Perspectives from Gainsight

Monthly CTA closure rate by Owner   It is important for a Customer Success Director to keep tabs on work performed by various CSMs. CTAs come in really handy to keep track of the tasks completed. Below is a rule that can show you CTAs completed by each CSM on a monthly basis and if they were completed by due date or have been overdue.    Rule Name: GS : CTA overdue percent   Rule Flow Diagram:  

According to our latest survey of top SaaS CXO’s, the focus of customer success is currently all around retention and scaling with clients. To achieve scale, companies are honing in on: Preventing Churn: Moving from Usage to Value Better Churn Forecasting: Early Renewal and Stakeholder Alignment Understanding Product Usage: Product Telemetry Increasing Product Adoption: Implementing “Tech Touch” Preventing Churn: Moving from Usage to Value In good times, customers buy technology because it’s “cool.” In tough times, they only renew products that add value. While the early days of Customer Success were all about product usage (“are they logging in?”), sophisticated Customer Success operations have implemented a Success Planning process. They capture the client’s desired outcomes during the sales proce

Hello Gainsight Admin Community! This article about Adoption Explorer layouts will cover the basic steps of how to get started and what are the insides of it. Bringing in the Usage data and drawing insights from it is made easy with Adoption explorer. As per the business requirement Usage Layouts with Usage sections can be configured.  The Usage section is similar to a report with Adoption explorer objects as the source and Layout is similar to a Dashboard holding Usage sections. To edit/create a new layout - click on the +icon availa

Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta recently talked to Lorna Henri, Global Vice President of CS, TAM, and Support at Mapbox, about how they used the Gainsight CS application to help them standardize their best practices and scale to match their customer growth. The Mapbox customer success team needs to be highly technical so they can understand and speak to developers on a code-base level, as well as be able to talk to stakeholders to define and deliver ROI on a broader, strategic business level. Previously, their teams were taking notes in various places, and the CS playbook varied from team member to team member. Today, because of Gainsight, they have a better, more automated picture of account health that includes usage data. It shows up in their Customer360, and is referenced throughout 

We wanted to help CSMs and all customer-facing roles do what they do, but better. How can we do that? Improve your productivity by giving you access to core Gainsight functionality within the solution you use the most—email and calendar. Gainsight has introduced an email integration as part of our GS Assist feature. The new Chrome plugin allows Gainsight users to access Gainsight email templates from their Google or Outlook inbox, allowing them to quickly send the right message to their customers.  CSMs can log customer emails to Timeline directly from their inbox, making it even easier to capture this context.  Gainsight also offers

Gainsight surveyed executives back in March to understand their concerns related to COVID-19 and again a few weeks ago, to see how their focus is evolving. Customer retention remains top of mind, of course, but what does that actually mean in terms of their company’s priorities and the impact on renewals?  The latest survey findings: Churn Rates Are Going Up, But Not As Much As People Thought Net Retention Rates Are Also Getting Worse – But Not As Bad As People Thought Companies Are Keeping Or Growing CS Teams  Churn and Product Are Top Focuses for Companies We also asked respondents about what top actions they’ve taken since COVID-19 started, and what they see as the next challen

When adding tasks to a playbook there is an option to choose the owner/date/priority/status and so. I want the option to customize those fields and add a custom field we have on Task Object in SF - Medium. This field holds the medium of the task (email, phone, etc..). Actually, I want to choose the medium when creating the playbook task so whenever the specific task will be created under the playbook the medium will be marked automatically. Is there a way to do that? Thanks!

Our CSM team often engages with our customers through a 1:many method (i.e. 1 communication reaches many customers). To guide customers along the right journey, we use 2 approaches: CSM Touches and Tech Touches. Our engagement with customers differs depending on their lifecycle stage. We use Calls to Action (CTAs) in Cockpit to remind the CSM when to reach out at critical points. We use Journey Orchestrator for Tech Touches.  For more information on this topic, click here to view my full blog post. And now we'd love to hear from you! How do you structure your 1:many strategy?  

Hi, One of the CSMs on my team is going on a leave of absence as they welcome a new member to their family. They won’t be working during that time and another CSM will be taking over working with the companies.  Are there any best practices around having one CSM take over another's companies for a month or two? Does Gainsight offer any tools to help with this? We want to ensure data integrity and that anyone who looks at our instance knows who’s managing which companies. Thank you for all your help Community!

Hi all - new to the community and curious how other handle an Annual Business Review with a client that has multiple SAAS assets from your company.  I ask because our company’s clients could have up to 15 different SaaS solutions (all provided by us), that our CSMs need to include in an Annual Business Review.  We were pretty efficient with our processes before when we were only reviewing performance and goals for 2-3 assets but now - it is getting to be a bit much.  Anyone else out here have a similar issue that wouldn’t mind sharing some best practices or ideas related to this?   Thanks!

How do you align your Sales and CS teams? Are they aligned at the account level or at a manager level? Or not at all? What are the pros / cons of your approach? 

Happy New Year ! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season with family and friends and trying to get back into the swing of things. We are planning to send the “2019 Annual Client Satisfaction Survey” in late January and we wanted to reach out for suggestions on the following: We have an engagement and incentive platform with reporting and analytics on the backend that is sent to our clients. What wording is used to get at specifically satisfaction or dissatisfaction with customer reporting and analytics that speak to activities and outcomes around products our clients purchased. Essentially, we want to know our clients level of satisfaction with our reports and the analytics we provide on their specific accounts/data. We are not interested in the actual results or outcomes of those reports or analytics, but the design/components/layout/frequency/look/value/elements included in our reporting and analytics.   Hope this makes sense! We appreci

Hello!  My team is shifting from using Salesforce exclusively to using Gainsight and we are having a hard time going without the SF Activity Timeline on each account.  GS has a lot of benefits but it is hard to figure the state of an account without the context of the emails between our org and the customer.   How do your organizations deal with this?  

As you know, Gainsight not only builds powerful products to manage your customers’ success and product experience. We’re also focused on supporting CS and PX practitioners with industry best practices and thought leadership. In that spirit, here’s a roundup of our blogs and webinars from the last month, as well as what’s coming up!: Blogs 10 Gainsight Updates That Are Setting the Bar for Customer Success Platforms in 2020: Gainsight is in lockstep with the ever-evolving discipline of customer success. As the leading customer success platform, we’ve continued to focus on building out the tools that CS teams need to optimize and mature their strategy. So what have we been up to in 2019? Aside from publishing books and throwing the biggest conference in customer suc

This is a great report to add to your renewal dashboards and/ or Risk Escalation Dashboard.  Step 1: Go to Administration → Data Management and add a field to the company object called “Days Until Renewal” you’ll want to make this a formula field within the MDA object Step 2: Once you’ve tested and saved step 1, you’ll then want to go to report builder and use the company object as your data source.  “Sum of Score” is located under the + Current Score Look up as the“score field”  and you’ll want to click on the widget icon to update the “aggregrate” to sum.  In the by section you’ll be including “Account Name” & “Label” field from the Current score look up, and make sure to SAVE the

Hello - We are in the process of implementing Gainsight. We are connected to our Salesforce instance. The integrator that we’re using said that we should pick where we want to edit customer data that is in both Gainsight and SFDC, i.e. status, assigned CSM. He recommended that we either edit the customer data in Gainsight OR in SFDC, not both even though it’s possible to do it in both. I would ideally like to be able to edit it in both places since we’ll still be working in SFDC too. Wondering what others have done that has worked well or not worked well? Thanks

Does anyone have a communication plan format they like?  We're implementing Gainsight for the first time and I want to ensure we have the highest adoption possible and that the project has visibility across the company.  For example, audience, purpose, frequency, method, description - include project updates in the monthly internal company newsletter, provide project updates and demos in CS team meetings and other communications at least 1x/month to make sure the rest of the CS team and other users are onboard and feel like they have a say.  Thank you!

As you know, Gainsight not only builds powerful products to manage your customers’ success and product experience. We’re also focused on supporting CS and PX practitioners with industry best practices and thought leadership. In that spirit, here’s a roundup of our blogs and webinars from the last month, in case you missed them: Blogs Top Customer Success Trends To Watch For In 2020: On a recent webinar with one of our private equity partners, Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta shared an inspiring outlook on what’s to come in the year 2020 for customer success. The industry is constantly evolving and it’s important to stay ahead of the curve with new concepts and trends. This is a partial transcript of Nick and Gainsight’s vision of the future of customer success. It's been lightly edited for clarity and leng

Looking for a current resource to help your CSMs understand how to get the most out of Gainsight? One of our own Gainsight colleagues recorded an 11-min. video on how she uses Cockpit, C360, and Timeline to manage her daily work.  And if you’re interested in additional guides to support your end users or admins in configuring these features, check out this article. 

Does Gainsight have any solutions or functionality for tracking Customer Advocacy, e.g. tracking referenceable contacts, participation by customers in ref calls, speaking engagements, webinars, other advocacy opportunities?  I know we can create "tags" on the C360, but the reporting functionality is not optimal for what we need.

Hi All, We are working on our Parnter Success Managent program. It is focused on our Delivery Partners and helping them find success post licensing sale. We started about a year ago and our parnters are responding well. My current goal is to better define metrics to measure success. Please let me know what works for you or if you would like to connect for brainstorming.

A very common question I get from customers is how to add fields to the MDA Company standard object. I'm hoping this video will help clarify the steps involved. Please feel free to add any questions/comments below!

My org is looking to rename our Segments and I wanted to gauge the #1 CS community to see what other people are using. Let me know in the comments!

Hello,  We currently utilize both Relationships and Customers since we have 10 different products on Gainsight. We have a Product CSM field on the Relationship object that provides us with the correct CSM for each Relationship. In our case the customer does not always have the same CSM across all of the products they have bought.   Though, we run into an issue on the Customer Info object because we cannot have a single field for CSM, since it is not a 1:1 Customer:CSM. I thought I could solve this by creating a separate CSM field for every product on the Customer info object, but now it is becoming a mess using one consistent filter in Dashboards for CSM or CSM Managers. Curious if anyone has any good ways they have solved for this when managing so many products in Gainsight with multiple CSMs.