoid creating a new (and empty to start) forum/area - re

We are beginning our DCS journey, including creating a foundational success hub in our community. I'd love to hear what other success hubs look like? What kind of content do you feature? Is it a separate "hub" in your community or integrated within? How do customers leverage it? Etc.

As a customer success leader, one of the primary challenges you may face is how to best support customers who use multiple products from your company's portfolio. To help you navigate this challenge, we've outlined five common customer success management (CSM) models that can be used to support customers with various product combinations. By understanding the strengths and limitations of each model, you can make an informed decision about which approach is best suited for your organization. Here are the common models we’ve seen and how to evaluate the ones most appropriate for your business. There may be combinations as well - single CSM for small multi product accounts vs. a Relationship CSM and Product Specialists for your largest accounts. The Generalist CSM Model: “THE Single Point of Contact”The Generalist CSM Model assigns each customer success manager to be well-versed in all the company's products. This approach provides customers with a single point of contact for any product-

So exited to see the great turnout on Tuesday for the Day in the Life of a Gainsight Enterprise CSM session! We had tons of great questions but one that I wish we had a bit more time to go deeper on was “How does Gainsight measure adoption?” There is absolutely a wrong way to do this. Any time you are asking a CSM or other user to either calculate or speculate on what the customer adoption is you are: 1. Leaving room for subjectivity 2. Leaving room for manual error 3. Taking away time they could be spending driving value with customers 4. Your health score will not be predictive.  At Gainsight this is all automated so I (as a CSM) do not have to take any manual action to get this insight. Our adoption health score is 50% adoption depth (how often are people logging into Gainsight) and 50% adoption breadth (are they using top sticky features). Trends using this data fire off CTAs when adoption depth declines with playbooks to take proactive action. Adoption is leading indicator to rene

We assume that you have a way to identify which customer is due for renewal and when is their renewal and you are tracking the renewal process(Opportunity) something similar to the below example.   To calculate Retention Rates in Gainsight, We should use the Data Designer feature. Click here to know more about Data Designer. Calculating Net Revenue Retention Rate:Step 1:Using Data Designer, fetch Renewal and Expansion Related Information from Opportunity along with their Close Dates and Stages.   Step 2:Next step is to get the First day of the Quarter for the Close Date of Opportunity. In case if you want to get Retention Rates by Month, You need to get the First Day of the Month for the Close Date of Opportunity.  Step 3:Get the SUM of Amount of all the Opportunities, SUM of Current ARR  and Total Number of Accounts per Quarter(Grouping by Quarter).  Labels: SUM of Amount → Total Renewable ARRCount of Accounts → Total Renewable AccountsSUM of Current ARR → Total Current ARR .Step 4:Ge

In our monthly meetup group about the CS Ops of Digital Customer Success, we spoke in April about defining digital customer success. As a follow up from our Digital Customer Success Bootcamp webinar on April 4 the group discussed how they define their digital cs maturity and challenges they might face as they become more mature in their strategy. Check out the recording to see what we learned!  

Missed our webinar on the Day in the Life of a CSM “How a Gainsight CSM uses Gainsight to support enterprise customers to drive ROI, mitigate risks and collaborate with sales to identify new opportunities”. You’re in luck! You can find the recording and slides below.  If you have any questions please thread them below! 💻 Slides 

Subscribe to this monthly newsletter here!  Hi ​[there]​, So, my last newsletter was the first week of November. Did I miss anything? Before the tech layoff wave, before SVB, before my first time getting Covid (then my rebound on Christmas Eve), before ChatGPT, ya know, happened… It feels like a lifetime ago that predictability was something we could claim to have. Do you feel that you’ve gotten your prediction skills back? Or maybe you’ve just pieced back together your sense that they ever existed? I mean, who can say what CS will look like in a year? Sorry, I didn't mean to send you into a nihilistic tailspin. On the contrary, you have trained for unpredictability. Do you remember that feeling from March & April 2020 of, "What on earth happens next?" In your day-to-day life, in the four walls of your home, the only possible answer was, "What's immediately in front of you." (Or, in the style of a Jeopardy answer: "What is Tiger King.") So, you know how to pick your way forward, on