Alida CXM (formerly Vision Critical) is designed to enable users to listen to direct & indirect sources of customer feedback, perform automated actions on collected feedback and have complete visibility into key customer experience metrics so users can create exemplary customer experiences day after day. Alida CXM offers a holistic customer experience platform that brings in both operational and experiential data, integrates this data with the tools to collect, understand and action customer…
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Gainsight CS
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Gainsight Customer Success (CS) is presented as a growth engine for modern post-sale teams. Built for CROs, CS leaders, and operations pros, it provides visibility into customer health, expansion potential, and revenue risk. With automation, AI, and health scoring, Gainsight helps scale outcomes without scaling headcount. With its playbooks and success plans to CSQL tracking and journey orchestration, Gainsight CS helps teams to take the right action at the right time, every time. Access to…
From my experience, I believe that Vision Critical offers the best software to manage an insights community. They are great to work with, and my opinion has only improved over time. However, that doesn't mean it is the best survey software overall. If someone simply needs to program and distribute surveys, this may or may not be the right solution. There are some other really great survey tools on the market that are competitively priced and offer very intuitive interfaces (like Qualtrics). If you are going to recruit people to answer surveys or provide feedback on an ongoing basis (re-contacting and engaging with the same people repeatedly), though, Vision Critical would be my #1 recommendation.
There are a couple of tedious areas that can give CSMs double work, like when they fill out details in a text form field, but if they don't click save for each form field, they have to retype everything. Overall, I think this is one of the better CRMs to use for companies that are enterprise. It's fast, intuitive, and easy to use.
Ability to capture all customer information in one spot
Gantt charts for overall success plans to map out TAM deliverables
Automatically integrate feeds from sources to build reports as needed
Ability to capture customer follow-up tasks so I'm not trying to capture the list of actions too repetitively (e.g. using the "Tasks" section of an entry)
Ability to use the plugin to automatically add emails to timeline; ability to use calendar integration to automatically add meeting minutes that will sync up to Gong notes
The functionality when creating a new questionnaire is rather clunky, particularly when there are a few conditional factors in the logical flow; being able to see those factors and how they apply with some sort of other logical layout would really help when creating a longer survey.
There are quite a few steps that aren't intuitive when launching a survey, for instance all the various dates (launch date, reserve date, survey date, etc etc etc). If there were a description field if you hovered above labeled areas of sections that explained what this field was for that would really help
It doesn't help either that the entire site is grey; it's a cold environment to be in for a long time, and the simple design makes it seem more clunky than it probably really is.
Quite time consuming from a system admin perspective. It can do almost anything but does nothing without a system admin building it. Example, I wanted to identify accounts in Gainsight that didn't have any contacts (people) records. It's possible, but requires creating a custom field and a rule in the Rules Engine, and then a report.
Customer Goals and Success Plans feel like they should be tightly connected but aren't. My impression is that these were two separate features developed at different times that have never been properly reconciled.
Need better customer facing features. Hoping that the new Spaces functionality is a good answer to this.
Connection between CTAs and Tasks can get confusing. Some follow up items are so simple that I want to just create a CTA without any tasks, but the flaw with that approach is that it won't show up if I have any views that are based on Tasks. So I have to toggle between views of CTAs and Tasks and understand them as sometimes the same thing and sometimes different things.
It's nice to be able to send a Timeline entry via email, which we WANT to use for sending meeting recaps, but there isn't a way to have an email template in this area. Our CSMs send many, many meeting recaps via email and we haven't been able to identify a good approach that gives us both a fast process for CSMs and a professional customer facing email.
Vision Critical often requires you to dump the data to a statistical program. I hate that step. You waste time, and improve the chance of data being lost, or changed.
Gainsight offers a level of support that I've not experience before. They will work with you to come up with a solution to a problem - or help match you with another client that has a similar setup as you to get their feedback. Also the functionality that we have built within the software works for us. It's 'easy' to use (once you get the hang of it) and our users rather enjoy working in the software.
I think there is a ton of room to improve, in things as simple as aesthetics and other areas of logical flow when it comes to creating and then launching a survey, as well as providing descriptors for what each field is referencing. For instance, there are like 5 date fields to be filled out, but no button near them that says "this date will determine _________" and I am not about to go back into the training module, which was confusing enough to FIND, let alone work through to find just ONE answer.
Reiterating that yes, it is one of the major players, and has for many years been a pioneer in driving customer success tooling, but is lagging behind with what you pay vs. the agility you want and need these days. Rather, OK to adopt internally, but CS members feel it is too administrative.
Rarely any issues with availability or outages. When they do occur, there is excellent communication and consistent updates. Bugs are usually addressed in a timely manner, and communication around those issues is also extremely good
There are some times when it can take almost a minute to load some of our reports or the rules engine. Within a rule it can also take time to load the actions as they each load one at a time when scrolling. The ability to scroll without waiting would be ideal
Absolutely fantastic support team. Willing to help you online through vast collection of how-to guides and resources, online via chatbox, or over the phone. Even though we were in different time zones, they were always available. Very helpful and knowledgeable
The CSMs are very hands-on and helpful, both Elaine and Lane have provided a lot of guidance and value over the years. Support is responsive and will jump on things as needed. The thought leadership and community is probably the most valuable part of our support from Gainsight.
The online videos are very good for basic tasks in the platform, but it isn't very descriptive or helpful trying to make your own specific variables fit the simple example that is typically used. Typically, I'll watch a video, try on my own and still have to get help from support or Customer Success team
I was not part of the implantation (I took over later). However, based on what was passed to me, the tool was not well implemented at our org. I think this had to do with complexity, wrong person assigned in our org, and org buy-in. I think it would have been very successful if we had a better assignment process internally.
Gainsight has always been the leader in the industry, in my opinion. While a lot more expensive that their competitors, the tool seems to have a better UI and functionality that support the CS organization. My prior employer had a very good implementation of Gainsight and it's a tool I used every day. Some from the Sales org also wanted access based on the great data I was able to monitor from the tool. When talking to customers, the graphs and trends helped me tell a story of activity that was very helpful.
It can lean a little heavily toward Customer Success, but the ability to customize many areas based on specific user or account characteristics allows you to make it work across many different roles. This also makes collaboration within the tool across teams possible. It a flexible tool if you have a skilled admin to help guide your process building.
Our use of Vision Critical's software has allowed us to dramatically increase the amount of research that we do, at a much lower cost. Since there is no incremental cost for each survey we field, we can ask many questions we wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
Our use of an insights community has also sped up the research process, allowing us to write, program, field and report on a survey within only a few days.
Because of the two advantages listed above, we have been able to listen closer to our customers' opinions.
No metrics yet, but we have improved our at-risk customers by identifying risks earlier via our automated health score and with our Gainsight approved mitigation workflow, CSMs and leaders have better discipline with mitigation efforts and sharing at-risk customers across the org so other teams can step in and assist
