For SaaS products, Gainsight's product experience software enables companies to track every step of their user's journey and fully understand how they're interacting with a product over time.
$0
100 or less MAUs (Monthly Active Users)
StoriesOnBoard
Score 1.1 out of 10
N/A
StoriesOnBoard is a holistic product management tool powered by user feedback. Through collecting user and customer feedback into a single repository and sorting it based on custom rules and collaborating with stakeholders to form actionable feature ideas from them, users can make sure their ideas will be driven by real user needs. Ideas can be validated on a public roadmap and then placed on a user story map to plan releases. StoriesOnBoard supports the product management…
Gainsight PX is well suited for companies that are looking to measure customer engagement, usage, and adoption of their products and services. It is also well suited for companies that are looking to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. Gainsight PX can be used to track customer journeys and measure customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, Gainsight PX is less appropriate for companies that are looking to measure sales performance or customer lifetime value. It is also not well suited for companies that are looking to measure customer retention or customer churn.
As mentioned earlier, we also use StoriesOnBoard to create other processes (customer and employee journey). We use the swim lanes to differentiate between measures, tools and processes and working with them is very easy and understandable for this purpose.
Less easy is the use of context, i.e. when one part of a story map depends on another story map. This cannot be avoided (at least for us) to avoid creating redundancy (and the risk of creating different stages). At appropriate places, we refer to the other map in the title.
Backfilling data. Many tools do not have the ability to be tracking elements once they are available and then pull it in and have historical views. You're not starting from scratch once you identify something.
Educational Engagements. There are a ton of options for in-app messaging and its very customizable and easy to set up.
Product Mapper. Organizing and shifting structure is easy to change. Setting multiple rules on a feature and confirming what you tagged is easy to do.
Walk through functionality is weaker than other providers. If you ask a user to do something on screen, and that action reloads the page, the tour closes. This shortcoming is the primary cause for us using another walkthrough tool.
There is no global CSS styling for PX modals. When I make a new CSS refinement, it's limited to that one engagement only. Everytime I have a new message to deliver, I know picking a correct tour type, finding a good starting place in existing CSS and content, working over the CSS to handle new content will all take more time that it takes in other tools with universal styling controls.
The page reload tour cancelation also affects surveys. Want to send a CES survey after a user clicks a button that causes a URL change? You can't. Indirectly, you can load the survey if the user has clicked the button < 1 day ago, and is on URL X. If the URL is the same before and after the button click, even this work around wont work.
Not sure how effective PX is on mobile, the functionality did not exist while we were building our mobile app, and we've yet to add it in.
Would be nice if it could integrate our knowledge base, but only one KB vendor was supported (not our Freshdesk) last I looked
StoriesOnBoard works really well; all features are well thought through. It could look a bit fresher, although the new updated dashboard is already much better than it was.
I have not had to contact support frequently but when I have I used the chat and my questions were answered immediately. I've also used their knowledge center, help documentation and training videos which are all very thorough. The support we've received from our Customer Success Manager has been helpful as well.
Heap has a great value proposition and very nice user experience. But it lacks the clear funnel analysis that Gainsight PX provides. Plus Heap also does not have integration with a lot of CRMs and Customer data platforms. Also, Additionally if you go in the market to find Heap implementors or SI vendors, you won't find any.
The only other competitor we looked at was cardboardit.com. Both had solid functionality, but StoriesOnBoard was more user-friendly and quick to learn and use in our opinion.
Allow us to integrate actual product usage with Salesforce.
Too much developer time went into it, especially when the premise was that this was mostly going to be handled by the Product team. This was mostly because the Gainsight PX event editor doesn't support more complex querying on events.
StoriesOnBoard (and story mapping in general) creates a low-cost visual method of aligning on high-level business and technical requirements early in a project and provides an ongoing reference as the project progresses. Having this alignment is critical for the later stages of the project.
