Gainsight Customer Communities vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

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

For well-suited, this product is great for your external clientele groups that you would not necessarily want to have a high user fee rate for. So basically general public or a group that will be authorized to come in and just do a few things here and there, but you don't necessarily want them access to all of your systems and your data points for groups that it would not be a great use for. I'd say probably your high level internal staff, they're going to be using a lot of the backend functionality automations, evaluating data, managing data, and doing custom inputs. That's just not what's intended for.

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

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

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

• The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
• Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)

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

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

Incentivized

It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.

Incentivized

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

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.

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

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

• Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s.
• Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data
• Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data

Incentivized