Appcues is online software for creating in-product experiences such as user onboarding, feature announcements, etc. without writing any code. (The vendor believes it's the non-technical people who oftentimes have the best information about a software user's needs and desires.) The goal of using Appcues is to improve product engagement within the user's own customer base.
$299
per month/billed monthly
Gainsight CS
Score 8.9 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…
It is well suited for SaaS products or services that have a highly complex user interface. Through Appcues, you can ensure that people discover all the existing and new features and make them understand the value of your product as soon as possible to address the evergreen issue of churn. But if your user interface is really messed up, you should change the product itself instead of using a tool like Appcues to explain everything on the screen.
Gainsight CS is well suited for SaaS and Managed Services companies looking to have a centralized log of all their customer interactions and analysis of those customers' health so that CS and AM teams can be the best champions for their customers and interactions are not happening in silos. The new AI functionality being rolled out will have a massive impact on CSM's ability to manage time and add value.
Gainsight's Data Designer is a powerful tool that allows you to create new tables/data sets from different sources (Create a new table by merging Snowflake, SFDC and Gainsight data that you can use for reporting or be the engine of calls to actions)
The health score is great! with good data and the right workflows in place, you can easily create automated health scores by your desired segmentation
Journey Orchestrator is the best 1:M outreach tool I have seen from any CSP. Very flexible and comprehensive. Can also support surveys! JO can be used for all segments, not just your digital segments!
Gmail/Outlook integration - Our CSMs love that you can send an email and attach it to the gainsight account. You can also create a meeting note in Gainsight and email it to your customers!
Calls to Action/Playbooks are very customizable, interoperable with SFDC and a great way for CSMs to keep on top of their work and also a great tool for reporting outcomes and CSMs work throughout the year
We were extremely surprised that there are not any Appcues used in Appcues. The app is pretty easy to use, once you figure out how to use it. There were not any type of tutorials when we logged in that quickly walked through how to setup a flow.
Appcues has lots of support articles, however they are almost so numerous that it was hard to find simple onboarding documentation that we found useful.
The different tooltips and product actions are great, but being able to customize the different cues a little bit more by changing sizes and aspect ratios could be an improvement.
Would love to see a Gainsight OPs/Admin checklist that guides CS Ops team through specific pieces of information needed to execute specific playbooks (best practices)
When creating reports, sometimes it's difficult to find the correct variable that you are looking for as it's nested under various categories
Would love ability to "heatmap" specific individual customer engagement based on CSM inputted customer contacts at meetings
Would love to see more analysis on engagements - how often, how frequent - built into the product
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 give it this score based on the implementation at my current employer. I don't know if it could be higher based on if the implementation went better, or if there is something on the vendor side that could help. If this were asked at my previous employer, I would have given it a score of 9 or 10.
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
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.
It has a much, much better user interface, better customer care, and of course better pricing. This along with the fact that they were very accommodating for our use case ensured we went ahead with Appcues.
We went through an evaluation of ChurnZero, which did not have the ability to pull in usage from complex data sets or to visualize it natively. ChurnZero did not offer the ability to run surveys or NPS which would have required additional tooling and investment
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.
We increase account coverage by more than 20% through the tools within Gainsight CS to generate actions for our CSMs to prioritize accounts.
Now that we are using Success Plans, we are seeing 65-75% of customer outcomes realized within a 12-month period. This was something we weren't able to track before.
