Share and Learn Best Practices

'Most of the credit for this post goes to @sdrostgainsightcom, who shared the bulk of these steps with me during an office hours session a while back. I’ve since added a couple notes of my own, as I’ve been dealing with a few user cleanup projects in our org. I’m hoping this can be a helpful guide for anyone else going through this process (and selfishly, I’ll probably need to reference this myself in the future!).  ISSUE: When a username is changed in Salesforce for a user that is synced into Gainsight, the User Sync job, which uses the Salesforce Username as the upsert key by default to maintain the connected Gainsight User, creates a new user record:  The new Gainsight user has the SAME Salesforce User ID, but has the NEW username from Salesforce – this user will not reflect the applied Gainsight license, etc. since that info remains unchanged on the original user record with the now out-of-date username. This original Gainsight User will not be updated by the sync job going forwar

Subscribe to this monthly newsletter here!   Hi there,Lately, I’ve been mapping CS Ops career journeys. What does the transition look like into CS Ops or into Gainsight Administration, and then upwards, and what resources do people need? Yet, for my own career, I find myself turning more and more away from mere information, and towards time with mentors, mentees, and peer coaches. I’ve realized how hungry I am for ideas from 'far-off lands,' and for a buddy who’s willing to poke at questions of, 'What matters most, in this case?'So, I hope that, in serving up the knowledge below, I’m creating a space where you can step back from your day-to-day, even though we aren’t sitting together over a beverage. Mostly, though, I hope that you can find someone outside your company to talk with about CS Ops. I’ve come to believe that there are an awful lot of people striving to maximize their ‘doing,’ and we could use more of us who strive to pause and attend to each other, since there's so much va

Generally NPS are sent out to execs. But NPS (or product NPS) are delivered to the end user. I am going to assume that you are talking about NPS from a stakeholder or an exec and give recommendation.As soon as you receive a detractor NPS, someone should reach out. I say someone because it can be automated and look like coming from an inbox or it can be actual person responsible for the customer (CSM, AM etc). Gainsight recommends that the outreach comes from the Manager in fact and not the specific CSM. This is done so that if there is a concern around the CSM experience, the customer is able to have a frank conversation. For a high touch, mid-market segment, it is the manager who reaches out with a prepopulated automated email template apologizing for the experience and asking if the exec can throw light on the issue or be able to meet them. ​​​​​​​From what you gather from the conversation from exec, you would need to course correct the customer by opening a risk CTA (in case of Gain

Up until today in my team, we have no way to reinforce the CSMs when a client renews. Winning takes effort and sweat so we need to find a way to: Motivate them, feel valued and recognized in the company Help them prioritize their goals as CSMs  Perceive client expansion and churn fighting as an opportunity to grow The Question: how can we celebrate when we achieve success with our clients?Does anyone have examples or best practises on how to do this in your company?What are the most effective ways to reward CSMs so they keep motivated to renew and renew more account each year? I was thinking about these 2 options: A) Monthly email to the team sent by the CSM Lead with summary of the renewals using positive languageD) Mention by CSM team lead or Founder on a slide in the Company meeting - congratulating them Any other hints on your end?Your suggestions would be super valuable :) Thanks so much

Hey guys,I was wondering if anyone could offer any advice on how we can manage this scenario a bit better.We provide our customers with a software and we have a training team that delivers training sessions and webinars.At the moment users book via a zoom registration form, when this has been submitted our training team open a training success plan and link a pre-configured playbook.In that playbook there is a CTA called “Introduction Training” as an example, and if booked the training team will update the CTA to “Introduction Training - Booked”.Then after the training has been delivered the training team will export the attendee list from Zoom, add in the relevant GSID’s and upload the CSV to a program which sends users a follow up email with a link to their recording of the training and a feedback survey.When the follow up email is sent a CTA is created that is named “Introduction Training - Attended” that automatically closes 24 hours later.This means we can then pull a report on CT

Hi Community,I was wondering if there are any best practices for the following: You close a deal with a multi-national enterprise and successfully expand product adoption to different business units.Each of these business units would like to have their dedicated CSM, with dedicated touch points, EBRs, etc., so for sure multiple-times effort for the CSM.Of course, usually you don’t expand with an ARR multiple of 2x, so consequence is that you will have a CSM who needs to manage e.g., 4 instead of 1 customers but within a single account.Is there any best practice how to deal with these situations that you’d like to share?Best, Carsten 

Over the past couple weeks,  I’ve received multiple questions about how to start or run Office Hours. This has become a key piece to our 1:many strategy here at Gainsight. We offer a few different types of Office Hours and each has a different outcome we’re helping to achieve.CSA Office Hours - These are geared towards Operations teams who have questions about how to do something technical in their instance.  CSM Office Hours - The Digital First CS team holds these once a month and deep dive on a specific topic to drive awareness and adoption. PX Office hours - Each month the PX team covers a topic to drive adoption of parts of the platform.5 steps to getting started:Start with a small group of customers - This allows you to be more intimate setting as well as get rapid feedback on the program. As we rolled out our Office Hours, we started in our Pooled CS segment. Be aggressive with your invite - I don’t mean to invite the same person multiple times. However, since you’re starting sma

Hello Team,We observed that the number field is getting rounded off to the nearest integer when it is used in Cockpit UI.Can we show actual number instead of rounding off?Usecase:Customer has a custom field of number type(2 decimal values are allowed) in Call to Action object to track duration.When duration is filled as 0.25, it is rounding off to “0” and when we use “0.5” or above, it is rounding off to 1.Customer wants to show the original value instead of rounded off value.Can we do that. Thanks & Regards,Srikanth 

Hello Gainsight Community! I am hoping to get your help with a question. I am looking to add a custom field in Success Plans, and I am wondering where it says "Insert text here" in grey (on a rich text field) - is it possible to change that to add a hint? 

The client is having an issue with saving multiple data fields.  The rich text fields on the Success Plan are causing issues for my team. When they have two fields open to add notes, such as Company Description and Business Objectives, they can only choose to save one field, which then removes all text from the other open field. Is this a known limitation within the Horizon success plans? Or is this a bug specific to our instance? They have also expressed issues with the format options and ability to use bullet points and copy/paste options.I have attached two screen shots. One is prior to pressing save, and the other is when I click save on the business objectives field. You can see that the company description disappears.I cannot provide support access, but can send you additional details if needed.Thank you!(Also, there is no option to say this case is about Success Plans in the field below)  

The Gainsight Global Admins Meetup Group got together in April 2022 to share ZoomInfo’s success story and tactics in launching Gainsight to their CSMs.Watch the RecordingThank you to @karentaylor for your incredible thought leadership, and to @gunjanm for helping make this happen! Congratulations to both on your launch Find out about these meetups in the future by joining the Meetup Group.

In our monthly meetup group about the CS Ops of Digital-Led Customer Success, we spoke in March 2022 about how to blend digital and human touchpoints in the customer journey. Here’s what we learned!🎞️️️️ Recording of key takeaways from each breakout room 📝 Note-taking slides from the breakout roomsLearn about these meetups in the future by signing up for the monthly CS Ops Newsletter.

Hoping to get an idea on how much change management/retraining you had to do for your teams if you moved from SFDC to NXT.  Anyone willing to share what to expect?  Thanks!

Hello, We are also looking for a better process on our user/license managment. Wondering what other teams are doing to track their user licenses as well as how they are set up if a new user joins. We woud like to track and audit this periodically so that we know which users are applied which licenses.  Does anyone have a process that they have seen work around this idea?  Thank you for any feedback!

Hi there!  Does Gainsight have Salary benchmarks for CSMs (associate, senior)?

Hello! We have a team of “pooled CSMs” that operate in a 1:many model.  If you also have this model at your organization, what do you call this role, and what do you call the manager of this team? Do you simply call them “CSMs” and “Manager of Client Success”, or something else?  Thanks for contributing!

The Global Gainsight Admins meetup group got together to discuss highlights from the January/February 2022 (v6.31) release. Thanks to Anastassia Goidina (LinkedIn | Blog) for leading the conversation! 🎞Watch the Recording Highlights from the Zoom chat:On the Gong integration: We use Gong - have heard that’s coming in April On the Cockpit Task View: This is my favorite one!!! I got sooo many requests from users for this. Even to the point of me making my own version of this as a report on their dashboards This is so Awesome!!! My people will be very happy :-) One call-out is that if the CTA doesn’t have any tasks, it won’t show up in task view (that’s the last I heard!) I’m capitalizing on a captive audience to vote up a Product Enhancement for a Cockpit View that includes both Tasks and CTAs with 0 Tasks. https://community.gainsight.com/cs-product-ideas-21/enhance-the-cockpit-views-to-have-1-view-for-tasks-and-or-for-ctas-without-tasks-42063  The only thing I wish they’d do to i

How do you track account changes in Gainsight?  We're looking to have more data on how accounts change in a given quarter, such as keeping track of the number of accounts that Churn in a given quarter and the number of accounts that transfer ownership in a given quarter.In addition to the number, we’d want to be able to drill down to the specific records. For example: In Q1’22, Sarah Miracle had:3 accounts transferred out of her name in Q1’22 Company A, B, and C 4 accounts transferred into her name in Q1’22 Company D, E, F, and G 5 accounts churned in Q1’22 Companies H, I, J, K, L  Currently we do leverage a rule to update company status to Churned if certain criteria is met, but we are not recording any other information about that (date of churn, for example).

We should all protect what has been entrusted to us; that includes the powerful functionality and data accessible in your Gainsight NXT or PX organization. Newly released articles outline the top 3 best practices Gainsight recommends you take to secure your Gainsight NXT or PX org.NXT versionPX versionPlease take a moment to review the complete guidance on these best practices for Gainsight NXT or PX.

If a premium customer converts to essentials, will their account be removed from Gainsight?

The Gainsight Customer Success team is hosting webinars this week on how CS professionals are adjusting with the current times and discussing best practices, tips, and innovative ideas for transitioning to a virtual customer success world. Please add your questions, comments, and key learnings from the session(s) here! We look forward to continuing this conversation with you.

Our team is considering getting our sales team more involved/dependent on People Maps. It works well for our CS team currently, but our Sales team relies more on Leads vs Contacts. We’re currently using the Contact Id as the identifier, so that we can capture changes in name/emails without creating duplicates in Gainsight. Has anyone decided to sync in both contacts and leads and have any words of advice? Do you sync leads at a certain point in the sales process for an account to avoid bringing in ‘junk’ leads? What do you use as the identifier to capture both sources? Last, how do you most efficiently handle adding new leads/contacts? We currently struggle just on the contact side with CSMs manually adding a new ‘person’ via the +PERSON button in people maps because we can’t turn it off. Since we use the contact id as our identifier, these manually added people are never tied to a contact record and thus will never have user related data from salesforce.

We have a pooled CSM model in our SMB segment.  Our touchpoints are generally quarterly and as needed.  If you also have a shared model at your organization, how do you (or do you at all) introduce this service model to the client during/after implementation?  -Does the Implementation person own the introduction, or does CS own that after go live? -Do you keep it pretty vague “after implementation, our CS team will be checking in on you from time to time to make sure things are going well and you’re maximizing value/achieving your goals….” or do you make it super clear what their touchpoint schedule is...”we will be reaching out to you once per quarter, and also when we notice an opportunity to provide some extra guidance to help you achieve your goals”…. If you have any advice on making a smooth introduction and transition during this point of the customer journey, let me know.  Thanks! 

Here is an interesting question. What do people called their pooled CSM team? A customer wants to jazz things up a bit and looking for interesting names that fit the bill that we have seen other customers use

Anyone else out there primarily write 1:many emails regarding operational announcements? A large part of my portfolio is writing operational messages that are need to know - e.g. retiring features/products, new systems requirements, product issues that require some customer action to remedy. I would love to connect on the strategies and techniques others use when the information is critical. One of my most recent operational messages got 40% open rate and 30% click through, which I was really proud about, but that still means 6 out of 10 didn’t read the really important message! Note: we can use other in-product communication tools too, really looking for ways to optimize email performance.