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Hi Gainsight community - first post for me.I would like to ask a generic question on Customer Success (are more genetically on Customer Experience).Any software company receives questions of different types in its support channel - in our case at OutSystems e receive lots of “How To” questions that are not product issues. These are questions relate with best practices of how to use the product or simply “request for help” to understand why the customer implementation is not working as expected (troubleshooting). My question is - how do you deal with these Q&A coming via the support channel in your companies?I see a few options:have the support team answering these HowTo questions (it’s included in Support) Have the CS team answering these questions in a pooled capacity(handover from CS to Support) Have a professional services and digital offer to cover for this Q&A - only paying customers will get answers to HowTo questionsWhat do your teams do to deal with this constant stream

'Ever wondered how to supercharge your Customer Success team with automation through Gainsight? Look no further! ? Join us for an eye-opening journey as Moveworks reveals how they saved over 4,000 hours in just 6 months by seamlessly integrating AI, automation, and Gainsight. ? Key Achievements:3x improvement in Joint Success Plan throughput. Saving over 4,000 total CSM hours, making every minute count. Automatically summarized 4,800+ calls for actionable insights. Sent out a whopping 2,000+ emails with precision and ease. Generated 1,200+ decks at the touch of a button. Witnessed a stellar 32% increase in ARR managed by CSMs since kicking off these efficiency initiatives. This incredible journey is your gateway to redefining the future of customer success! ? ?️ Save the Date: September 28, 8 AM PST/11 AM EST. ? Register Here  Don''t miss out on this opportunity to unleash the power of Automation with Gainsight. —see you there! '

 Executive Business Reviews (Part 1) - Make Them Taste Good  I was fortunate enough to recently attend one of our amazing corporate hospitality events that Gainsight hosted for Customer Success Leaders in London, where they were taught how to make delicious hand-made pasta from scratch.As the chef was guiding us on what to do, it got me thinking. Customer Success is a lot like cooking. You need to have all the right ‘ingredients’, such as a robust Success Plan, strong Stakeholder Alignment and visibility into Customer Health. However, it is the Customer Success Manager (i.e. the chef) that makes the magic happen (or, using my analogy, the food taste good). Keeping with the above theme, If you've ever read the “The Customer Success Professional's Handbook” (Chapter 8 - Section 6), then you will recognise the analogy of treating a Quarterly / Executive Business Review, like a meal. Once again, it needs all the right ingredients and you are responsible for preparing them correctly: -There

Inspired by Pulse, I’m revisiting a document I created exactly a year ago but completely overthought so I avoided posting it 😅As a member of Gainsight's Customer Operations team, I've been asked numerous times about how we manage our team's operations, including administering our Gainsight and Zendesk instances, enabling our CSM and Support teammates on internal processes, and implementing strategic programs for our customers. While I’ve had many one-off conversations, I’ve struggled to pull together all of the details to share more holistically. This is me holding myself accountable (hopefully).  I'm planning to write a series of posts that will hopefully provide insights into the key processes that we’ve built at Gainsight that I hope are helpful!Here’s an overview of what I’m planning - what else would you like to see/learn?Sprint Planning: Discover how we allocate our team's time between strategic initiatives and run-the-business operations. I'll share how we use a planning board

Friday CS Analytics day comes early!Benchmarkit executed a large CS Benchmarking study in partnership with Gainsight.  Details below.I was looking into GDR/NDR performance for companies with and without CSMs.  Excited to share there is much better performance (statistically significant) with CSM team.  Discover other insights from The CS Index 2023 for North America. We surveyed over 400 companies about the state of their CS organizations, the metrics they use to measure impact, and the ways they plan to invest in CS and CS Ops in the future. This year we took a heavy look into how Digital CS is being incorporated into strategy and organizations.

I wanted to share some tips on how I go about QAing or testing a Journey Orchestrator program, as it has taken me some time to standardize my processes and identify the “best” way for my org to test our new programs before launching.Design your program as you believe it needs to be designed. Create a Clone of the program and title it TEST - [name of program]. This is the program you will use for testing. *Shorten any conditional wait times, wait timers, and/or reminder times to allow for quicker testing Use CSV import to upload yourself as a participant Set your Uniqueness Criteria so that “Participant with same unique criteria can enter after...” SELECT ALL participant states. This will allow you to test multiple pathways as the same participant. Create a QA checklist so you can test scenarios as you go. Some common checklist items for me include “Sender is sent from Sender Email” … “Email template format looks good” … “Mappings worked as expected” … “Survey link worked” … “Survey pre

Just wrapped up a webinar discussion on CS Compensation trends with Ray Rike from RevOps Squared.Summarized the trends from our 2023 CS Comp Survey Discussed how we’ve seen CS comp plans evolve over the last several years Compared the two ends of the spectrum for comp Variable based on Renewal/expansion performance  Variable based on Outcome (typically an Activity, Indicator, or Result) We had a ton of questions during the session that I wanted to bring to the community.  Dont see you question here? or don’t see an answer?  Create a community post and tag with #compensation! First, a set of questions that are answered in the report - so head here to get it! (https://info.gainsight.com/the-evolution-of-customer-success-report-ebook.html)What is the compensation breakdown for a Director of Customer Success? Are you seeing a trend of variable pay focused on Net Dollar Retention, rather than something like quota commission + churn target MBO?    Where do Directors and Sr Directors fall in

An informal survey of CCOs about CSM compensation gives us some incredible insight into the broad variety of ways that comp has been structured. See attached PDF, linked below.For example:About half of CS teams have some amount of team-performance variable comp Median variable comp is 20%:⬇️ Attached PDF with much more info ⬇️

I’m excited to share the first in a series of posts around how we do CS Ops at Gainsight! We’ll be starting with our OKR+Project+Sprint Planning processes as these are the backbone of how our team operates across our entire Ops & Scale organization. My hope is that this is helpful for any teams looking to begin a similar process or are looking for inspiration. If you missed the initial post, check out other topics we’ll be discussing an feel free to add additional ideas!This is a process we’ve iterated on over the past 2.5 years and will continue to tweak as we go. I’d love to hear other ways your teams are planning your work.If you prefer videos over reading, I put together a 12-minute recording (sorry, I got carried away 😁). At a very high-level, this is how our team thinks about the planning process and various inputs across the organization. This is the guiding principle for how we’ve structured the setup. We leverage Monday.com for our planning and project tracking. It’s stru

Hi everyone,I haven’t been able to find an answer (or maybe debate?!) to this question so hoping to get some ideas. It has become apparent that some of my CSMs are logging their mid-term upsells as the pro-rated amount in the Renewal Center, and some are logging what the full ARR would be if not upsold mid-term. I can think of arguments for both sides here:FOR pro-rated: if you log it as pro-rated that's the money actually coming in, and you'll see the NRR benefit fully at renewalAGAINST pro-rated: If you log it as pro-rated you're being penalised due to the point the customer is at in their term which isn't representative of the size of the upsellI wonder if anyone has experience either way, or can recommend the best way to do it? Thanks!Sophie

Hi everyone! Today, I'm excited to give you a sneak peek into the Moveworks Customer Spolight with Gainsight and how they integrated their operations  with us to drive efficiency and automation. 🤖 Moveworks is an AI technology leader, uniting enterprise systems with a chat-based platform for instant information access, enhancing the workday.Their tech leadership are on the Cloud 100, Forbes AI 50, and AI breakthrough awards.  The reason behind choosing Gainsight: robust data model, total flexibility in product configuration, seamless integrations (including native ones like Snowflake), and incredible account support. Journey in automation and efficiency. In just 8 months, we've saved over 4,000 CSM hours through four impactful initiatives: 1️⃣ Call Note Summarization: Automated call note summaries with generative AI for easier reference. 2️⃣ Automated Emails: Streamlined email workflows with Gainsight's tools, saving time and reducing errors. 3️⃣ Deck Generation: Automated decks led t

Recently, Gainsight brought together a set of CS leaders from the edtech industry.  We ran a roundtable focused on wins and challenges with edtech customer success. I’ve summarized the discussion below and added a few resources including an invitation to a new cohort program for Gainsight customers. The first cohort is focused on Risk Management. Sign up here to learn more and participate!Do these topics resonate with you? What’s one win and one challenge you have?  Share here to learn from the rest of the Gainsight Community! Tyler @Paulina @denver_kirkpatrick @danny_hallgren @allisonh   EDTECH WINS + RESULTS Automated Lead Generation & Onboarding ChallengesDiscussed a successful strategy implemented by one company to operationalize the capture of leads and to quantify cross-sell and upsell opportunities generated by the CS team. They used Gainsight to create leads automatically into Salesforce when certain conditions are met, such as usage metrics and health scores.  Already gene

HeyI would love to join this event but I’m Europe based and can’t make the evening. Can you either publish the recording or do another session for those in Europe timezone? Thanks

Thanks to the more than 40 folks who attended our first ever CSM round table on Adding Value at every touchpoint where we did a quick review of this Pulse Session: Not Just a Check-in! Key Elements to a Strategic Cadence Call, went into some breakout sessions to meet others and address discussion questions, and then came back together to share key takeaways.  If you attended (and even if you did not) please share feedback on any topics you would like us incorporate into upcoming CSM Round Table sessions and post any burning questions here and we will answer.  Recording below and breakout takeaways with discussion questions attached  

Latest Update: Sept 13, 2022 //Gainsight Administrator is a creative, powerful role. It drives career development, it lives in the cutting-edge world of Customer Success Operations, and it’s both a new challenge to a systems administrator veteran and an entry-point for someone looking for a first ‘technical’ role.I know, because I’ve lived it and I’ve seen it. I became a Gainsight Admin in 2015, and earned my Level 3 Certification when it first became available. After transitioning from ‘Gainsight customer’ to ‘Gainsight employee,’ I ran Gainsight’s CS Ops team for 2 years, which included experienced Admins who have since grown into leadership, and first-time Admins who had never configured a piece of software before. In my newest role, I see the experiences of Admins with all levels of experience, plus their managers, on a daily basis. I hear about what they need and what has worked well for them.And I hear how out-of-reach the role can feel for newcomers. It’s intimidating, or confus

What’s a good Account:CSM Ratio or ARR Managed:CSM Ratio?The question comes up weekly, if not daily across our customer base and across the market.Plus, these benchmarks are changing as companies move more fully into Scaled CS approaches including Digital CS programs, 1:Many Events, and Cohorts.Here’s the latest from Gainsight.     Finally, here’s an estimate of ARR per CSM by ACV  

💰 How do you develop confidence in your ability to impact GRR/NRR?Post-sale teams are tasked with driving GRR and NRR - the key lagging metrics of a SaaS business. If the bucket is too leaky, there’s no way to get off the ground (GRR). And if you can’t consistently expand with customers, you won’t stay in orbit for very long (public company NRR median is ~115%, top quartile is 120%+).🚦 What are your leading indicators?What actually impacts these lagging metrics is a question that must be continuously assessed and answered. Our leading indicators drive our Health Score.  Specifically for measuring outcomes, we use the “DEAR” Framework.  Each measure and threshold is based on correlating performance 6 months before the renewal with the renewal outcome:At Gainsight, we’ve shifted to re-assessing health scoring to 2x per year vs. annual or more as market conditions change quickly.📊 What did we learn this quarter about our leading indicators?We reconfirmed the “recipe” continues to be tw

In our monthly meetup group about the CS Ops of Digital Customer Success, we spoke in July 2023 about how self-serve resource centralization and customer education can enhance your digital customer success journey. Here’s what we learned!  📝 Note-taking slides from the breakout roomsLearn about these meetups in the future by signing up for the monthly CS Ops Newsletter.

Hi everyone - after a small hiatus, I’m back with another post to share how we run CS Ops internally at Gainsight. If you missed the first post, you can check it out here. I discussed how we run our quarterly planning and sprint processes. Today, I’ll be discussing one of my favorite tools to foster learning within our team - Retrospectives!In the ever-evolving landscape of customer success, staying ahead means continuously adapting and improving strategies and operations. Incorporating regular retrospectives into your CS Ops team can help achieve this goal. These retrospectives foster teamwork by providing a space where team members can share without judgment and find common ground in their work. Why Retrospectives are Valuable Retrospectives foster a culture of continuous improvement and teamwork. Through regular check-ins, teams can analyze what worked well, what didn't, and formulate action plans for the future. This not only promotes efficiency but also nurtures a more collaborati

Hi Community!As we continue to develop capabilities around Timeline, we wanted to get your feedback on how you would like to use it in the future.Originally we designed Timeline in response to many customers who wanted a superior note taking tool. They were using systems like OneNote, Evernote and others and it just didn't meet the grade. So we built Timeline.One of our original goals was to provide a high quality repository of customer notes. Different than SFDC activity history, which logs everything and can get pretty noisy, Timeline would be cleaner and easier to find specific human interactions.But things evolve and we want to get your input. We've had some customers ask about having the ability to sync every JO or Advanced Outreach email, CTAs, Milestones, NPS survey responses and even health scores to Timeline. [i]What's your point of view? Should we keep Timeline as a view of human interactions only or would you want to drop automated, system generated actions in Timeline as we