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Liam
Liam
Contributor ⭐️
September 16, 2026

Gainsight Optimization Opportunities

  • September 16, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 96 views

I’m running an internal session with our Gainsight Admins to review how we can level up our instance, and I’d love to tap into the community’s experience.
For those of you using Gainsight in your CS org, which functions, features, or workflows have delivered the most impact?
I’m particularly interested in how teams are optimising dashboards, CTAs, email integrations, and health scorecards — but keen to hear any high‑value setups you’ve implemented.
What’s been a game‑changer in your Gainsight environment?

3 replies

chelseahopkins
chelseahopkins
Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
September 24, 2026

Hey Liam!

I'm about three months in at my current place, and here are a few things that have made the biggest difference for us so far:

Data quality, integrations and enablement:
Health scores, dashboards, CTAs etc... are only as good as the data behind them, so we've had a huge internal focus on data quality and on building integrations so that all our data has one landing place. This has been our biggest lever. We've built automated feeds into Gainsight from support tooling (Intercom, soon to be Zendesk), from Dataverse via Power Automate, and from our project tracking tools. We've found that once end users trust that the data is current and are enabled on it, adoption of everything else follows.

A new structured risk process:
We recently redesigned our risk CTA template so every risk is logged consistently, with a defined reason and clear ownership. When scoping the project, we surveyed users on the proposed layout and whether they felt it was workable, and we used that feedback to shape the final risk model. Each risk is also linked to a Salesforce contract and feeds top-level data back to Salesforce. That data is used in downstream reporting for the wider business and is helping us calculate measures like likelihood to renew.

Leaner health scorecards:
We're in the middle of redesigning our scorecards, and we're sticking to a small number of measures tied to data that end users trust and that's relevant to the account. Our current setup isn't fit for purpose and has resulted in a lot of whitespace and counterintuitive scoring. "Keep it simple" is our new motto for scorecards.

Dashboards:
We ran into dashboard fatigue. We had about four years' worth of dashboards, and it was putting users off because so much of the data was no longer relevant. I added a warning message to every dashboard that hadn't been used in a month, saying it would be deleted in a month's time unless someone spoke up. That let us remove around 50% of our dashboards. When rebuilding the rest, the motto is the same as for scorecards: keep it simple. In my opinion, a dashboard with 40 reports on it is overwhelming. Making the most of Global Filters and enabling end users on them has also cut down the noise coming my way, as they can slice the data in a way that works for them.

In terms of what's next for us, it’s going to be AI focused. Data quality is still very much a work in progress for us. Once we're in a strong, stable position, that's when we'll really start leaning into AI initiatives. At our current stage, we wouldn't want to rely on anything AI-driven, because it's rubbish in, rubbish out. But we're confident that once the foundations are right, it's going to be a real game-changer.

Happy to share more detail on any of these. I'd also love to hear what's had the most impact for others too!

Chelsea Hopkins
    Liam
    LiamAuthor
    Contributor ⭐️
    September 24, 2026

    Thank you for the great feedback - risk CTA’s sound like a great alternative to what we currently do (entering it against the opportunity in Salesforce and changing it to At-Risk).  Do the CTA’s change Opportunity Status in Salesforce?

    chelseahopkins
    chelseahopkins
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    September 24, 2026

    Thanks Liam, glad it was useful!

    The short answer is no, the CTAs don't change the opportunity status in Salesforce. They do, however, update custom fields on the opportunity/contract. For example, we send over the risk of loss and the renewal status (values like "In negotiation"), which are then used in downstream reporting.

    We deliberately don't touch the opportunity status itself because of how we've split ownership: the CS world lives in Gainsight, and the commercial and finance side lives in Salesforce. Our risk process is very much built from the CS perspective, based on what we think is going to happen as the CSMs are more actively involved with the customer.

    CS is of course involved in renewal conversations, but it's our commercial leads who own the opportunity and the renewal, so it's up to them to manage the contract and opportunity in Salesforce.

    What we've found is that this has actually improved alignment between CS and our commercial/finance teams. They now get a clear heads-up from CS along the lines of "this renewal is coming up and we think there's a high risk of loss", which lets them focus their time where it matters most.

    We also have a safeguard in place: if a risk is marked as lost in Gainsight but the churn notification process hasn't been completed in Salesforce (which is a requirement for us), we alert the relevant person so they can complete it. It's nice having the two tools working together to keep our data accurate and users accountable 😁

    I've attached a couple of screenshots showing how it looks:

    Salesforce:

    How it looks on the CTA in Gainsight with the contract linked as an associated object:
     

     

    Chelsea Hopkins
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