Share and Learn Best Practices

During Pulse 2017 the Gainsight Client Outcomes Team organized a Circles of Success & Birds of a Feather Program, featuring group discussions for Gainsight customers focused on key topics and challenges. We had such engagement from our customers we wanted to keep the conversation going on Community. One of the topics we discussed was Health Scores. Here are a few of the questions that we discussed: What health scores have worked best for different organizations? Do you see trends based on the industry? How do you divide your customer base to ensure that the parameters around your health scores are relevant to them? How are customers creating health scores across multiple product offerings? How do you report on health scores? How to approach a customer with a low health score (full transparency or some sugar coating)? How do you measure impact of activities?Please share your best practices on this thread to keep th

While at Pulse, my team and I learned that we need to add a segment to our customers. We currently only have Premium and Standard, where Premium is based on if the customer purchased our "Premium Support" offering. This means we have a wide variety of customer types in the "Standard" model. We are now working on implementing a new segmentation strategy to separate "Standard" into two groups: Tech Touch and Mid Touch (kudos to the presentation on Customer Communities, forget the presenter names).  So far, here is what we are looking at for factors: License volume License volume # of products owned Customer type (a function of spend per customer) Strategic valueOur hope is that this will allow us to tailor our engagement strategy better, focus our CSM team on our higher-valued customers, while maintaining an acceptable level of engagement with the tech touch group. Looking for guidance or other ideas from the community! Thanks!

I'm looking to export reports from Gainsight so I can load them on a monitor in my office. We use Geckoboard to display dashboards from other parts of the organization, so this is the preferred endpoint for the Gainsight data. I explored creating a Zap from Amazon S3, but unfortunately they do not support that. Does anyone have any ideas on how to accomplish this goal?

We're looking to create some KPIs specifically for our Success Operations team. Does anyone have these in place that they'd be willing to share?

Hi Gainsight Community, As my team is adopting Gainsight into their daily routine, one issue we are finding is the cadence for completing performance reviews (PR). For our clientele, it is crucial that our CSMs connect with clients to show value in our product by conducting/delivering PRs. It allows both CSM and client to reset expectations and come up with an action plan. Therefore, we have created a CTA targeted at this task. However, our clients have such busy schedules that it has proven difficult to get a client on the phone for 30-45 minutes. Our temporary solution is to have our CSMs extend the "due date" for the CTA, but their cockpit has begun to get out of hand. We know that there will be instances where clients will not schedule a call, so how do we "deliver" value and show them their progress.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! All the Best, Chip

We usually have more than one success plan open for a customer. My challenge for reporting becomes what do I use as my overall complete number? If I only use active success plans then the CSM could be 50% of the way through his total success  plans (2 plans each with ten tasks, 9 complete in plan A and 1 complete in plan b). Then (s)he completes the final task for plan A and closes things, now their complete % drops to 10%. Conversely if I use non-active plans (closed) then once we have a large number of closed tasks, the open tasks will not move the needle much and 90% complete won't mean much.  Thoughts?

Hello Everyone, With the new feature of timeline and the log of activities, I'm curious to know how other companies will encourage CSMs to register customer activities. In our case, today we are using CTAs to log meeting/calls annotations. CTAs pros: can create reports based on CTA reason, duration, etc. Timeline pros: much better interface, formatting, connect with contacts, etc. This means that if I want to use both, a CSM would need to follow this process: Receives a new QBR CTA. Do the call. Take notes logging a new timeline activity (without reason categorization). Go to cockpit and close QBR CTA without annotations. This would result in a CTA disconnected from its notes. What will you guys going to recommend to your teams? Cheers

Hello Everyone, I’ve been working in a project of scalable CSMs team and I would like to get some opinion about rescue churn. Nowadays every churn request is sent to be rescued by a CSM, however we have resources that prove that efficiency of involuntary churn rescue as Champion left is very low. I would like to know if you have already tested any model of not rescue involuntary churn and which impact it has resulted. Thank you

Hi Folks,  We're in the final implementation phase of our Gainsight instance, and therefore almost ready to take the reins. My question to you is what are your experiences with admin ramp up times post implementation? How long would it typically take for an admin to become comfortable with the tool and able to get to a steady state? Let's say the future admin has moderate knowledge of Salesforce but no experience with a tool like Gainsight otherwise.  Thanks in advance for your thoughts. Regards, Niki

Hi All,   First of all, Sincere thanks to all the respondents for taking out your valuable time in responding on our product CSAT survey. Your feedback plays crucial role in our product planning efforts. Our teams will soon reach out to you, as follow-up act for more detailed feedback, based on your responses.   I would also like to congratulate the below mentioned lucky winners who are selected for the Free Pulse’17 Passes. Winners will soon receive a mail from our team with instructions to redeem their passes.                         Hope to see you attend our Pulse’17 : Ultimate Customer Success Conference   We will soon post a blog on our takeaways from this Product CSAT survey. For any queries please feel free to reach out to  Venkatesh Sirpurkar : vsirpurkar@gainsight.com 

Does anyone have some examples and best practices of surveys that are built to customers to let us know insights about consulting engagements? I'm looking for generic examples of questions that can be asked to the customer to rate and provide insight about consulting engagement. I understand that these can be very specific to the company or product offerings but I'm currently looking to get some generic questions that can be asked Thanks ~Lokesh

I'm interested in the ROI of Customer Success and Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs). Obviously, these are different that MQLs or SQLs. Does anyone currently utilize a Playbook for their CSMs to uncover and qualify leads within their customer base? If so, what process do they follow?

In the past 5 business days alone, we’ve done these Success Briefing Centers with 4 of our clients. What’s so remarkable about these cross-functional discussions is that the other functional leaders are asking to serve as references for the SBC. I’ve actually never felt so positive about the future of Customer Success. When you witness those “Aha” moments, it’s hard not to get giddy: The head of Customer Marketing realizes that there’s a way to pair up an advocate with a prospect in 24 hours, not 7 days. The head of Field Sales realizes that she can get customer usage trends into the hands of a strategic account executive who’s on the road all day. The head of Professional Services realizes that he can prove he’s driving fast time-to-value and not just breaking even on a P&L. The head of Inside Sales realizes that there’s a way to help account managers avoid the embarrassment of pushing an upgrade on a customer that’s in the middle of a support escalation. The head of IT re

Hello everyone! I'm looking for some networking/inspiration on how you celebrate your Customer Success wins with your company.  For instance, when sales lands a big deal they send out a "Bang the Gong" email to the company. Does anyone do something similar like this for Customer Success wins? Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

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 a new wayThese are brief lists, and as always you can find more detail about these changes in the 5.5 release notes.  We welcome your feedback about whether this is a helpful way to think about and see the enh

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 Aligning with Partners on Customer Success. I'd love to hear from you - how have

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 Why your team members are your clients, too. Do you apply the same principles of Customer Success to Teammate Success? I’d love to hear from you!

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, what are the components of a standard project experience

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.