Share and Learn Best Practices

Hey fellow  CS Camps, Question for ya. We are struggling with proving our adoption rate. We feel every use case is different so we need to keep a million scores to see what adoption really is and then we will only have it per customer. Sound familiar? My question to you, how do you do it? Do you have one percentage that that you say when you are being asked: what is your adoption rate? And how do you calculate it? Next step is, what is a good percentage? We are struggling with this. Would be absolutely awesome to hear your best practices! Thanks so much in advance! Martine  

We are looking at ways to show the effectiveness and success of our CSM program.  Our CSM's do not handle renewals or any revenue generation and so we are looking for other metrics to track and were hoping to use Gainsight as a way to do this.  I would love to hear how others have done this successfully.

Hi! I'll be hosting a webinar on Community tomorrow. If you're interested in learning more about how we started and grew the Gainsight Community or are considering creating a Community for your organization, join us!  August 17 at 9:00-9:45 AM PT -- Building a Community -- RegisterOfficial description: Gainsight customers use the Gainsight Community to share ideas, learn best practices, solve problems, and help influence the product roadmap. Learn how Gainsight scaled our Community to 500+ members.

How are other companies using Gainsight and/or SFDC to quantify how much upsell the CS team is contributing?   Our CS team doesn't execute the transaction, but rather explores opportunity with the customer and hands off a "lead" to Sales.  I'd love to know what others are doing to track the upsell your team generates.

I'm working on building a rolling NPS / CSAT survey to trigger the quarter prior to and following the client's renewal event. I received a request for the ability to compare NPS trend overtime for a rolling cohort. So rather than comparing Q2's responses to Q1 or February's reponses to January, I would select a sample size (say 50 responses) and always look at the most recent sample. (ie comparing responses 1-50 vs 2-51 vs 3-52 and so on) Has anyone built this type of report in Gainsight? Since I can't find any examples, I wonder does this go against best practices?

We currently have all subscriptions in the Product and Charges field.  "All" is the issue as in it shows all products from all subscriptions whether active or inactive.  Example below.  subscriptions outside of the current active one confuse the data when trying to pull reports.   Any help/ideas would be great!

We are new to Gainsight and leverage Marketo for all of our marketing campaigns and Influitive for our Advocatehub. We want to create an engagement score in the heathscore that reflects their engagement with our campaigns/webinars/user groups/advocate hub etc. Would anyone be willing to share how they have set up a similar scorecard component in Gainsight?  

Does anybody have examples of how they set up and use Relationships in C360 that include the attributes, linked objects, card view, and/or 360 view fields that were chosen? We have a Cloud CSM team and an On Premise CSM team. Naturally, our customers might have a Cloud product, an On Premise product, or both.

We are a new GS customer and I need to introduce Gainsight to our internal CSMs next week. In order to gain buy-in and enthusiasm, I want to get at the "WIIFM." Does anyone have any ideas/thoughts about what's in it for a CSM who hasn't previously used a tool like Gainsight? A couple of benefits come to mind right off the top--automated messaging and playbooks, and at-a-glance customer health scores. What others can anyone add?  I might be able to somehow leverage the idea of the 5 Pillars of Customer Success, but if I do I'll need to put them into simple terms to make the CSMs understand that Gainsight will make their jobs easier. Help, anyone?

How do I write a CTA that is triggered when we haven’t had any meaningful communication with a client in x number of days?

Want to learn more about one of our most exciting new features? This week we'll be hosting a webinar on use cases and best practices for GSnap. Feel free to share any ideas or best practices from your organization's experience with GSnap thus far! [i]We'll be continuing the conversation below! Additionally, tune in to our weekly CSM led webinar on Tuesday July 19th @ 9am PST where we will be discussing this topic! Click here to register.

 Our “Customer Spotlight” series features Gainsight super users on our online Community. For this week’s installment, we’re featuring Allie Gold from ZeroFOX.[i]Tell us about ZeroFOXSocial media has become the new cyber battleground, presenting one of the largest and most dynamic risks to organizational security in decades. The ZeroFOX Platform continuously monitors social media platforms for security risks and business threats targeting employees, customers, brands, and organizations. Using intelligent data collection with an automated scriptable analysis engine, the ZeroFOX platform automatically identifies and remediates social media security issues including impersonator accounts, phishing attacks, fraud, customer scams, exposed PII, and much more. We're headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland.[i]What tips do you have for our members on how to get the most out of the Gainsight Community?I would say that if you ever have a question about a feature, search for it in the Community board

We are looking for guidance on what best in class CS teams have in terms of percentage of accounts that can be in red/yellow (either by # or by ARR $). Does anyone have any ideas on best practices or guidance? Obviously this will be different on how you define red/yellow, but we're looking for a ballpark figure on what is a reasonable amount of escalations to be had at any given time. Thanks!

I'm interesting in understanding best practices of Customer Success organizations that manage 1,000+ customers. Can anyone from this vibrant community share best practices, blog posts or thoughts on how they manage 1000+ customers? I'm also interested in hearing what features of Gainsight assist in managing that many accounts. Thanks!

How do you manage critical handoffs in your organization?

How did you build the right environment to support the launch of Gainsight?

What are some of the most important reports and metrics that your CS organization tracks?

Success Snapshots are a highly effective tool to increase the efficiency of your EBR process by allowing CSMs to download ready-to-use, customizable Business Review presentation decks that leverage all of the information contained in Gainsight. How is your CS team currently using the Success Snapshot tool? What are some best practices you'd found in using Snapshots? [i]We'll be continuing the conversation below! Additionally, tune in to our weekly CSM led webinar on Tuesday July 12th @ 9am PST where we will be discussing this topic! Click here to register.

As you may know, Gainsight recently announced a new organizational structure to prioritize Customer Success. You can learn more about this exciting change either by reading this blog post by our VP of Customer Success and Business Operations Allison Pickens or by watching this recent webinar on the topic. Our team is thrilled to prioritize customer outcomes above everything else by aligning our teams around a new, customer-centric organization. [i]How has your company organized around the customer? [i]What strategies have you used to navigate a customer-focused reogranization? [i]What questions do you have about Gainsight's recent reorganization?

Hello! I wanted to see what thoughts people had on sending 1:Many outreaches out to customers that have chosen to 'opt out' of e-mail communications? I ask because these communications are going to provide valuable content around training and best practices, thus providing information that will not only benefit the customers' overall product experience but also their overall product/industry knowledge. Curious on what thoughts others had on this topic! Thanks, Melissa

We've just rolled out the Gainsight tool to our CSM team. We've instructed them to use CTAs to influence the health score card instead of manually adjusting the health score number themselves -- to prevent too much subjective override. If a CSM does happen to manually adjust the score, how long will this stick? And how do we change it back so that the score is calculated from rules and open risk/opp CTAs?  

I'm speaking with a company preparing for an internal workshop on how to improve their onboarding/implementation processes.  Beyond the three articles below, do you know of other great content related to 'best in class' onboarding/implementation?  Would love to hear how others have tackled stepping up their implementation game.  Thank you! User Onboarding that Improves Customer Success and Avoids Churn by Bill Cushard, Head of Training at ServiceRocket  Customer Onboarding is Hard - Avoid this 6 Pitfalls by Amy Clark, Editor of IWantItNow blog.   Onboarding at Gainsight - Making it happen using Gainsight by Allison Pickens, VP CS

Advocacy is an key part of Customer Success. It is important to retain customers and increase customer lifetime value. It is also a very powerful component of the sales cycle. How does your team encourage and track advocacy?  How does your Marketing team use Gainsight?  [i]We'll be continuing the conversation below! Additionally, tune in to hear our Customer Marketing Strategy Lead host a webinar on Wednesday June 29th @ 9am PST where we will be discussing this topic! Click here to register.

One of the challenges we're finding with Gainsight is building reports and rules for large teams. We don't have a field in Salesforce where we can easily say "Show me team = X". As a workaround we're having to individually add each account manager's name to reports and rules. As people leave and join the company it is going to be quite the task to update everything accordingly. Aside from creating a field in Salesforce for the individual team names, does anyone have any ideas or best practices for solving this problem? We tried something called "Team manager" creation where we assigned names to a "Team Manager" through a rule, but it did not have the expected behavior and only worked for accounts, not people. 

I am expanding our VoC program and attended a couple of great sessions at Pulse which provided good ideas.  I would love to get more information on Gainsight's VoC operations......what that looks like, who participates, what tools are used, best practices.