Share and Learn Best Practices

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?  

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 success, we’ve maintained a rapid pace of innovation in our product. (Feb. 2020) 6 Experts Share How They Use Customer Feedback to Build a Better Product: When you're trying to deliver an exceptional product, it's easy to get l

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 report   Step 3: when you initially “run” the report you’ll come back with some funky colors labeled  “red, yellow, Green” in order to update the color scheme you’ll want to go back to the “report repository” and in the 3 dots in right corner click on “custom colors”.  Search for the “scoring scheme Def

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 length and includes slides from Nick's presentation. (Dec. 2019) The Efficiency Crisis In Customer Success (Dec. 2019) It’s Not Just About Culture: Industrializing Customer Success (Dec. 201

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.    

We're looking to do some churn analysis, and want to get our hands on some qualitative data. Unfortunately, when customers have churned we haven't had a formal exit interview process in place. Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions for what could work here - if fair to reach out to churned customer after they've left a year or so ago, etc.

Hi Everyone, I’m looking to hear about what your best practices are for creating & managing tickets with Gainsight support for your team.  Do you have everyone on your team submit their own tickets, or does your admin do it on their behalf? How do you manage the need to “grant access to Gainsight support” by a specific user? Does your admin request this of each CSM every time they have a specific issue? I’m having trouble getting tickets resolved in a timely fashion due to the need to grant access to support for enough time, and chasing down my individual users so they can turn this on. Who has a process that works well? There’s got to be a better way! Thanks!

It is my understanding that Gainsight can integrate with Higher Logic Community. Has anyone done this, if so, what is the most helpful data that you have seen come out it? Also, it doesn’t have to be Higher Logic, but that is a bonus. :) 

We are wanting to have our CSMs fill out an internal questionnaire/survey when it is time for them to transition to the renewal team.    IDEA 1: Our initial thought was an Activity Timeline post with a task assigned to the RM, but the questionnaire would have multi-select picklists - this is not possible currently IDEA 2: Internal survey that the CSM would take and a task would be assigned to RM to view the results.  I cannot find a method to generate the survey URL, but not deploy it to the customer (this is an internal only process).  Is this idea feasible?   Any feedback on how to complete one of these ideas or another solution that would assist us in this?

I have a unique team of CSMs who work directly with our New Business (Hunter) reps, who are solely responsibly for running and converting Proof of Concepts. In this unique position the CSMs bridge the gap between more traditional Growth CSM metrics (like upsells or Growth on Retained) and New Business Sales (bookings).I am curious if others in the industry have a specific team like this and what time of performance metrics CSMs have (revenue, retention, KPIs, etc). Ideally, I think there should be a way to strike the balance between rewarding CSMs for revenue growth at the time the POC converts, with the core responsibilities of a CSM (retaining customers through proactive account management and exceptional customer support/insights). Would love to hear what others are doing!

Monthly, Manager-CRM Strategy Meeting Notes.Does anyone have any suggestions, thoughts or current processes using Gainsight on how to record important monthly strategy meeting notes between Manager and CRM regarding next steps for aspects of their portfolio? The purpose is to help managers manage, review and refer back to the next action steps agreed to within these strategy meetings We currently use a spreadsheet but would love to hear from users a creative way to do this within the Gainsight platform.

Question for all my admin friends! We are sending out automated emails from the CSM at certain days of the customer lifecycle. We have them spread out so that they don't interfere with scheduled events the CSM completes, but obviously, there are times where the CSM may not complete one on time and run into the window of the automated email. My VP is asking if there's a way to prevent the automated email if a CTA was closed within a certain time period. I can do that obviously, but it definitely gets complicated. So, I'm wondering how others handle this situation. Do you just go ahead and have the email send or do you prevent them if another "live" action happened?

Hi Community! Our office is located right in the heart of Silicon Slopes, and we are wondering if a Utah meet-up group for company's using Gainsight in the area is something that has been done before? If not, would people be interested in coming to one if we were to set something up? It would be great to sit down with other company's similar in size to see how everyone is using Gainsight and to see if there are any insights that can be shared. Interested to hear your thoughts!

Hi there, As part of linking timeline to the health scorecard, i'd like to get a better understanding as to why capturing the client sentiment over time (which in turn produces an average score that summarizes the overall client relationship) is a best practice instead of capturing a "point-in-time" sentiment. Is there evidence based research on the topic of Customer Sentiment Analysis that either argues for or against a point in time metric. Thank you in advance, Jasmine