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As a CS Ops Manager at TrendMiner for the past 5 years, I’m always looking for ways to help our Customer Success team scale more effectively through better processes, systems, and data. Recently, we tackled a common challenge in CS: single-threading.

Got questions or thoughts on this? Feel free to drop a comment or send me a message. Happy to chat more about it!

The challenge

It happens a lot more than you’d like as a CSM: your main contact changes roles or leaves the company and the customer goes dark. The solution? Multi-threading: making sure you have regular touchpoints with multiple stakeholders, so you are not dependent on a single individual.

But how do you ensure this is consistently done for every customer? What tools can you provide to your CSMs to get more insight into the breadth of their outreach?

Introducing the Value Network, a practical tool implemented in Gainsight CS that accomplishes exactly that…

What is a Value Network?

A Value Network is an overview of all customer contacts who are deeply involved in reaching their outcomes; these can be value generators (key users working on relevant value generating use cases) or value drivers (sponsors, project managers, team managers responsible for aligning everyone towards the desired outcomes). The idea is that CSMs stay in close contact with all these players to get a 360-degree overview of the value obtained (and bottlenecks encountered in the course) and minimize the risk of single-threading.

Defining the process

Before you start implementing, define what you want to get out of this:

  • An easy way for CSMs to define the members of the Value Network at a specific customer
  • An overview of the defined Value Network for each customer, including when each member was last met with
  • A way for CSMs to track the breadth of their outreach: how are they doing on an individual customer and what customers within their portfolio need more attention?

To achieve the last point, you will need clear guidelines: what is the minimal number of contacts that constitute a Value Network and how often do you expect a CSM to engage with each member?

Implementing the Value Network approach in Gainsight CS

These are the steps to implement this approach in Gainsight CS:

  1. Enrich the Person Objects
    In Data Management, add the following fields to the (Company/Relationship) Person Objects:
     
    • Value Network (On Company/Relationship Person)
      Data Type: Boolean
       
    • Last Meeting (On Person)
      Data Type: String, Lookup to Activity Timeline based on GSId
       
    • P360 Link (On Person)
      Data Type: Url, Formula: Concat ( NONE , https://GAINSIGHT_URL/v1/ui/person360?pid= , GSID ) – replace GAINSIGHT_URL by your Gainsight URL
       
  2. Load Last Meeting to Person
    Create (and schedule) a Rule that loads the GSID of the last Meeting Timeline Activity that a Person attended to the Person Object, based on the Activity Timeline and Activity Attendee Objects.
     
  3. Add the Value Network field to your C360/R360 People/Contacts section
    Make it editable. CSMs can now easily indicate which people are part of the Value Network for a specific customer.
     
  4. Put a Value Network report on your C360/R360
    Create a report on Company/Relationship Person, filtered on the Value Network field, that lists all people in the Value Network. Add relevant properties, along with the date and subject (clickable) of the last meeting they attended. Through the P360 link it is possible to consult more information on each person (e.g., overview of last Timeline Activities, usage data, support tickets…).
     
  5. Include the Value Network in your Scorecard(s)
    Two measures may help you define a customer’s health based on the Value Network data:
     
    • Value Network: is a Value Network configured for this customer and is it large enough based on your guidelines?
       
    • Value Network Coverage: which percentage of members in the Value Network have been present in a meeting in the last x week/months (as defined in your guidelines)?
       
  6. Add a tracking widget to Gainsight Home
    Build a report on Unified Scorecard Fact – Company/Relationship that helps CSMs identify where to focus their work. Presenting the scores for the above measures across their portfolio in a stacked bar chart and configuring clear click-throughs shows for which customers the Value Network needs to be built/grown and where a broader outreach is needed to avoid the risk of single-threading.
     

     

As an alternative or in addition to Scorecard measures and a Gainsight Home widget, you may choose to launch (Risk) CTAs when a customer’s Value Network is not large enough or when not enough people in the Value Network have been met with.

Woah, ​@Jef Vanlaer — this is 🔥!

​@kstim, ​@kim_stone, this could be a fantastic idea for marking key contacts if there are contacts the CSMs are chatting with regularly that are not admins — and getting those specific conversations into the health score. 😀

Thank you for sharing, ​@Jef Vanlaer 🙌🏽

​@Jef Vanlaer This is amazing! 

We took a slightly different approach to just look at whether or not an account was single-threaded (regardless of role), and built a DD to look at the Activity Attendee object and count the number of External Attendees that were included in activities that were NOT emails in the last 6 months and then, merged that with Company to get a count per Company. 

Using the DD, we then created a KPI report for our CSM 1:1 Dashboard to show the percentage of companies that a CSM is assigned to that are multi-threaded.  We also included a report to call out the accounts that need to be addressed.  (This is also included in the KPI internal email that I mentioned here.)

(Side Note: Staircase does this out of the box across all communication mediums you have connected)

Need Action Report
 

 

KPI Report

 

Nice approach as well, ​@heather_hansen 

I believe the major difference between both approaches is the focus on recurring touchpoints in the Value Network. Of course, the Value Network would also evolve over time. Providing the overview of all contacts in meetings over the last x months could make a nice entry point for CSMs to pick candidates to add to the Network.

We’re looking at that as we speak. In my old org, we wanted to understand this based on the engagement model (no all customers are made equal). Have you deployed the same thresholds across all your customers or you have variants based on engagement model ​@Jef Vanlaer?

Hi ​@alizee 

Our thresholds depend on the customer’s segment indeed. This holds for both the expected size of the Value Network (lower threshold for less strategic customers) and the expected meeting cadence (e.g., monthly meetings vs quarterly meetings with all members of the network).

What’s nice about this approach is that you can use the same Scorecards / Scorecard metrics for different metrics and the reports on Gainsight Home can combine customers from different segments. We include the expectations/thresholds in the Scorecard comments (and include these in the drill-down of the reports), so CSMs can easily see what they need to do to get a customer back into the green.

Thank you ​@Jef Vanlaer ! That’s great fuel for our ongoing exercise at the new org. 

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