Best Practices on CSM Portfolio Penetration aka Engagement

@andorfuhrer there are a number of routes you could take with this:

• Engage all customers: build a report to show days since last activity for the CSM’s dashboard to break it down by account. Those with higher days should be contacted first. 
  • Create resources with email templates that can be sent using the Gainsight Assist Chrome plugin 
  • Use Journey Orchestrator to send emails to batches of customers based on segments from the CSM’s perspective using dynamic tags
  • Good opportunity for a CS-marketing alignment chat! 
• Responses:
  • We’ve built an activity type for Texts because our customers are very text heavy
  • We have included a picklist for Text Outcome, with the default being “Not Responded”. Similar on the Call type activity. 
  • We then report on customers whose last Timeline activity was a Text with outcome not responded
  • We have built a Rule to create a CTA with a playbook involving both the CSM and their manager when there hasn’t been a response in over 2 months 
  • This also builds into the health score with a Stakeholder Engagement measure

Hope this helps as a starting point!

@andorfuhrer did @gunjanm comment help you. Please let us know your comments here. 

I agree with @gunjanm. I would recommend using Timeline Activities to track each touch a CSM has with a customer, the type of touch, and the results of it. If you track the activities, you will be able to see when the customer was last touched, how often they are touched, and what happened as a result of the touch (did the customer respond, what did they respond with, etc). 

With this type of model, you can of course report on all the touches but you can also use the rules engine to trigger a CTA if a client hasn’t been touched in X number of days. I’ve found this incredibly helpful for CSMs to keep on top of their work. You can create a rule, for example, that looks for the last Quarterly Business Review, adds 90 days, and triggers the next one via assigning a QBR playbook to the CSM. Or if its been 30 days since the last email check-in, you can assign the CSM a CTA to follow up with the client. 

I also typically like to include a Metric on the C360 that shows the count of days since the last touch. This gives the CSM a quick place to see when they last reached out to them. For this, you can use a formula to count the days between the date on the last timeline activity (type = customer touch) and today. 

Hope this helps!

Jean

This is all so great! thank you  @jean.nairon  , @gunjanm !! :)

Timeline does make sense to capture an actual engagement with the customer (i.e, we had a meeting / phone call, email exchange with the customer)

Does anyone track the # of times a CSM tries to engage with a customer?  I am thinking of using CTA’s as the vehicle to track how many times we've tried to engage with the customer. The CSM can email the customer via the CTA or playbook.  If the customer engages, a timeline entry will be created to capture that engagement. 

This way, we can see the numerator (how many actual engagements with customers) and denominator (how may outreach attempts we had)


Curious to see if others do it a different way or having visibility  to number of tries is irrelevant?

thanks!

I haven’t used the denominator in the past as you suggested but it makes complete sense to me. The only caveat is you will need to ensure you can filter out CTAs that weren’t truly completed. 

In my past, I have found sometimes that CSMs can mark something as closed just to get it off their Cockpit. So it’s really important that you only track the CTAs which actually had an action taken.

I love your approach on just tracking the ones where CSMs sent an email assist. That’s a perfect solution. It won’t capture emails sent from their inbox but it will track email assists at the very least. 

The accuracy of the denominator might not be 100% like the accuracy on counting the number of timeline activities. I would recommend doing some analysis on the results to see what is behind the calculation to ensure its working effectively and that your CSMs are updating CTAs as expected. 

We’re using Outcome fields for Text and Call timeline activity types to use that denominator. Also built a Rule to create a CTA when there has been no response/connect on one of those activities in over 4 days. It’s not crazy accurate but does a good job in developing a starting point. 

@jean.nairon you stated here:

I also typically like to include a Metric on the C360 that shows the count of days since the last touch. This gives the CSM a quick place to see when they last reached out to them. For this, you can use a formula to count the days between the date on the last timeline activity (type = customer touch) and today. 

What are the steps you go through to create this metric? (Add a field on company object? Use rules engine? Report builder?) Trying to understand how I can implement something similar.

@sarahmiracle - that’s correct. You can create a field on the company object and then use a rule to update it. I suspect you might be able to use a real time rule now but I haven’t done that yet. I usually just had the rule run every two hours in the past.