@seth, thanks for this question. Did you receive helpful responses? My perception is that Gainsight is further down this path than most companies. When I survey other CS departments it many still have just 1 FTE assigned to digital scale and are in the early stages of building out a more formal capability. 

@DougCaviness Alas I didn’t! Let’s see what perspectives we get from posting on Linkedin...

We currently have this spread across different roles. Our customer growth digital activities are owned by our customer marketing and advocacy team. Our pure CS digital programs are included in our CS Operations Manager role. We also have 2 digital-led CSM for our digital segment. Always curious to see what others are doing, Lane Holt did a great presentation at Pulse this year I would highly recommend. I definitely see the advantages of having one department or specific roles for this. 

@owbou, thanks so much for sharing! This is such an interesting topic, I love hearing how others are addressing it. -- Doug

@seth jealous of the number of individuals supporting this effort at Gainsight! At AuditBoard, we have started to scale of Customer Success motion through digital-led activities this year and have the following structure:

• 1 Program Manager, Digital CS (me!) 
• 1 CS Ops Analyst 
• 6 CSMs in a pooled model
• 2 Community team members (director and analyst)

We’re hoping to add a Digital CS Analyst to support with 1:Many Events, JO Programs (Email/Surveys), and Reporting in 2023.

@zdsiegert I hear you on the reporting front! Hard to pull together numbers that haven’t been analyzed for quarter after quarter for years, and to align data from multiple platforms. (CCing my boss @tyler_mcnally  )

If you add that analyst role, what’s the line between what you want to give to them, and what you’d want to retain for yourself?

@zdsiegert, that’s great that Community is part of your Digital Scale approach. Are there specific metrics you use to measure or validate the contribution of Community to Customer Success? I’ve talked with a number of Community leaders who fall under Support where the main value contribution is calculated on support ticket deflection and basically everything else is just a check box.

@seth great question! My vision is that the analyst role would be responsible for Stakeholder Mgmt and Engagement activities. This would include execution of our Best Practices Webinar series, running our ongoing email/survey programs, and handling reporting.

Ideally, that would free me up to focus on Adoption and Value Realization at scale in forms of automated Health Checks (Adoption Reports), Verified Outcomes, and Expansion plays. 

@DougCaviness our Community team is focused on Adoption & Value.  They are striving to achieve this by amplifying our user’s voice through Product Ideation in the Community and decreasing TTV with posts, how-to’s, and weekly Office Hours.  A bi-product is reduction in Support Tickets.  We’re still working on high-level metrics but for this year have been focused on increasing our community member per customer % to above 80%. 

@zdsiegert, interesting and that makes complete sense. Just want to share that I spoke with a community manager for a leading cloud company who indicated that ~75% of their community activity was by prospects. This blew me away! Think their Sales and Marketing teams are just at the earliest stages of recognizing the impact Community has or could have on the Acquisition side, but there is no quantitative value associated with this yet. 

@DougCaviness For a community’s contribution towards CS, think about evaluating your normal CS metrics among customers who are engaged in the community, versus those who aren’t. That could look like leading indicators (NPS, adoption, time-to-value, etc.) and/or lagging outcomes (GRR, NRR, advocacy). Here’s a breakdown of the “SPACES” model of ways that community can provide value, including common/example ROI options: https://cmxhub.com/the-spaces-model/

At Gainsight, we abbbbsolutely use community for Marketing purposes (Pulse, meetups, exec roundtables, local dinners, etc.), but it’s at a very small part of anything that currently happens on community.gainsight.com, and it’s owned within our Marketing team.

Here’s one way to think about the capabilities you need in Digital Success and the other places they need to interface.  What do you all think?

 

Thanks @tyler_mcnally !  This is a great visual representation.  I would recommend drilling into the Events since that is a key component of a 1:Many model.  We run Best Practices Webinars (roughly once a month) and Office Hours (one a week) which are the flagship programs of our Digital CS team

@tyler_mcnally, I think your Capabilities diagram is very helpful. Would you see Community fitting under Experience Programs? Where does automated / self-service Renewals and Expansion fit?

a few more details - absolutely agree with events and community.  Events and community also support each other with community as the “meeting place” for event invites, recaps, discussions, etc.