Customer Insights and Best Practices

We hold regular live instructor led sessions on our various products. We publicize and promote them in community and take registration for Zoom Hosted meetings.We often have paid consultants lead these session so anytime a session is not attended by any user is an issue. I was approached by the Digital CS Team Lead, who owns the regular live webinars, about whether it was possible to identify events with no/few registrants.Using Zapier and the Zoom connector I was able to automate a weekly review of upcoming meetings and alert the Community Team if there was poor registration via email.The alert could of course have been a Slack or Teams type message also. The find all meetings step requires some parameters to be included.

I recently joined the new Retention Rethink podcast from the Customer Success Collective and Gainsight to discuss best practices in adoption. At TrendMiner, we use Gainsight PX to gather adoption data and guide our users in-app, and we leverage the adoption data extensively in Gainsight CS.I figured it would be useful to share some practical best practices from the podcast here as well… 1️⃣ Start with data: Identify the behaviors that actually predict retentionStart by correlating usage patterns with retention outcomes. When we did this, two insights stood out: Three distinct logins early in the journey strongly predicted long-term retention. Specific feature usage (search + monitors) was the biggest driver of stickiness. Gainsight Application:Use PX data to find your equivalent “sticky ac

SummaryEffectively documenting Journey Orchestrator (JO) programs isn’t a “one-and-done” factor in Customer Success Operations. At its core, three underlying principles come to mind as you seek to transform a chaotic program landscape into a clean, well-organized roadmap to scaling your digital enablement programs:Establish thorough project documentation (before starting) Implement crystal-clear naming conventions throughout JO Maintain detailed post-launch program logs and reportingBy following these key pillars, admins can build scalable JOs — which any team member (or Gainsight support) can follow, troubleshoot, update, and optimize — preventing costly rebuilds, accelerating stakeholder alignment, and creating the foundatio

SummaryThis article breaks down the "it depends" framework for choosing between Data Designs (DDs) and one-off queries as your Journey Orchestrator audience source. It explores how to use DD Templates for standardization and Dynamic JO Filters for easy testing and targeting, a topic I covered in my Pulse Academy Live (PAL) talk at Pulse 2025. The post weighs the pros and cons of each approach, contrasting the easy, centralized updates of a DD with its high-risk potential as a single point of failure and a source of sync-timing conflicts. Ultimately, it provides a framework for when to use a safer one-off query (for high-stakes programs) versus a centralized DD (for low-risk, multi-use audiences).Overview

Background: The Scheduling StruggleEvery CSM knows this pain — manually sending emails to schedule a renewal call, EBR, or Joint Success Plan meeting. The back-and-forth to find a time that works is not just tedious, it’s a poor use of high-value CS time. While many teams have tools like YouCanBook.Me or Calendly, they still rely on manual effort to send links and track outcomes.We knew we had to automate and scale this process. Problem Statement:CSMs are manually reaching out to customers to schedule strategic calls (Renewals, EBRs, Success Plans), resulting in wasted time, inconsistent follow-ups, and lack of visibility on what’s working. Solution: A Fully Automated Booking Funnel with Gainsight JO + Booking Platform + Gong We implemented a Journey Orchestrator-based campaign that:Automatically sends personalized calendar

In Gainsight, both Rules and Connectors are essential tools for managing customer data and automating Customer Success workflows. However, they serve fundamentally different purposes in the data lifecycle. Understanding this distinction is key to building an efficient and scalable Gainsight platform.1. When to Use Connectors: The Data Input PhaseConnectors are your primary mechanism for ingesting and synchronizing external customer data into Gainsight.  Their role is to establish a bridge between Gainsight and the various systems where your customer data resides. Use Case Rationale Initial Data Ingestion You need to bring customer records, usage data, support ticket logs, or billing inform

After a pair of acquisitions and the decision to consolidate CS in Gainsight, we needed to migrate notes from Planhat and Catalyst into Timeline. This post documents how we migrated notes, including the conventions we used, the mapping decisions we made (authors, activity types, companies, attendees), and a few issues to be aware of/avoid.If you’re planning a similar migration, follow along, hope this helps. Migration goalsMove legacy notes, meetings, QBRs, and other interactions into Gainsight Timeline with original authors, dates, and attendees. Make it safe to rerun batches without creating duplicates. Make the source system visible on every migrated activity.Our conventions:External Id The record Id from either Planhat or Catalyst Guarantees global uniqueness and gives a natural “upsert”. Replays won’t create dupes; you can PUT with identifier=externalid to fix records. We used this m

If you are using Gainsight as your platform of choice and are involved in Digital Success, or Digital First as I like call it, you will want to watch this video.In this tips and tricks video, I explore leveraging Data Designer as a control plane to inform your leadership of planned outreach and data gaps, and to better determine when an email is sent. 

Sometimes integrations break. While I would hope Gainsight support would monitor, catch, and address things when the integration stops working, that may not be the case. Here’s a simple solution I came up with to ensure that (at least half of) the integration is still working. (Shoutout 🤖 Google Gemini ✨ for the thought partnership )My assumption: if the PUSH of PX data TO Salesforce isn’t working, the PULL of Data probably isn’t either. But this solution doesn’t necessarily guarantee to catch the other half if the PUSH continues to work.  Set up a Salesforce fieldCreate a field on Salesforce Contacts for PX Last Seen Set your Salesforce integration to PUSH data from PX to Salesforce PX User attribute (out-of-the-box): Last Seen Salesforce field: {your field name} Create a Salesforce ReportCreate a report  Filter all conta

It's been a really long time since I last recorded a Tips and Tricks video, and since I have been having lost of fun with Staircase AI by Gainsight, I thought I'll share some ✌insights✌ - 🥁 🥁 😉  

Ever wish your team(s) could get vital Gainsight information without having to constantly log in? You're not alone! At Acquia, we've found that using Gainsight's internal email features has transformed how we communicate and collaborate. I'm excited to share some examples of how we do this and how you can too.Improved Response TimeFor our teams with occasional Gainsight tasks, we’ve built out notifications to prompt action from those teams.Example 1: Our CSMs create CSQLs (Customer Success Qualified Leads) via a CTA that they then assign to the Account Manager to work.  Account Managers tend to operate mostly in Salesforce, so it’s not always top of mind for them to go work CTAs.  To solve

If you’re looking to analyze the usage of Gainsight among your users, there are a few ways that this can be accomplished, and I wanted to share how we went about tackling this problem.Ultimately, we didn’t use the GS Asset Tracking object for our use case. We were less interested in the reports/dashboards being used, and more interested in the results we were expecting to see (the outputs, like Timeline activities and CTA movement).  Business Impact: As a member of CS Ops, CS Leadership, & CS Systems, I want to understand how our users are adopting Gainsight and adhering to their expected usage of the platform.Description: Build a dashboard that outlines key indicators of adoption/usage:Log in frequency Logging activities to Timeline Acting upon created CTAs Updating CSM Sentiment in health scorecardThe dashboard answers questions such as… 

Is anyone else out there obsessed with automating every corner of your community platform? 🙋‍♂️ I’m all-in on streamlining processes using tools like Workato, Google Apps Script, and Python to make community operations smarter, faster, and more scalable.Here’s a peek at how we’ve extended our setup to do just that — and some of the behind-the-scenes automation magic that makes it all work.🧠 Custom Roles That Assign Themselves (Yes, Really)Our community structure is centered on lines of business and product access, with custom roles managing visibility and permissions. Manual assignment just doesn’t scale — so we automated it entirely.🔁 When a user registers, a community webhook fires.⚙️ A Workato recipe catches that webhook and: Parses the user's email domain Queries Salesforce for the associated Account and its Lines of Business Dynamically builds a list of roles based on what t

Effective escalation management is vital for Customer Success. While tools like Jira or ServiceNow handle technical workflows, they often lack the context and visibility CS teams need. This article outlines how to use Gainsight to complement those systems with better tracking, reporting, and accountability. The GoalEnable Customer Success teams and leadership to:Track the full lifecycle of escalations within Gainsight Improve visibility across accounts and teams Enrich customer context for health scoring, renewals, and risk management Automate follow-ups and SLA tracking with CTAs Leverage AI-powered insights through Timeline and Copilot features Step-by-Step: Escalation Tracking via Gainsight Step 1: Keep Support Platform as the Source of Truth

I wanted to share how we track key field changes on the Company object using Real Time Rules. This is a common use case that is easy to implement once you get comfortable with Real Time Rule functionality!Step 1: Create your History Tracking ObjectWe use a custom object to hold information for our key field changes. We titled it “Company History Tracking.” It has the following fields:Old Value New Value Field Company (GSID lookup) and the other system-generated fieldsStep 2: Create your Real Time RuleReal Time Rules can be used to track field level changes on limited objects (called “Topics”). For this example, we’ll use the “Company” topic to track field level changes from Company in real-time.Step 3: Choose your event (what do you want to track that changes?)After choosing your “Topic” (Company), choose your “Event.” This is the change

As a CS Ops Manager at TrendMiner for the past 5 years, I’m always looking for ways to help our Customer Success team scale more effectively through better processes, systems, and data. Recently, we tackled a common challenge in CS: single-threading.Got questions or thoughts on this? Feel free to drop a comment or send me a message. Happy to chat more about it!The challengeIt happens a lot more than you’d like as a CSM: your main contact changes roles or leaves the company and the customer goes dark. The solution? Multi-threading: making sure you have regular touchpoints with multiple stakeholders, so you are not dependent on a single individual.But how do you ensure this is consistently done for every customer? What tools can you provide to your CSMs to get more insight into the breadth of their outreach?Introducing the Value Network, a practical tool implemented in Gainsight CS that accomplishes exactly that…

Yes, this post was created with AI, but I checked its work. Based on our implementation, here's a comprehensive guide on how to build robust killswitches into your Gainsight rules to prevent data disasters and massive CTA creation incidents. 🎯 Why Killswitches MatterImagine waking up to find your rule created 2,000 CTAs overnight because of bad data, or worse - your health scores were incorrectly set to zero because a data source failed. Killswitches are your safety net, providing automated circuit breakers that stop rules when unexpected conditions are detected. 🛠️ Two Main Killswitch Patterns1. Volume-Based: Preventing CTA ExplosionsUse Case: Risk CTA creation that depends on external data sourcesImplementation:Count the number of CTAs that would be created by your rule If count exceeds a reasonable threshold (e.g., 100 CT

Hi everyone -  I recently crowdsourced the Gainsight Admin community to ask for some best practices regarding best practices for managing a Gainsight sandbox. I got some helpful thoughts, and along with an assist from ChatGPT, came up with the following 8 best practices. By all means, do not consider this a final list! I’d love to hear what I missed or if anything needs to be tweaked. We’re all constantly learning here 😃. 1. Use Sandbox for Testing Only Only use Sandbox for:  Testing new rules, playbooks, layouts, and configurations  Training new admins or CSMs  QA before deploying to production  Never test in production if the change has risk — even small changes (e.g., to Rules or Permissions) can cascade widely. If we absolutely must test in production (due to data limitations in Sandbox, for example), then test on a Company record that is only meant for testing. 

Hey Community-ersAbout a year ago I posted here asking how you promote community at events.2 weeks ago, my company www.mews.com hosted it’s annual hospitality conference. I wanted to share this here as we did 2 things differently this time around with some great results so thought I’d share here. Hopefully this is somewhat inspiring!!:  Community Drinks Event (Pre-Conference): We hosted an exclusive rooftop event for customers already in town the evening before the main conference. We had support staff managing logistics so I could focus on mingling. I budgeted for a live DJ and a magician which added a special touch. The evening was hosted in a beautiful waterside rooftop venue in the sun which certainly helped with the strong turnout. As a result, I was able to have some great conversation about the community with my customers, get

Introduction:Hey everyone! I'm excited to share our journey in automating our end-to-end process for self-adoption assessments and scorecard updates. This initiative has significantly improved our efficiency and accuracy, and I believe our learnings can help you too! We've streamlined everything from survey delivery to scorecard updates, and I'm going to walk you through how we did it.Our Automated Process: An OverviewOur automated process has several key steps:Survey Creation and Delivery: We kick things off by creating and delivering surveys to our customers. Survey Completion: Once the customer completes the survey, the process moves forward. Backend Data Management: This is where we handle the data behind the scenes. Manual Intervention (as needed): For our high-touch customers, we've built in a step for manual interven

Implementing Gainsight CS from scratch is both an exciting and complex challenge. At PVcase, a leading solar energy software provider, we had the unique opportunity to deploy Gainsight CS in a greenfield environment, meaning we had no existing customer success platform to migrate from. This offered both freedom and responsibility so that we could design the system exactly as we needed, but we also had to ensure it met our business needs from day one, exceeding the expectations of many in our teams.We’re about 4 months in from full deployment, and so  I wanted to create a quick post that walks through our approach to a successful deployment, the challenges we overcame, and lessons learned that could help others in a similar situation. Understanding Our Starting Point: A True Greenfield DeploymentAs an e

Alright, so this is all about controlling who gets to see what in your reports and dashboards. We're gonna talk about two main things: sharing groups and folder permissions.Quick Rundown:Part 1: Sharing Groups - Making Teams: Basically, you can create your own teams of people to share stuff with. These teams can update automatically based on certain info (dynamic) or you can just pick the members yourself (static). I’m using a simple example here: CS Managers>CS Leads>CSMs. Part 2: Folder Permissions - Locking Down Folders: You can also control who can even open and see the dashboards within specific folders. Whatever rules you set on a main folder automatically apply to all the folders inside it. Each folder is shared with the right team of people (that sharing group we talked about)Part 1: Create your sharing groupsGo to data permissions → sharing groups. For th

Summary:Summary: This article provides a comprehensive guide to planning, launching, and managing Gainsight Journey Orchestrator (JO) programs, emphasizing thorough planning, testing, and communication. It should take approximately 10-15 minutes to read thoroughly.Missed the previous posts in this JO-focused series? This article follows these previous posts:

Summary: This article provides an overview of Gainsight Journey Orchestrator (JO), its benefits, and the crucial role of a JO-focused administrator. It also shares insights on approaching communications within this platform, drawing from practical experience. 1. What is Journey Orchestrator (JO), and Why Should You Care?Gainsight Journey Orchestrator is a powerful tool within Gainsight that empowers customer success teams to automate and personalize communication programs. This platform enables scalable engagement with customers, leading to increased efficiency and improved outcomes. Key features and benefits include:Automated Communication Sequences: Streamlining outreach efforts. Scalable, Personalized Experiences: Tailoring interactions to i

Summary: This article explores the nuances of my role as a Gainsight Journey Orchestrator (JO) administrator, distinguishing it from a broader Gainsight CS Ops admin position and highlighting the skills, challenges, and future evolution of this critical function. Missed the first article in this series? View it here. 1. My Role vs. a "Whole Gainsight" CS Ops AdminMy role is more focused than that of a general Gainsight CS Ops admin. While a CS Ops admin handles a wide range of tasks, including data design, reporting, and surveys, I primarily conc