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…
$2,500
Per Company Per Month
Google Forms
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Google Forms is an app for creating forms and surveys, and is part of Google Apps for Work. The product focuses on ease of use; the interface is similar to a document editor, with drop down lists of options and drag and drop question re-ordering. Users can embed images and video into surveys. Users can also program the question flow with custom logic. Google sends users basic summaries of the survey results automatically, or users can export the raw survey results data and analyze it via…
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.
Google Forms is great for simple surveys, such as quick polls, but any logic beyond conditional pages is not supported. Google Forms is best used when the survey participants have and are permitted to use a Google Account to fill out the form; we ran into issues with hospital IT departments. I don't believe there's a better free tool out there than Google Forms, though.
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
Live results: When a user completes the form the results are added instantly.
Easy to create: Google Forms has a simple interface that allows for a wide range of question types. Google will even try to guess the question type based on the question (but this can be overridden).
Answers export to Google Sheets: It is easy to have each response to your form add a row to a Google Sheet, allowing for further analysis or processing.
Ability to automatically collect email addresses within a domain: If you have a form that has been shared with users in your domain, you can set it to automatically collect the users' email addresses without them needing to type it in. Makes checking whether all students have completed the form easy.
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.
Sometimes finding the output -- a Google Sheet with all responses-- is a little difficult. It's also sometimes confusing to figure out how to get back into the Google Form Survey itself.
As always, sharing among an institutional Google account and your personal Google account can be frustrating. You have to make a copy and can't share across the two different accounts very easily.
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 will definitely renew my use of Google Forms because I really like the ease of use and the number of tools that Google forms provide. I also love that I can administer a test in real-time and get results in a timely manner
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.
Overall ease of use for staff, volunteers, and adult learners, and easy to get reports and to share reports via Sheets. As a free tool, it does more than expected. Easy to change the look and brand it to your organization, or just make it more fun, depending on what you want to use it for.
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
In the years I've used GoogleForms I've never ran into any issues with the reliability or availability. Google is a gigantic company with essentially limitless resources which makes it very easy to trust that I will continue to be able to enjoy the same reliability I've come to know and expect from GoogleForms
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
One of the things that comes as a benefit of the lack to create complex logic branching and truly custom design is that there isn't lot of room to bog down the software. GoogleForms has always loaded just as fast as my internet service and device would allow it. I'm not sure about front end integrations or integrations into the form itself, as I've never explored it, but on the backend, I've never had any issues with integrations channeling from GoogleForms from the GoogleForms's end of things.
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.
We haven't used much official support for Google Forms. However, because it is so widely used, there are a ton of articles and guides available online to help administrators of varying technical abilities to work through problems that arise. Additionally, Google provides an official support forum where there are discussions with other users as well as Google developers that can help address issues if needed.
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.
Google Forms doesn't really require "implementation": simply log into GDrive and create a survey! You can configure settings per survey to, for example, automatically write responses to a GSheet.
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.
Although both platforms offer similar functionalities, Google Form has a personal advantage and it is the impeccable integration with the different applications of the Google suite, this allows to make use of all of them in a transparent way, which in the work environment allows to perform work efficiently and without affecting the quality of it.
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.
GoogleForms lacks the ability for complex logic branching and the ability to truly design it in a custom manner. It's pretty obvious when you land on a GoogleForm that it is in fact a GoogleForm. This rating solely reflects the lack of flexibility which in turn makes it something that wouldn't usually be scaled. That being said, if needing to scale a simple solution, GoogleForms would be up for the job.
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
