Share and Learn Best Practices

I’m excited to share the first in a series of posts around how we do CS Ops at Gainsight! We’ll be starting with our OKR+Project+Sprint Planning processes as these are the backbone of how our team operates across our entire Ops & Scale organization. My hope is that this is helpful for any teams looking to begin a similar process or are looking for inspiration. If you missed the initial post, check out other topics we’ll be discussing an feel free to add additional ideas!This is a process we’ve iterated on over the past 2.5 years and will continue to tweak as we go. I’d love to hear other ways your teams are planning your work.If you prefer videos over reading, I put together a 12-minute recording (sorry, I got carried away 😁). At a very high-level, this is how our team thinks about the planning process and various inputs across the organization. This is the guiding principle for how we’ve structured the setup. We leverage Monday.com for our planning and project tracking. It’s stru

Hi everyone,I haven’t been able to find an answer (or maybe debate?!) to this question so hoping to get some ideas. It has become apparent that some of my CSMs are logging their mid-term upsells as the pro-rated amount in the Renewal Center, and some are logging what the full ARR would be if not upsold mid-term. I can think of arguments for both sides here:FOR pro-rated: if you log it as pro-rated that's the money actually coming in, and you'll see the NRR benefit fully at renewalAGAINST pro-rated: If you log it as pro-rated you're being penalised due to the point the customer is at in their term which isn't representative of the size of the upsellI wonder if anyone has experience either way, or can recommend the best way to do it? Thanks!Sophie

Hi everyone! Today, I'm excited to give you a sneak peek into the Moveworks Customer Spolight with Gainsight and how they integrated their operations  with us to drive efficiency and automation. 🤖 Moveworks is an AI technology leader, uniting enterprise systems with a chat-based platform for instant information access, enhancing the workday.Their tech leadership are on the Cloud 100, Forbes AI 50, and AI breakthrough awards.  The reason behind choosing Gainsight: robust data model, total flexibility in product configuration, seamless integrations (including native ones like Snowflake), and incredible account support. Journey in automation and efficiency. In just 8 months, we've saved over 4,000 CSM hours through four impactful initiatives: 1️⃣ Call Note Summarization: Automated call note summaries with generative AI for easier reference. 2️⃣ Automated Emails: Streamlined email workflows with Gainsight's tools, saving time and reducing errors. 3️⃣ Deck Generation: Automated decks led t

Recently, Gainsight brought together a set of CS leaders from the edtech industry.  We ran a roundtable focused on wins and challenges with edtech customer success. I’ve summarized the discussion below and added a few resources including an invitation to a new cohort program for Gainsight customers. The first cohort is focused on Risk Management. Sign up here to learn more and participate!Do these topics resonate with you? What’s one win and one challenge you have?  Share here to learn from the rest of the Gainsight Community! Tyler @Paulina @denver_kirkpatrick @danny_hallgren @allisonh   EDTECH WINS + RESULTS Automated Lead Generation & Onboarding ChallengesDiscussed a successful strategy implemented by one company to operationalize the capture of leads and to quantify cross-sell and upsell opportunities generated by the CS team. They used Gainsight to create leads automatically into Salesforce when certain conditions are met, such as usage metrics and health scores.  Already gene

HeyI would love to join this event but I’m Europe based and can’t make the evening. Can you either publish the recording or do another session for those in Europe timezone? Thanks

Thanks to the more than 40 folks who attended our first ever CSM round table on Adding Value at every touchpoint where we did a quick review of this Pulse Session: Not Just a Check-in! Key Elements to a Strategic Cadence Call, went into some breakout sessions to meet others and address discussion questions, and then came back together to share key takeaways.  If you attended (and even if you did not) please share feedback on any topics you would like us incorporate into upcoming CSM Round Table sessions and post any burning questions here and we will answer.  Recording below and breakout takeaways with discussion questions attached  

Latest Update: Sept 13, 2022 //Gainsight Administrator is a creative, powerful role. It drives career development, it lives in the cutting-edge world of Customer Success Operations, and it’s both a new challenge to a systems administrator veteran and an entry-point for someone looking for a first ‘technical’ role.I know, because I’ve lived it and I’ve seen it. I became a Gainsight Admin in 2015, and earned my Level 3 Certification when it first became available. After transitioning from ‘Gainsight customer’ to ‘Gainsight employee,’ I ran Gainsight’s CS Ops team for 2 years, which included experienced Admins who have since grown into leadership, and first-time Admins who had never configured a piece of software before. In my newest role, I see the experiences of Admins with all levels of experience, plus their managers, on a daily basis. I hear about what they need and what has worked well for them.And I hear how out-of-reach the role can feel for newcomers. It’s intimidating, or confus

What’s a good Account:CSM Ratio or ARR Managed:CSM Ratio?The question comes up weekly, if not daily across our customer base and across the market.Plus, these benchmarks are changing as companies move more fully into Scaled CS approaches including Digital CS programs, 1:Many Events, and Cohorts.Here’s the latest from Gainsight.     Finally, here’s an estimate of ARR per CSM by ACV  

💰 How do you develop confidence in your ability to impact GRR/NRR?Post-sale teams are tasked with driving GRR and NRR - the key lagging metrics of a SaaS business. If the bucket is too leaky, there’s no way to get off the ground (GRR). And if you can’t consistently expand with customers, you won’t stay in orbit for very long (public company NRR median is ~115%, top quartile is 120%+).🚦 What are your leading indicators?What actually impacts these lagging metrics is a question that must be continuously assessed and answered. Our leading indicators drive our Health Score.  Specifically for measuring outcomes, we use the “DEAR” Framework.  Each measure and threshold is based on correlating performance 6 months before the renewal with the renewal outcome:At Gainsight, we’ve shifted to re-assessing health scoring to 2x per year vs. annual or more as market conditions change quickly.📊 What did we learn this quarter about our leading indicators?We reconfirmed the “recipe” continues to be tw

In our monthly meetup group about the CS Ops of Digital Customer Success, we spoke in July 2023 about how self-serve resource centralization and customer education can enhance your digital customer success journey. Here’s what we learned!  📝 Note-taking slides from the breakout roomsLearn about these meetups in the future by signing up for the monthly CS Ops Newsletter.

Hi everyone - after a small hiatus, I’m back with another post to share how we run CS Ops internally at Gainsight. If you missed the first post, you can check it out here. I discussed how we run our quarterly planning and sprint processes. Today, I’ll be discussing one of my favorite tools to foster learning within our team - Retrospectives!In the ever-evolving landscape of customer success, staying ahead means continuously adapting and improving strategies and operations. Incorporating regular retrospectives into your CS Ops team can help achieve this goal. These retrospectives foster teamwork by providing a space where team members can share without judgment and find common ground in their work. Why Retrospectives are Valuable Retrospectives foster a culture of continuous improvement and teamwork. Through regular check-ins, teams can analyze what worked well, what didn't, and formulate action plans for the future. This not only promotes efficiency but also nurtures a more collaborati

Hi Community!As we continue to develop capabilities around Timeline, we wanted to get your feedback on how you would like to use it in the future.Originally we designed Timeline in response to many customers who wanted a superior note taking tool. They were using systems like OneNote, Evernote and others and it just didn't meet the grade. So we built Timeline.One of our original goals was to provide a high quality repository of customer notes. Different than SFDC activity history, which logs everything and can get pretty noisy, Timeline would be cleaner and easier to find specific human interactions.But things evolve and we want to get your input. We've had some customers ask about having the ability to sync every JO or Advanced Outreach email, CTAs, Milestones, NPS survey responses and even health scores to Timeline. [i]What's your point of view? Should we keep Timeline as a view of human interactions only or would you want to drop automated, system generated actions in Timeline as we

Gainsight hosted our first Customer Advisory Board focused on Customer Education with an amazing group of education and post sale leaders.  Learn how companies are blending education and customer success to scale. See below for Summary, Key Points, How to Get Started, Common Org StructuresSummaryThe lines between educating users, driving adoption and guiding customers to achieve ROI are completely blurred.  If your education programs are not strategically woven into your post-sale experience, you’re missing a huge opportunity to scale while increasing adoption, retention and expansion!The discussion focused on improving the customer experience through education, aligning customer education and success, and using data/metrics to demonstrate education impact. Key themes were enabling customer and CSM efficiency and utilizing CSM insights to enhance content. View the recordingKey PointsThe ultimate educational experience from the customer's perspective is seamless, searchable, easy to acc

We have implemented Gainsight within the last 1.5 years. We’re still maturing and expanding our usage of Gainsight as well as standardizing some of our processes across teams. As part of the CS growth we’re bringing in resources for a CS Ops role. Right now, we have an admin, project manager, business analyst, and product manager, so this would be outside of one of those roles.  I’m looking for input from the community on how you utilize this role and areas you really feel like they provide the most value. 

Hi GS Fam!   I’m hoping to draw some inspiration from y’all around tracking customer goals via a Success Plan.  I would LOVE to see if y’all can share your best practices around the process and documentation.  A simple screenshot of your plan info section would suffice too!   We are in the middle of really REVAMPING how we track, document and manage these bad boys via Success Plans, would love some inspiration and best practices!   What we are looking for: We want to record Customer Goals (easy) Document current KPI measures Document target KPI measures Document customer outcomes    I know it’s easy to just create a text field and document these, but looking to see if anyone has more innovative ways, even if it means changing the overall process.   Thanks! Andor

'Working on Digital CS motions, there''s one thing that comes up over and over: having the best strategies is great - but aligning teams around those strategies is often really, really hard. Keeping everyone aligned, whether at work or in life, means juggling a lot of inputs and needs and working together to be successful. It’s something I’ve seen at Gainsight (working on several cross-functional projects at the same time) and outside of work (trying to get my 2 and 4 year old daughters on the same page definitely requires some expert-level collaboration and juggling - and lets face it, they win most of those rounds). Digital Customer Success can be executed in different ways by different companies, and with different alignments in between. But often teams struggle with this question in the same ways - how do you work effectively, together, with competing priorities. I’m really excited to be a part of next week''s webinar with Drift’s Director of CX, @emilymm519 , to answer this exact

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🎉 Whoa, the webinar was absolutely fantastic! 🎉 A huge shoutout to the incredible Champion @melissa_allen  for launching our First Spotlight series CS with such a bang! The collaboration between @lane_h  and @melissa_allen  was nothing short of amazing. The key lesson that resonated with me was mastering the art of managing that 80% of customers responsible for 20% of the ARR. And the best part? They shared how to achieve this in a digital yet incredibly personalized manner. Melissa's insights struck a chord with me: the secret lies in starting small, meticulously testing on a small scale, fine-tuning through iterations, and then scaling up. No doubt, I'm on a mission to spread the word and share this remarkable recording with everyone! 🚀Click here to Access the link. For those who couldn't make it to the Okta webinar, I highly recommend diving into the recording. One particularly intriguing strategy they discussed was harnessing variant emails to deliver tailored messages to specif