ClientSuccess vs. Gainsight CS

Client Success is well suited to both growing and established companies who know what they want and need to track for their clients. With the broad ability to support numerous accounts, have multiple users, and its custom success cycles to map a clients progress, it would be a great solution for any Client Success team. I think that teams that are unaware of what they need to track wouldn't find Client Success as useful, and organizations that require a large number of custom client descriptions and variables would find certain limitations a barrier to successfully using this tool.

Incentivized

Well suited for: consolidated and organized note taking tracking stakeholders contact information if properly configured - identifying and categorizing risk categories less appropriate setting up customer journey takes quite a bit of work to implement and make use of - want best practices baked into the product - "customer journey wizard" reporting is robust but clunky to set up reports and get meaningful data

Incentivized

• ClientSuccess makes it easy for our customer success managers to manage their workflows and provides excellent visibility into our company's customer activity and engagement. We're able to log into CS and regularly check segments of our customers that need to be engaged with on a daily basis, log customer health, and be aware of approaching subscription renewals in order to pay appropriate attention to the right customers.
• The user interface is easy to use, friendly in design, and quick to learn. They make it look attractive with bright color schemes without overdoing it too much.
• As a customer success manager myself, I am appreciative of how this tool has kickstarted our fairly-new Customer Success department and made us much more organized and knowledgeable as a customer-facing entity.
• Their customer success/support teams are excellent as well - which is to be expected. We've felt very well taken care of since we became customers of ClientSuccess.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• The support view takes a few steps to get to the meat and potatoes.
• The success score model can be improved to include smaller one-off campaigns. Success score is good for a campaign that has existed for a while but not for the one-off projects.

Incentivized

• Sometimes tying Salesforce Data into Gainsight objects can be challenging. (I don't believe this is a true Gainsight limitation)
• I would love to see the ability to create a dashboard directly from JO Analytics, to help save time recreating measure the program analytics already provide. (Since the JO program analytics aren't extensible to everyone, a dashboard needs to be created )

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

They are SUPER responsive...even for late night inquiries.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

HubSpot is excellent as it was an easy expansion from the sales and marketing work we were using it for. It meets our needs but isn't entirely as geared towards customer success like ClientSuccess. ClientSuccess has more bells and whistles that are out of the box vs. HubSpot, where the capabilities may exist but require a little more leg work.

Incentivized

Our Salesforce admin is constantly pushing us to adopt more of the features of Salesforce. However, we find that Gainsight is a stronger tool for customization and enhanced interdepartmental communications. Timeline makes it easy to understand where we stand in a customer lifecycle, which is far superior to reviewing an activity history related list in Salesforce.

Incentivized

• Within the first week, leadership was able to have more visibility into the lifestage and health score of each client
• We needed to become more proactive as an organization and this platform has allowed us to do so with real-time metrics and reporting.
• We needed to find a way to scale our approach, especially as our Client Success organization continues to grow, and this is already helping.

• 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.