Basecamp vs. Gainsight Customer Communities

Basecamp is a wonderful tool for teams of varying degrees of technical knowledge, teams managing lots of different types of "agifall" and waterfall projects, and teams that are remotely distributed. It's probably less useful for more strictly agile-focused development teams, compared to other more flexible software applications like Jira and Asana.

Incentivized

A great scenario that we use the community for is product adoption. That's one of the things we use it for. So sending our new customers as part of their onboarding flow to the community to learn from others and see the resources that are available and know that there's a place for them to ask questions and get their questions answered. That's probably one of our primary use cases and scenarios that it works straight in. I can't really think of something that it wouldn't work good for. That's a tough one to think of on the spot.

Incentivized

• Task management - It is very easy to add, organize and discuss tasks within Basecamp's interface.
• The "Campfire" function is great for communicating when you just have a quick question for someone on the team.
• Notifications - Basecamp lets you decide how often and about what you'd like to be notified. The ability to respond to messages in Basecamp directly via email saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

• They provide a ton of materials on best practices in setting up and using their platform
• They provide materials on how to provide an exceptional customer experience, with podcasts, webinars, and blogs.
• They support their community and walk the talk, so to speak in engaging their customers with each other.

Incentivized

• High Learning Curve. It's true that it can be easy to use, but to use well and effectively takes some time to learn. It's recommended to have an agreed-upon system in your team of what tools to use and when.
• Notification Overload. If people aren't careful they could send a notification to everyone when only a couple people were meant to be prompted. And since emails are sent by default, you could have your mailbox overloaded with unnecessary updates. This is where it takes a bit of training in your team to have an agreed-upon system.
• Lack of organization with Archived Projects. I will often need to reference an archived project to make a new one, but there is only a list of archived projects in alphabetical order, with no way to organize by archive date, or even search.

Incentivized

• The REST API could use some work with missing capabilities.
• Speed; production instance can sometimes be noticeably slow, especially on the back-end.
• Polls; the polling data is not easily accessible. It can be found in the data lake but that is not necessarily simple to access for some.

Incentivized

When I bring new people onto a project, it's immediately obvious how to use Basecamp. I don't have to worry about teaching them the features or walking them through it, it's just incredibly user-friendly. For this reason, I'll continue to renew my subscription even as new people are brought onto production jobs or the client changes.

It is easy to use, even for clients who have no experience with the platform. It can only get a little cumbersome to ensure that a client can't see certain documents you might want to keep in the Docs & Files folders. And sometimes, getting a client to actually use an unfamiliar platform can be a challenge.

Incentivized

Gainsight CC is very versatile and easy to update in the areas they provide for customization. There are still some limitations that surprise us, but I really we are pleased with the ability to make changes on the fly. Overall we are able to accomplish what we desire to accomplish, and appreciate how user friendly it is

Incentivized

I've never experienced downtime while using Basecamp, or been unable to access it when I needed it. That's not to say they've never had downtime, but I've been lucky enough not to encounter any, and I work odd hours, including late nights when maintenance is often undertaken.

Incentivized

For the many reasons I've given, Basecamp is a very strong program. There are a few features I can imagine that might make it even better, but I don't have a basis for comparison to be able to say that there is definitely a better one out there. I've noticed that Basecamp has evolved a bit from the time I started using it until now, so that makes me think that the producer of this program values it and believes in continuous improvement. If you could use the features offered by Basecamp, I would think you could use it with confidence.

Incentivized

Decide the process before implementation - i.e. when it's due 8/9 does that mean 8am, noon, 5pm, 11:59pm? Check your to-do list frequently Set-up templates - just not with the dates (they can be funky)

Pretty good, but [Basecamp] has its drawbacks. Honestly I find the interface non-intuitive and sometimes have trouble figuring out how to change the status of a task. Perhaps it has something to do with the way it was originally set up by the admin, but I'm not sure. I liked Jira's drag and drop obvious functionality, but the project management side of the software was lacking. Smartsheet has excellent project management functionality, but the task management isn't as good.

Incentivized

Gainsight CC was a clear winner for us. Khoros was second, but we eliminated it from consideration due to cost and how hard it is to implement. Verint is a great platform, but lacks integrations. Circle is more of a small community platform and better suited to communities of practice.

• It has saved me time when having to get the same message out to multiple restaurants
• It has helped us make smarter operational decisions because we can all collaborate on an answer in a shorter amount of time (instead of calling a meeting!!!)
• The calendar function allows us to plot out our marketing agenda for the month and add/change it together as needed. The chef will post his recipe, the managers will cost it out, the social media manager will post pictures on it, and ultimately we will get that information out on an info sheet to the staff by printing the page.

Incentivized

• We are actually doing some work to prove return on investment for investing in Gainsight Customer Communities right now, and it's proving to be exponentially higher than we initially estimated. I'm not sure the exact numbers off the top of my head, but we're having a monumental impact compared to what we projected in terms of monthly recurring revenue and customer churn.

Incentivized