Gainsight CS vs. Medallia

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

Any customer service industry would benefit from implementing Medallia. This is your one-stop-shop for everything surveying and data analytics. I have personally seen this successfully implemented in both software companies and retail. Medallia offers multiple integration options to create connected applications in your business. This is designed as an enterprise solution, smaller businesses may find it difficult to justify the cost.

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

• It provides a rating for customers to rank how satisfied or not satisfied they are with the service.
• As an Account Manager, this is a helpful tool to hear customers' experiences and feedback.
• It helps us manage our next steps because the tools also provide options to note the action taken and if the issue has been resolved or not.

Incentivized

• Quite time consuming from a system admin perspective. It can do almost anything but does nothing without a system admin building it. Example, I wanted to identify accounts in Gainsight that didn't have any contacts (people) records. It's possible, but requires creating a custom field and a rule in the Rules Engine, and then a report.
• Customer Goals and Success Plans feel like they should be tightly connected but aren't. My impression is that these were two separate features developed at different times that have never been properly reconciled.
• Need better customer facing features. Hoping that the new Spaces functionality is a good answer to this.
• Connection between CTAs and Tasks can get confusing. Some follow up items are so simple that I want to just create a CTA without any tasks, but the flaw with that approach is that it won't show up if I have any views that are based on Tasks. So I have to toggle between views of CTAs and Tasks and understand them as sometimes the same thing and sometimes different things.
• It's nice to be able to send a Timeline entry via email, which we WANT to use for sending meeting recaps, but there isn't a way to have an email template in this area. Our CSMs send many, many meeting recaps via email and we haven't been able to identify a good approach that gives us both a fast process for CSMs and a professional customer facing email.

Incentivized

• Our service model does not provide any ownership over the platform. We have to engage our Medallia Project Team to build surveys, troubleshoot issues, make changes to surveys, reports, and dashboards, resulting in long turnaround times and inefficiency.
• Medallia charges for both "units" and users. "Units" are defined as named individuals in surveys, but don't have log-in privileges. In our case, they are customer service agents or business consultants that engaged with the client but are not part of our closed-loop case management process or access to the platform.

Great tool and we've spent a lot of time getting it up and running. Unless something else comes a long that does a similar function for less money we will consider jumping cause we are always looking to save budget where we can. Till then I think we are satisfied with Gainsight at the moment.

Incentivized

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

Medallia's user interface is simple and intuitive for the end-user. Everyone in our organization from the CEO to store level team members use Medallia to see how we are delivering experiences for our customers. From an administrative side, I would rate Medallia closer to a 7.5, but this part of Medallia is not used as often post-implementation. That being said, you will need a technical/IT resource on staff or will need to pay a premium to a 3rd party to manage it for you.

Incentivized

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

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

Medallia is always there to answer questions and/or support our needs. In some cases it does require a PO if the request does not fall under normal support, but that does not change the fact that they are very responses and available to support your needs

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

Gainsight is catered towards CS, while the others cover a broader range of roles. Because Gainsight is designed for CS, it is the gold standard and enables the CS team to work like a well-oiled machine. Other tools tend not to have as efficient a system for task tracking and risk mitigation.

Incentivized

We are also using Salesforce.com for our customers/clients' records, usage, cases, and such. Like Medallia, we are using Salesforce.com to understand the different account usage based on the services we provide. With the data provided by Salesforce.com, we would understand where we are lacking, which parts we are strong in, and which part of the service needs improvement. All in all, both products are very helpful and, [conveniently,] both are integrated into one another.

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

• The timeline features - tracking interactions in a log manner is the greatest impact compared to vanilla Salesforce.
• Dashboard View - As good as the timeline features, getting everyone in one view really helps in planning.
• CTA - Task automation helps a lot as it is part of the dashboard. We can make sure by focusing on the most critical task at hand.

Incentivized

• It does play a big role when we are running a referral campaign. Referral greatly affects sales and retention since customers are bringing in new clients/customers.
• It helps our organization keep track of the accounts that are most likely to churn by checking their feedback and knowing how we can improve our service.

Incentivized