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Hello EdTech Gainsight Community! 😎

 

I recently had a conversation with someone working in CS Ops at an EdTech customer of our’s. They asked a really important question: how do we avoid health scores dropping to red during the summer, when the adoption measure drops to zero? 

 

I thought I’d share this out to the community to get feedback from others who’ve come across this challenge. If you have any ideas, please drop them in the comments below! 👇

 

Here are some initial ideas to get the conversation started:

  • Pausing the adoption measure rule from June 1st - late August
    • Adoption data will essentially “freeze” to reflect usage at the end of May from June to late August
    • In late August, when school is back in session, rule can start running again to pull new usage data
  • Change the logic of the adoption measures to look at year over year usage averages for each month 
    • Adoption measure score is based on the % change from last years usage to this year’s usage
    • Red-Yellow-Green scoring is entirely based on how a customer is using your product based on previous year, rather than an arbitrary baseline set for all customers

Of course, neither method is fool-proof, but both are a more practical method than the tradition of basing adoption scores off of a pre-set baseline every month. As we know, EdTech is very cyclical and June-August and December are outliers in that yearly cycle. Let me know your thoughts below! 👇

 

Shawn Ferrell

CSM | Gainsight

Great observation!  EdTech is a unique space with some challenges on measuring adoption. One option is to update scores based on the time of year comparing to historical usage of similar accounts of the same size and product mixture. We have had success with this. We compare to Benchmark metrics using historical data on a rolling average from July 1 - June 30 (the average school year). Not perfect, but we continue to improve it year over year. 

Just wanted to add my experience to Shawn’s post. Not adding much new, but validating what he is suggesting here!

 

The Ed Tech customers I work with tend to try to look at month over month compared to smaller time frames, and compare the usage against where their customers may have been the year before. Trying to fluctuate within the school year can have too many variables that hampers internal adoption considering the differences between districts tended to be measured in closer days vs weeks or they just had too many differences to account for everything. 


Freezing health scores during the summer break is a great way to help CSM’s not have too many red flags pop up when usage is expected to go down. You may also want to move to a different model that focuses on more infrequent usage if there is a long enough break. This can help in case there are still some classes going on but they tend to be different than usage during the regular school year. 

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