Perspectives from Gainsight

Does anyone have a downloadable word template that a Customer Success Manager could use to plan for account level Customer Success on an annual or quarterly basis?

Our February 5.5 release was a big one, so we understand if you're feeling uncertain about how or where to get started. We're exploring ways to present our release notes and new feature info in a more concise and digestable format, but in the meantime we put together a quick summary of the February release changes. This spreadsheet contains three lists to help you understand what's new or different in 5.5 at a glance: Automatic updates: changes to existing features that you can immediately take advantage of and don't require any Admin setup Incremental improvements: changes to existing features that require minimal Admin configuration to utilize New Features: these are wholly new features that require Admin configuration, and perhaps thinking about a business process in

Customer Success at scale is much more than one-to-many email automation to engage the long tail of your customer base. Collaborating with your partner ecosystem on Customer Success can be another key to scaling. When there's alignment between vendors and their partners, every constituency wins. Customers derive quicker time-to-value that is consistent with standardized journey maps, vendors benefit with better margins due to reduced adoption costs, and partners not only increase their margins and retention rates, but also identify upsell/cross-sell opportunities and enhance their competitive position. Here’s our recommended playbook for working with partners to drive Customer Success: Profile Your Partners Define the ROI to the Partner Share Customer Insights Provide Enablement Define the Division of Labor Measure Partner EffectivenessTo learn more, check out my new blog post on 

What are some of the major points you've relayed or takeaways you've received from reviewing your overall portfolio of health scores (automated & manual) with upper management? No need to dive in specifics! Looking for best practices for a management team that is unfamiliar with health score practices. Thanks in advance!!

Are there any recommended Test automation tools that we can use to test our Gainsight environment I'm looking for testing the UAT tests that we run on Gainsight when we upgrade to newer builds These UAT tests includes validation of Rules execution, Permissions and access to various features of Gainsight web currently Any advise here will be helpfull

At Gainsight, we’ve built processes that have helped us meet our Customer Success goals. Later on, we realized that the same fundamental processes would allow us to achieve our Teammate Success goals. The analogy between Customer Success and Teammate Success best practices is wonderfully perfect. Each of our 5 areas of best practices for Customer Success has a parallel in Teammate Success: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-vO0cAxOizl1TlPLJQ6GVKbmAtZbX9T7Y7t1lT0KjgncGNhzEd_umQdjvngo4l7jv9Rck8J6NChDq-RR-zppmEuodw5vpyjMHQG6qyYN0WbLPG2pZN2mkD0ZhGUtDQQbjCHZ4ISwTo learn more about how we leverage this framework, check out my new blog post on

I would like to know how many full access and limited access Gainsight licenses I have in my organization. Is that information visible anywhere?

I'm curious if other folks have been thinking ahead about what topics they're hoping to dig into at Pulse 2017. I just got approval to attend, and have a hit-list of aspects of customer success that we're bringing extra focus to this year, and that I'd love to dive into head-first in Oakland: Live Customer Training How do organizations make boring ol' knowledge transfer into an invigorating customer experience, an exciting job for our trainers, and effective at getting customers not just to [i]understand the product but to [i]use the product? Customer Learning What have organizations done to establish a coordinated strategy of educating customers across many media (email campaigns, live training, documentation, in-app guides, etc.), with a consistent voice and style t'boot? Customer Project Management How formal is too formal? Especially during launch, but also during other parts of the customer journey,

We've been experiencing an issue with the SF tabs not sticking when we select Gainsight in the Force.com Apps menu. So, we can adjust them, and then, the next time we go back in, they have defaulted back to the original layout. Has anyone else had this happen or have suggestions for how to correct? We've been able to get around it by using another Force.com App choice in the dropdown, but would be great if we could figure out how to make them stick using Gainsight.

We are looking for some direction on the key data elements for Invoicing.  What would an Invoicing data set look like? 

How are other storing "documents" related to an account or deployment.   Things like design documents, customer presentations, etc. that we may want to reference in the future.   Have folks incorporated sharepoint or other document repositories within Gainsight?  Store some other way?    Thanks for any feedback. 

I'd like guidance on how others have their CSMs track interactions with customers (emails, phone calls, meetings, etc.) in Salesforce and how they map these interactions in Gainsight using milestones or other reporting. Our team does not have a current standard on how to track customer interactions in Salesforce which is frustrating to our Sales team and as I roll out a clear standard of how we are going to use Salesforce to show visibility into our interaction with customers, I'd appreciate guidance on how other Gainsight customers do this. Thanks in advance for your help!

Some CSMs spend only a small part of their day in Gainsight. Others spend their entire day in Gainsight. We're curious to hear how we could move the needle towards CSMs spending more time in Gainsight. If you are a CSM who only spends a small part of your day in Gainsight, what are the barriers to increasing product usage?

(1) What's the best way to measure NPS as part of CSM's performance metrics using a manager's dashboard or report? (2) We can set up a report by CSM by month with % of detractors, passives, and promoters as a column chart. Is there a way to get the actual NPS score by month by CSM? 

My role, and our org, are relatively new to the Gainsight world. We're going through and consolidating CTA Types and CTA Reasons to use. My main question revolves around how detailed should we start out with CTA Reasons? For example, we have Risk, Lifecycle, Objective, Opportunity and Event as our CTA Types. We could have a reason for Engagement Risk (customer has not engaged in a lengthy period of time) and Engagement Opportunity (regular follow up with Customer) - I know these are very high level examples. Any recommendations for breaking down Reasons into Risk/Opportunities as well, or keep them high level as that will be specified within the Type? Thanks!

The “right way” to do Customer Success varies significantly across countries in Europe. There are certainly commonalities - in particular, Customer Success tends to be higher-touch in Europe than in the U.S. - but it’s mission-critical for a CSM team to vary its approach by country. Check out a new blog post written by several executives in the Gainsight community: https:// http://www.gainsight.com/2017/01/31/guide-customer-success-across-europe/. We welcome you to add your learnings from your own experiences, so that we can continue to supplement our perspectives.

Before our executives have a meeting with a customer they ask to get an Executive Summary report (for which we built a template). This report includes details from various places - All of them are already in SF or GS. For example:  Key contacts, Open opportunities, NPS Score, Product purchased. Is there a way to have GS pull these info from all these sources and generate a PDF/Word file that can be sent to the executive?

I'm trying to set up a report to get a snapshot of a Customer's Scorecard when they decide to cancel (we store this date of cancellation at the Customer level). Is there a way to set up a report to track these over time? Does anyone have a good example of what they use for this? Thanks!!

Hi guys I'm new with SF/GS but I'm trying to figure out a thing. I would like to know if has form to register a informantion from a field in another one every last day of the month. For then take the difference betwen months in a formula of other field. I have an idea to do with rule engin but not clear what to do. How could i do this in the best way?

Looking for some best practice insights. So we are still ramping up with Gainsight and we've come across a few self inflicted data integrity issues with respects to our Customer Info object data. The issue stems from changes in processes upstream in the way we were managing opportunities in SFDC. We've sorted out the process now so going forward things are good. Here's my question. I want to clean up the few data integrity issues we have by updating the opportunity records with active subscriptions associated with them. I'm looking for a rule that would enable me to make updates to the opportunity record and then subsequently update the customer info object using a daily rule. Essentially this is a rule that enable me to maintain the opportunity record and then maintain the data in the Customer Info Object. Thoughts?

We want to have as many scores set as possible on all our accounts.  There are some instances where a field is blank or is not eligible yet, but we want a score.  For example: Customer has never submitted an NPS or is too new to have cases.  I tried setting the NPS score based on null value....no luck Is there a way to do this? Otherwise, my backup is to add it to my rule that essentially defaults all the scores

January 31 at 10:00-11:30 AM PT - Gainsight Roadmap Webinar -- Register Gainsight's VP of Product, Karl Rumelhart, shares what's planned for Gainsight's product roadmap and what it means for you. Gainsight has a major release planned for Feb. 21, so you'll want to tune in and see a preview of what's coming soon, as well as what we're working on for future releases!

Our team is developing a best practices guide for Account Management teams using Gainsight. Can you share how Account Managers are using Gainsight in your organization? Thanks!

How does your Customer Success team structure commissions? Do you factor in retention, renewals, and expansion?  We've written about how we recognize and reward CSMs here, but we're interested in hearing from you! 

Looking for some 1:Many ideas for CTAs, reports, communications. Please share ideas regardless of how established your 1:Many program is.