Share and Learn Best Practices

Hi all, I have a question. I am looking into upsells and trying to come up with some metrics to start to predict this for example in days. Like 'when a company signs, the implementation should ideally take 90 days for phase 1 and the first upsell can be expected after a xxx amount of days after signing the contract' . Now I am wondering what a good average amount of days is from the closing of the sale to the first upsell or cross sell,. Can anyone advice me or share best practices for them? Would be super appreciated. Thanks in advance! Best Martine 

Anyone a customer or prospect of UserIQ? Looking for feedback on potential integration points. Thank you!

From time to time, the response time of our Gainsight instance/solution is slow to respond.   I dont have anything specific.  But I was wondering if there are any best practices or guidance around the configuration of the Gainsight features and functions so that the general performance is at its best. For instance, we know not to search with more than 2 filters.

Hi All, I'm a new GS Admin, who has completed our implementation in the Sandbox. I'm now getting ready to implement in Production and wanted to see if anyone had any documentation that could help act as a checklist in order complete appropriate steps. Thanks.

Hey CS ops peeps, We run a series of networks which clients use to build their system on (we're DNS geeks... ::pushes up glasses::). Usage is almost always pretty flat, so people set it and forget it. Subsequently, virtually nobody logs in on a daily basis, a major break from a lot of companies I see on here (Gainsight included) and I don't see a lot of examples of non-license based setups. What I was wondering, was if any of you are in the same boat from a business standpoint and how you architected your health scores and CTAs. Would love to have a conversation here/offline to swap ideas.

Hi I'm wondering if anyone captures data at the end of a stage and how this is done? As an example I'd like to know what a customer's health score was when they were done with on-boarding.  Is this data persisted anywhere?

We have a field that we're using to fire a CTA when the client doesn't hit a usage benchmark. That field is only populated for accounts where the benchmark isn't reached. I'm trying to write the CTA so that the CSM only gets the alert one time in a 30 day period. So, how do I prevent the CTA from firing again for an account where the CTA has been closed in the 30 day period?

We are trying to determine how to best connect social media advocates to the customer accounts in Gainsight. We have a few social tools right now, but they are not integrated into Gainsight. We'd prefer to have this closer to real time which would mean we most likely wouldn't be able to do uploads to MDA via the API.  Has anyone leveraged Hootsuite or Spredfast or another social tool to integrate it into Gainsight? Or has suggestions on the best way to do this?

Hi team,  Does anyone know of a way we can freeze a churned/will churn customer's health scorecard in Gainsight so that we can start reporting on trends? When a customer churns, we move them to the "Churned" Stage and our CSMs will close out the CTAs as Closed Risk to clear out the noise in their cockpit. Since our scorecard colors are driven by specific reason codes, once the CTA is closed, each measure will turn green the next day. This causes a problem for our churn analysis downstream. Any tips on how you can keep the cockpit clear but also keep a record of all of the risks identified in the customer account? BONUS question: We were also thinking of trying to find a way to operationalize "If a customer is in Churned Stage, then the Overall Health Score = RED (or black) or some really obvious color" Any tips on this? Thanks! Linda

Tales of Groc: the Customer Success Caveman Installations of Tales of Groc will be released bi-weekly [i]Geologists from Stanford University recently made an astounding discovery. Drilling core samples in Palo Alto, a thousand feet below Sand Hill Road, they discovered the fossils of an ancient civilization. They're excitement grew as excavation revealed a Neanderthal community with complex tools, written language, and a primitive subscription economy. [i]A paleo-forensic team pieced together the daily life of one adult Neanderthal that lived there 40,000 years ago. They've published his narrative below, and titled their work the Tales of Groc, the Customer Success Caveman. Chapter 1: Blindside Churns Groc arrived at the office bleary-eyed. His 6-month old cavebaby had been crying all night. He’d had a thin breakfast of squirrel and pine nuts and he had a mountain of EBR prep to get done. As he approached his desk, he could see a stone tablet with writing on it. Groc’s

Has anyone successfully written a report or built a CTA to fire when the Number of Contacts tracked in Sponsor Tracking is 0? We haven't solved for this one yet, mainly because Gainsight (and a lot of force.com, for that matter) cannot detect the absence of something. My leadership team wants to see how many customers have 0 tracked contacts, and then to fire a CTA when this occurs so it can be remediated.

We are going through the process of re-evaluating our NPS Program. I would love to hear how others here do NPS.  Some of the areas I'm specifically looking for input on are: How do you create buy-in across your company to empower others to followup and create change for responses? How many questions are on your NPS survey? What processes do you have in place to ensure timely followup and follow-through on responses? How do you increase your response rate?

Hi Anyone have any idea how chart colors can be changed when charts are created in Reports 2.0 using MDA data? More like is this even possible? Mainly because below you can see the two Green colors are almost so similar its confusing to which metrics this is referring to.

Hi, I am new to Gainsight and looking to get some information on how Customer Marketing teams can leverage the tool to keep the customers engaged and enhance the customer experience. We are using Marketo to run our Marketing initiatives and have it integrated with Gainsight. It would be helpful for us to know the best practices of using the integration and the value it provides. Any inputs on how you're using these tools together would be very helpful. We thought of running some campaigns like Client Onboarding, Cross-sell, Up-sell, product usage related, etc. from Marketo. Thanks, Shashank Sharma

I am curious if anyone can share models that they have used for understanding the loads of their CSMs and hiring models as it relates to sales pipeline. I am working on some of this internally and would love to learn from what others have already done. 

My company is new to Gainsight and we are about to start the implementation. Any tips, thoughts, ideas you have for a company brand new to Gainsight, things you wish you had known before you started?

I am wondering if any CS Ops teams have implemented a change request document for changes to be made in Gainsight...as an example, removing fields from the attribute section of the C360.  My thought is that this will be helpful in getting approval from the CS Ops team to make the change, providing the reason behind the change, and then most importantly, having a 'paper trail' of what has been done and why.  I would prefer not to recreate the wheel if someone has already done this.  And, I'm interested in hearing how other teams handle changes in Gainsight. Thank you! ~Anne

Checking to see if any of our Customer Success professionals here have an elevator speech about Customer Success that you deliver to your internal IT team?   We have developed one, but our internal team - still seem a bit confused and reluctant about what we do.   Churn hasn't been an issue, but they wonder if we are stepping on their territory.  Has anyone experienced this and do you have a winning elevator speech that we can explain to IT - so they can explain to the people they face on our Customers team?

A couple of our scorecard measure have an N/A (not applicable) option  I've found that when people select this it skews the score down which makes sense since the grading scheme is set at the bottom with 0-1.  How do I allow for there to be an option for does not apply that will not effect the overall score?  Even if I make it 50/right in the middle that will also be an inaccurate representation of the overall score. Thank you, Lauren

We have a rule that creates a CTA when there is a change to a sponsor (Title, Location or Company). The details of the change, ChangedAttribute  NewValue and OldValue are captured in the tracking history. However, I need to include this information on the CTA so the rep know what changed. How can this be done?

Hi Community! Check out this new blog post by our Senior Director of Product Marketing, Puja Ramani, that shares her 7 tips to Run an Effective Customer Advisory Board. http://www.gainsight.com/2016/01/05/7-tips-to-run-an-effective-customer-advisory-board/

We're looking for ideas on how to pass product suggestions (or red flag issues) to appropriate parties via GS.  Currently, most of this is done via email as all our teams aren't in GS or SF for that matter.  I was thinking of creating a task in GS, and then, have a rule that runs when it sees that task, and either automatically sends an email to the correct group.  Anyone done anything similar or taken another approach?

Hi All Does anyone know how we can download this list? Naquiyah

We have several different reports that our CSMs need to run frequently, and we're looking for a way to create links to those reports within GS.  Ideally, it would be great to be able to add a widget called Important Links, and then, add several links into that section for easy access.  Has anyone done anything similar or have other suggestions?

Does Gainsight have a way to integrate the analytics from platforms such as Jive and Lithium so that the Community activity of a customer can also contribute to their health score and alert to any potential issues?