Share and Learn Best Practices

We have used Gainsight for a few months primarily focusing on Timeline and our CSM dashboard. We are now creating our approach for success planning. Prior to finalizing our template and having CSMs leverage this functionality, we want to have a success plan example to share with CSMs that demonstrates a focus on a customer’s time-based goals and measurable outcomes. Does anyone have a success plan example they are willing to share? Thanks!!

Individual CSMs have been reaching to our admin team requesting for a bunch of CTAs that are no longer relevant for them to be deleted. What approval process have you implemented in your organizations to make sure your admin team gets documented approval to delete CTAs. We want to avoid a situation where we just delete CTAs and activities based on the CSM’s request without leadership visibility? What are some best practices you use or a process you’d suggest? Thanks!

I love using Gainsight on Chrome. It’s been said many times before that Chrome is the best browser to use now days for its security, ease of use, and speed. But the real reason I love Gainsight on Chrome is because of the extensions!Chrome extensions are small apps that are built to sit on top of Chrome and extend its functionality. They typically serve a small single purpose like ad blocking, password protection, or to easily schedule a Zoom meeting within Google Calendar. They are distributed through the Chrome Web Store and are all fully reviewed by Google.Why I love extensions is because you can customize Chrome to better suit your needs. And best of all, you never have to leave Chrome and open another app. Here’s my favourite Chrome extensions that I hope will make your life easier as well. My S3 BrowserIf you use an S3 bucket to load data to Gainsight, this is the easiest file manager to use. There are other apps that can be used like Cyberduck but I don’t find it as easy to use

Hi folks, Our customer base is quite atypical - we work with farmers. As you can probably assume, seasonality is therefore a huge factor in everything we do. As we begin to plan out the revamp of our health scorecard and think about our risk escalations, we are attempting to determine the best way of catering to the seasonality we know we face. For example, if usage is below X in January, that’s totally ok; but if it is below X in July, that is a huge red flag. To top it off, these seasons can vary between farms based on the type of crop they are focused on. That level of segmentation is a bit rough in our database, but I am working on making that information more useful as well. I would love to hear any ideas or thoughts on how to approach this!

To nail the post-sales to CS handoff with your new customers, there are several critical components. Some of our Gainsight leaders gathered their thoughts into a playbook to share with you in this recent blog post.The high level plan:1. Define a taxonomy of outcomes2. Create a simple way for sales to capture the client’s desired outcomes3. Operationalize a Success Plan to map to the pre-sales definition of outcomes automatically4. Build the Success Plan into the product5. Demonstrate valueCheck out the blog for the details on how to transform the CS journey across your company!

Nick Mehta, Gainsight’s CEO, recently shared a blog post about how the best CSMs are often naturally human-first in their approach to work. Specifically, they demonstrate the ability to: See clients as people (or a bunch of people!) Recognize different stakeholders in an org have different goals, and to look for opportunities to connect them Connect people and companies with others like them Drive career success for the people they work with in their current org and beyond Read more here, and also be sure to check out these upcoming webinars on related topics: The Customer Success Professional’s Book Club Discussion (July 29) Mastering Difficult Conversations (July 30)  

Our CCO, Ashvin Vaidyanathan, recently listened to a podcast with SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin about “16 Rookie Errors Founders Make Pitching to VCs”. Ashvin distilled his learnings from the session and applied them to CS professionals.  Here are a few highlights: Make that email to a customer count. Give props to their teammates whom you work with regularly. Share some value metrics (“YTD we’ve saved you $X in costs”). If you don’t have value metrics, share some adoption metrics (“your company is among the top 20 percentile of users among all our customers”). Ask for a minimal amount of time (“15-20 mins works best”) and offer something back to them for their time. Send your deck as a PDF and not a link. This also means your deck should present itself if you’re not there to present it. For example, each slide’s title should summarize the takeaways from the slide, and the story should flow smoothly to the reader. For an EBR, knowing you may lose an exec’s attention after the first 1

Is there any concession for unemployed CSM enthusiasts to get Gainsight certified?

Calling all admins! We’re looking for Gainsight game changers with big ideas to contribute to the newly announced Sightline Vault.   Sightline Vault is all about harnessing the power of our admin community to make your best practices available to all -- in just a click. Think: NPS JO templates, your favorite playbooks, healthscore configurations, and other Gainsight best practices you can’t live without and want to share with the world.    What’s in it for you:  Your name in lights! (...almost!) You’ll be credited on any of the solutions you suggest that we publish and we'd love to further showcase you as an admin! Your favorite template or configuration, built to help thousands of future admins The opportunity to influence an amazing program for customer success technologists   What we need from you: Share suggestions - favorite templates, configurations, dashboards - let us know what you think other admins would benefit from if they could just click “go!” Permission to showc

In the below document, I have explained how to calculate the every 6th month anniversary dates and store in a separate field so that we use it to send surveys( whenever you wants to send NPS survey who completed 6 months), use it in rules and reports wherever required. Since I am creating a formula  field in Sfdc and bringing it into Gainsight, this work-around will be applicable only customers on salesforce platform   Calculate the anniversary dates(every 6 months)

Missed our webinar last week on “Work Faster with Gainsight Features You Don't Know that You Already Have”? You’re in luck, you can find the full recording here:     In this two-part webinar, Josh Weber, Senior Client Outcomes Manager, will first introduce you to these features and how to use them to your advantage, followed by step-by-step setup instructions and a demo by Altamash Syed, Senior Support Analyst.  

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:     Flow of the rule as follows, Fetch CTAs (Fetch Task) - Fetch required fields from Call To Action object,     Extract Due Date as Date (Transformation Task) - Due Date is Date Time field, in this transformation I’m generating a new date field Due_Date using date function on Due Date field.     Extract Due Date Month (Transformation Task) - Extract month value from the prior generated Due_Date field     Get Total Due CTAs monthly (Transformation Task) - Get the total number of CTAs due for each owner on a monthly basis - no filters are required here  

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 process and then use Success Plans to drive the entire post-sale motion toward the clients’ goals. Then, during the next Executive Business Review, the conversation isn’t about features and

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 available in the right corner.   To Analyse the usage data let us begin by choosing one of the Usage sections. For more information refer - here Proceed by choosing the usage section type to be as “Analytics”   In the next step select required measures of any Data source (Company usage info/person usage info etc…) In the show section select the measures accordingly   The below screenshot shows an example of “Total, Open and Clicked En

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 Timeline. They’ve also automated outreach, and the entire team has expansion and QBR Playbooks. Lorna built a one-to-one dashboard for each TAM that she reviews in weekly meetings, too. To hear more about L

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 calendar integration in Cockpit. You can sync upcoming Calls-to-Actions (CTAs) and view them directly in your Google or Outlook calendar. By monitoring customer data and triggering CTAs, you will know when action is needed on a customer account. Click here to read more about our workflow optimization tools. 

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 challenges facing CS. Click here to read Nick Mehta’s blog post for the detailed analysis. 

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 appreciate any suggestions you may have.   Thank you

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?