Share and Learn Best Practices

When hiring a CSM, do you look for a hybrid set of attributes (sales, project management, implementations, technical, support, etc)?  If so, how should you focus your efforts in finding this talent?  Should new hires have a strong grasp of the industry domain?  There are a lot checkboxes to check when looking for a candidate, and not everyone will meet all the criteria.

When a survey participant does not respond to a survey, what is the best practice recommendation on sending follow up surveys?  What frequency and how many follow ups are advisable?

How have you structured your Customer Success and Operations teams? Does Ops report to the VP of Customer Success or COO? If you have two teams, how do you differentiate responsibilities?  [i]We've written about our org structure [i]here[i] and [i]here[i], but we'd love to hear from you.

What alternate names have you heard or considered for your Customer Success team? For example:  Client Outcomes Onboarding Services Adoption Services

Leverage Success Plans. Success Plans help you create a roadmap (sometimes known as account plan) for achieving your customer’s objectives. Demonstrate value to your customer with tailored content from Success Snapshots, which automate meeting presentation preparation. Track your interaction using Milestones. Milestones represent major events in the customer journey. Examples of milestones include key onboarding stages, health check, training delivery, QBR/EBR, annual renewal, and marketing campaigns. You

Leverage Success Plans. Success Plans help you create a roadmap (sometimes known as account plan) for achieving your customer’s objectives. Demonstrate value to your customer with tailored content from Success Snapshots, which automate meeting presentation preparation. Track your interaction using Milestones. Milestones represent major events in the customer journey. Examples of milestones include key onboarding stages, health check, training delivery, QBR/EBR, annual renewal, and marketing campaigns. You

How do the different elements of your CS department affect your income statement? A quote from Andy, VP of Customer Experience, at Version One:   Outcomes management seems like it would fall into COGS. With a 15% investment on recurring ARR that seems like your CSMs would put pressure on your Gross Product Margin %. The costs for your CS Sales Rep are clearly an Operating Expense. That should give you great margins on upsell, which feels right to me.  I.e. we believe that investing in customer success provides a lower product margin, but that lower margin is offset by protection of the renewal rate and more predictable LTV. Additionally, it generates Upsell revenue very efficiently. Basically what I’m saying is companies that invest in Customer Success should have a lower Gross Product Margin % during the transition period, but if the investment pays off then CAC will be lowered by more efficient Upsell and 

Does anybody know how to set-up a rule in the rules engine that does the following: Run a rule nightly that searches for any open CTA's with a "type" of relationship scorecard and if one exists the scorecard will be updated to a certain score. We have a relationship group scorecard called "Content". We want the rule to search for any open CTA's for this scorecard nightly and update the score accordingly. If you look at the attached rule action,I want to copy step 2 & 3 for a relationship scorecard but there doesn't seem to be a way to do this... Any help would be greatly appreciated

1) Utilize the buttons on the top ribbon To visit the Gainsight Community, click the https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/s3OB_i3uNK8jBphkilrvyXyZELTnGUPAkpGjHIFOmArlrRqRqh20nbibawc9h8mkD4R_g-qNpUxO6giU3Bk2ZObF2ZwqLH7wE-Muq6bTqkvOiOCWXjhhiCG5-rEuf7jGfuKuCCjS logo at the top right of the screen To visit Gainsight Support, click the Go https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/3biO0bg5FqpgdivKJZjEQ4Gw55SxakpVoCmtTOsN99qRyfwB2LrZJQuY5K90fpHccvmJMeucR2R7XDgQHNU32otMO2wToM467Da7i_xnMiH7E9hL8CfY5EizFCnAK

Follow a CSM Transition Playbook. You can either create your own, or ask an admin to download a pre-built one from Vault. This ensures that CSMs with transferred accounts are all following the same steps. Here are some recommended tasks from the CSM Transition Playbook: [list=1] Conduct internal transition meeting with new CSM; update CSM field in CRM Introduce new CSM to customer Create milestone for new CSM Align with customer on objectives & outline next steps Ahead of any customer meeting, review all existing Success Plans for the account. Success Plans contain a roadmap (sometimes known as acco

We recommend CSMs check CTAs in the Cockpit every morning. First, navigate to the “Cockpit” tab https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/WK1xZr9JUJWb11jVAHBJEbEVTGS9dilOUu1rZp83BKiJGhXNI__vJIkRV55DOOaVCEUP6OCyvchjLJlAcfUKdObgFvHbXJoXL1PSMB8btFdD37WZUJowcOKLN5JEeg70H2O8nKJp Find a Call-to-Action, or CTA https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/tLwp-HF4wdP88Oo26fQwq-yOvZzxoWSiWV-8Q8pSY6DWjpmIoJGSsR95mkqQ8kodi6ipp13eB_4OjXNNjcQo5mAvhZHj-v-mkeq_5bgV7nSB03Xrtn8R2gHHqF3pJ

Use the search bar at the top of each page. See below screenshot:  https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/HHJKKFfd2iutXqHTlYVX0bx5BpyEJAB1JkjbXKMWPAzYoeVTNvuyXiu3drnamKCpzVxSiwfz4uBNb7dDTX58ykGG4sLGoJWESC9cGewYIsI5YLw6JovkOsvnelBfRfCcPEl3u2VF

Do these scenarios sound familiar? The exec at a customer tells you s/he loves your product, but your CSM says that the junior day-to-day lead hasn’t made any progress with it. Your CSM thinks the customer is making a ton of progress with your product, but the exec emails you and says they’re not getting value. Both of these scenarios are troubling. In the first one, it’s only a matter of time before the junior lead tells the exec that it’s not worth renewing your contract. In the second, it doesn’t matter whether the customer is making progress “in reality”, since what really matters is the exec’s view of reality. It’s critical to create alignment across the people at the customer. After all, “the customer” is really just a collection of people, all of whom have different personalities, opinions, and influences over whether “the customer” becomes successful, renews, and recommends your product. We’d love to hear from

We want to make sure that Gainsters with a variety of perspectives offer feedback on the product. For example, while a CSM might lend an interesting perspective on the usability of Gainsight for end users, a Solutions Architect might have a perspective specific to the configurability of Gainsight for an admin. Our Subject Matter Expert (SME) program connects our Product sub-teams, each of which focuses on a different part of the product, with people across different roles in our Customer Success organization. Each SME team meets once every two months, with the following agenda: Product Feature Update (20 minutes): Overview of trending usage stats, recently released enhancements/functionality and bug fixes SME Examples (20 minutes): Review of challenges faced by customers related to a feature, and proposed soluti

We are relatively new to customer success - I'm a CSM and I have a whopping 749 accounts I handle.  Needless to say, we are constantly under water.  How do you all divide up your clients for your CSMs?  We are a fintech company.  Currently, the only CSM in our org that has a firm handle on all her clients is our London based colleague, who only has 50 or so clients and she knows ALL of them.  Help!  What's your contact frequency?  By phone? By email? In person?  Do you send chockes.gift baskets/hoodies/t shirts?   We need a new plan from our current one which is call every client every quarter.  I want to present our managing director lots of options!  Thanks!

Best practices on surveys for support cases

For example, Account/Customer name is "One Big Account" if you search on "Big" , there are no search results.   But if you search on "One" , the account is found. Is that a current limitation of the search function, or is there a place to configure search to be a little "smarter/forgiving" ?

I would like that our CSM do not have an opportunity to edit or delete rules in administration tab or not have access to administration tab all in all. 

How do you edit the summary section to add comments within Customer Success 360? Do you need to add a status and a stage? If so, how do you add the status and stage so you can save comments within the summary of the customers page?

Hey everyone! Health scoring is one of those things that is always being tweaked and adjusted. And just when you think you have it dialed in, it's probably time to take another look. Why? Well, the landscape of your business and your customers is ever evolving. Contributing factors to customer risk 1 or 2 years ago are likely still impacting your customers today, but maybe not to the same degree, and new factors may now be present, or at new weightings. Add to this the changes in data streams and validity components that are available to you. All this means that tweaking your health score from time to time is a very good thing.  So.....I ask thee, noble community member: what are some recent efforts you've made to fine tune your health score? Please share!

When hiring a 1:many lead (CS Operations), what work history would you recommend targeting? How senior of a candidate would you recommend looking for? Gainsight has offered perspective on these questions here and here. How does your CS organization view the Ops role? 

Has anyone expanded their CS org from one central office to several different locations, either domestically or internationally? How have you structured your team to better manage geographically dispersed offices?

Have you ever found yourself in a meeting with your CFO, in which s/he questions whether giving you more budget is worthwhile? And have you ever struggled to identify metrics that justify your investment in Customer Success? Here's how we measure Customer Success at Gainsight:  If you'd like to learn more, check out a new blog post by VP of Customer Success Allison Pickens. She discusses which metrics Gainsight tracks internally and how to configure your Gainsight instance to reflect these metrics.  [i]Join the conversation - how do you measu

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.