Share and Learn Best Practices

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?

Unfortunately there are times where an account churns from being a customer.   And , unfortunately, there are a couple times when an incorrect account is loaded into GS. Its simple to find the account in a standard view and delete the account.   I was wondering if there was any best practice about perhaps "marking" the account as churned in GS versus deleting the account. The account is updated and altered in our CRM world as an inactive customer along with the appropriate notes.   But does anyone currently keep these accounts in GS and mark them as "lost"/"churned ?   Havent yet explored the idea of creating a rule to *delete* churned accounts automatically.   I assume if the accounts stayed in GS, the views , dashboards, perhaps rules would have to be adjusted. thoughts ?   feedback is much appreciated.

Was doing a Scorecard report and showing the metric values.   I decided to include a column in the report with the "Deleted" data field from the Customer object.   I am seeing the values of "false" and "-" and was wondering if "-" equals "true". Also, was assuming the data would by default only show if the scores were from valid / active customers or should we , by default, be sure to include "customer = true" as a default filter to most reports ?

Hello customers, you may have already read about Gainsight Vault, released this month, which provides the ability for you to import best practices into your instance. Currently you can import various playbooks and surveys created by the Gainsight team.  We are planning to extend this functionality to import rules and reports as well. We would love to share and get feedback on the flow and user interface. Please let me know if you are available for a 30 minute or 1 hour group call. Thanks, Gaurav

Do most companies allow all their Gainsight users to see Survey Response and NPS Response text, or only some users? 

In the survey analytics, there is a "view details and followup" option for each question. From this view, it looks as if you can then create a task (or CTA?). However this does not currently work in any org I have access to. I've not logged a support ticket, because I thought this may be old functionality. Can anyone confirm this and update me/Lila? https://support.gainsight.com/Product_Documentation/Surveys_and_NPS/User_Guides/Survey_Analytics (see bottom half for workflow and functionality I'm referring to)

Hoping to get some feedback on how others are using GS.  Currently, our teams are feeling more like our playbooks are more checklists.  It feels like our Success teams are very process heavy (partially because they are new.)  Looking for ideas or wins you've had in getting your teams to use GS to think more strategically versus transactionally.

When we worked with Gainsight to set our Org up they set us up with 15 minute increments between each rule since we have about 60k accounts to query.  We are now running out of 15 minute increments in the day.  Does anyone use less than 15 minute increments?  

Is there a way to make a question dependent on certain criteria in Salesforce? For example, with our NPS question if they select a 9 or 10 we want to ask them if they would like to be a reference for us in the future BUT we only want to ask them this if they have not already agreed to be a reference which is a box that is checked on their contact record type in SF. Is this possible?

Below in the chart when I select Green I expect to see accounts that are categorized as green. Instead the UI removes the option I select. Hmmm this seems a little (sorry oddly) off!  This would be a great and I assume easy enhancement where a user selects what they want to see not select what they dont want to see!  Naquiyah

My company is just in implementation with Gainsight, and I am just getting acquainted with the tool and am wondering how best to use the 'comments' section on C360.  If anyone could comment on how their CSMs or other users are utilizing this field, I would appreciate it.  Thanks! ~Anne

We use "Support" as a scoring field and are still thinking through how to score our account.  Things we think about are: "is it good or bad if someone has no cases", "are a lot of cases always a bad thing", "without perceiving customer tone, how do you automate this scoring"....Has anyone else looked into this before?  If so any good recommendations for this? 

Happy Friday everyone! Our Customer Success team is excited to announce new weekly ‘Gainsight on Gainsight’ webinars starting July 29th. These webinars will be hosted by members of our Customer Success team and will showcase how we use our own product, and other topics currently being addressed by our customers and our own team. Where: Please read through the descriptions and register for the sessions that interest you! Why: The purpose of these sessions is to share best practices on Customer Success and Gainsight When: Every Wednesday between 9-9.45am PDT What: Upcoming topics include operations, risk management and scorecards and we’ll leave some time to answer any questions If you can’t attend, but are interested in the topic, register anyway, and we’ll email you the recording afterwards.

Hey Guys! I'm looking for people in the twin cities (Minneapolis/ St. Paul) that would like to meet up and discuss your customer success programs.  I'm feeling all alone out here, and I'm sure there are others in the area who feel the same! Join the Meet Up I started and let's chat!  http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-SaaS-y-Success-Advocates/

On June 25th at 10am PDT, Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight, will host a webinar on the 3 key areas of focus that can ensure companies achieve their customer success goals and realize the economies of scale that are so important to growing businesses. He will show you how a customer success strategy focused on segmentation, automation, and documentation is key to scaling Customer Success. A customer success program that lacks strategic thinking in any of these areas is sure to fall short and unlikely to achieve scale or meaningful results. In this 60 minute webinar on the keys to scale we will discuss: How can you implement automation without harming customer relationships? What is the right strategy to segment your customer base? Which process are important to document and which aren’t?Save your seat for the webinar!

I'm filming short customer testimonial videos next Tuesday and Wednesday at Pulse. Videos will be filmed in the video booth in the customer VIP lounge. I'd love the opportunity to interview folks for 30 minutes -- let me know if you're interested and I can get you set up.