How to Transition CSMs from OneNote to Gainsight CS

I love this question! We are currently in the throes of a massive customer re-assignment and everyone is feeling it. So much info lives in OneNote that is getting lost or taking forever to transition. We are about to embark on the “nothing in One Note that isn’t in Gainsight” and I’m here for any ways folks have made this transition.

Our mantra is “*If it’s not in Gainsight, it didn’t happen.”

@kstim, anything you can share about some of the connections we have that are pulling prior account notes into Gainsight (or any of the one-time rules we might have used)? I’m not clear on what was done previously to help cut down on the search OUTSIDE of C360.

Edit: ​​@KimStocks, if you aren’t already in the Global Gainsight Admin Slack community (and I can’t recommend being there enough), that’s a great place for questions like this -- especially in the #quickhelp channel, though there’s topic specific channels (#journey-orchestrator and so forth). I went ahead and dropped this there to get the ball rolling!

Edit #2: Thanks @jcampos!

That’s what our mantra is… I was in the ballpark, but ours is the same as yours!

Great question and valid concern! 

As for the ease of searching in Gainsight, that still needs some enhancement. Right now I just use CTRL+F on my keyboard to find keywords on the page. However, that is tricky when those keywords are hidden within the timeline activity and only visible when you expand each timeline activity. So, it’s not really a perk with Gainsight, unless I’ve missed it, and I hope someone from Gainsight can see your post and advise. 

Having been a raving fan of OneNote for years and then having to transition to Gainsight when I was a CSM, we did not all embrace the change at first. It took getting used to and our leaders reminded us regularly that, “If it’s not in Gainsight, it didn’t happen.” Eventually this helped keep us accountable and by simply reminding ourselves that it helps tremendously with business continuity, recollection, and performance review prep, I began to warm up to the new platform.

Now 4 years later I am proud to say I love Gainsight and I would be lost without it. So would my manager and my teammates on those days when I’m out of office and need their support if something extremely urgent comes up. They can pick up right where I left off, in a sense. The CTAs also help me keep track of what’s pending and how to take a proactive approach to keep the momentum going and external relationships thriving.

I think if you continue to emphasize that the pros outweigh this one con (searchability), they will eventually realize it won’t be needed as often as they think. 

@dayn.johnson @KimStocks Hey! I joined my current company when we already had Gainsight and were using the timeline, but I will say that our timeline is pretty much our system of record. If it’s not in the timeline, it didn’t happen! I agree with @jcampos that the searching within timeline entries could use improvement, but in the meantime, you could build a dashboard with various timeline activity reports and global dashboards so users are more easily able to search for what they need. It can be difficult searching for content in entries since that differs every time depending on what people write, but you could always key off of more solid fields like Activity Type, or maybe a custom Update Type field like we do.

To add onto what @kstim said -- logging emails to the timeline has been hugely useful for us. Particularly including the emails we send out of JO, so our CSMs are able to see what emails the client has been sent by our Digital Experience team (and whether they engaged with them).

Following this thread as I’ve been told a couple of times over the last few months that OneNote is the biggest competition for our CSMs to fully adopt the Gainsight Timeline.

@Tommy_Peters probably of interest to you as well...

We follow the same mantra - if not in Gainsight - it did not happen.  We also track customer engagement - so if they do not log their entries - their customer engagement is low - and its part of their QBR read out.  

I have also been places where we put MBOs around timelines and  based on customer segment, it required a timeline entry X number of times a month

@dayn.johnson  - I try to stay away from logging JO emails to timeline - as I have seen it clutter the timeline at times, I prefer to add a report to C360 to show JO activity