ClientSuccess vs. Gainsight CS vs. PG Forsta HX Platform

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

I love using Gainsight CS for global collaboration, monitoring account health, digging into potential churn risks, summarizing account activity, logging account activity and having an overall historic record of account activity across multiple account teams, especially in my segment on a global account team.

Incentivized

They have done a good job at helping us maintain the integrity of the project while transitioning to a completely new platform. Our Voice of the Customer program happens to consist of multiple surveys within one "master" so I guess logistically it could be considered complex

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

• 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

Incentivized

• Confirmit has a fairly shallow learning curve allowing someone with no experience to be able to create a simple survey with not much time invested in training.
• Confirmit also has the flexibility to be used in very advanced ways. Whether modifying the display/page content's layout or modifying input types with jQuery, it is incredibly adaptable.
• Confirmit (with v. 18) now collects data in a true SQL database which is far more robust and easy to administrate than some other methods of data storage.

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

• Outlook integration could be better as within Outlook we do not get much insight of the account. While contacting a contact from Outlook, it will be great if the Outlook -Gainsight CS tool can show certain important information, like any pending CTAs, the latest billing amount, and pending certifications, etc. This will improve the communications and make it more aligned with the company and account perspectives.
• Limitations of report creation are user level - As a user I can not create report as per my wish on my set of accounts. Only the admin user has access to that, and also it's very intuitive compared to Salesforce.
• Dashboard customization - as a user I have very much limited options to put in my dashboard. It's all about CTA all the time.

Incentivized

• Ensure correct data collection. This is Confirmit's main goal, and which sometimes fails to succeed.
• Integrated data back-up service. It would be great if we could look at the data from a couple days previous.
• Interactive layout creator. Current layout creator is really "squared" as we say, it needs more flexibility with all the incoming technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

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

From my point of view Confirmit has been a key tool in our organization. Without it we can't deliver what we do at this moment. Confirmit has proved that is a reliable, stable and easy to use tool. The few issues we found (as far as I know) were sent to Confirmit support team and fix them. Patching the product has been done faster and without large downtime of the product

Gainsight CS earns a 10/10 usability rating for me by prioritizing strategic power and deep configurability over simplistic, rigid design. Instead of forcing users into a generic workflow, the platform allows us to build bespoke health scores and playbooks that align perfectly with our unique business model. This high degree of customization ensures that the tool acts as a tailored workspace that meets the needs of mature CS organization like ours. By leveraging the proactive CTA triggers, Gainsight CS reduces the manual burden on our CSMs, allowing them to focus on high-value customer interactions rather than administrative data hunting. It ultimately functions as a professional grade cockpit that empowers our team to manage complex revenue lifecycles with precision and repeatability.

Incentivized

Confirmit is a very technical tool, it takes time for someone to get used to the interface, even when it could definitely be more intuitive or user friendly, this is part of Confirmit's strenghts that makes it one of the most robust data collection technologies out there.

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

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 support team is responsive and I can tell that they are actually trying to help get to the heart of the issues before making us try every possible solution available. They ask the right questions and test things before coming back to us with proposals. I like the support team at Confirmit.

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

Should let the professionals handle implementation, don't have only the operations team at your company do it.

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

They're pretty neck and neck. Both are super similar. I love the icons for logging account activity in Totango. I also like the dropdown activity tab we have in Gainsight. We need to improve our auto forms for QBR notes and cancellation notes, but I do like that we can have details listed for the CSM to fill out without them having to think about it. Helps us improve our reporting efforts, too.

Incentivized

Forsta has a strong product functionality and performance. Integration capabilities are fantastic and it has strong customer focus. Pre-existing relationships also helped in cracking this deal. People at Forsta are helpful and customer centric. Although cost is not highly competitive but it comes close to value for money. Competitors have quite a few functionalities but there are additional charges levied for them.

Incentivized

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.

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.

• 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

Incentivized

• I love Confirmit, the only negative is that my experience using any other program is always terrible in comparison.
• I had Confirmit rep come into the office and was disapointed that they didn't have much informaton on how to use it as a researcher in marking research, perhaps employing more internal marketing researchers would help that.

Incentivized