Gainsight’s customer-centric technology aims to drive the future of customer success. The company’s Customer Cloud offers a set of solutions focused on customer success, product experience, revenue optimization, customer experience, and customer data, that together are designed to enable businesses to put the customer at the center of everything they do. The vendor states that companies that use Gainsight grow net retention by up to 33 percent. Learn how leading companies like Okta, SAP Concur,…
$2,500
Per Company Per Month
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
Well suited for: consolidated and organized note taking tracking stakeholders contact information if properly configured - identifying and categorizing risk categories less appropriate setting up customer journey takes quite a bit of work to implement and make use of - want best practices baked into the product - "customer journey wizard" reporting is robust but clunky to set up reports and get meaningful data
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
Gainsight's Data Designer is a powerful tool that allows you to create new tables/data sets from different sources (Create a new table by merging Snowflake, SFDC and Gainsight data that you can use for reporting or be the engine of calls to actions)
The health score is great! with good data and the right workflows in place, you can easily create automated health scores by your desired segmentation
Journey Orchestrator is the best 1:M outreach tool I have seen from any CSP. Very flexible and comprehensive. Can also support surveys! JO can be used for all segments, not just your digital segments!
Gmail/Outlook integration - Our CSMs love that you can send an email and attach it to the gainsight account. You can also create a meeting note in Gainsight and email it to your customers!
Calls to Action/Playbooks are very customizable, interoperable with SFDC and a great way for CSMs to keep on top of their work and also a great tool for reporting outcomes and CSMs work throughout the year
Sometimes tying Salesforce Data into Gainsight objects can be challenging. (I don't believe this is a true Gainsight limitation)
I would love to see the ability to create a dashboard directly from JO Analytics, to help save time recreating measure the program analytics already provide. (Since the JO program analytics aren't extensible to everyone, a dashboard needs to be created )
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
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.
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
I give it this score based on the implementation at my current employer. I don't know if it could be higher based on if the implementation went better, or if there is something on the vendor side that could help. If this were asked at my previous employer, I would have given it a score of 9 or 10.
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
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
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
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.
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
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 have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
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.
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
Our Salesforce admin is constantly pushing us to adopt more of the features of Salesforce. However, we find that Gainsight is a stronger tool for customization and enhanced interdepartmental communications. Timeline makes it easy to understand where we stand in a customer lifecycle, which is far superior to reviewing an activity history related list in Salesforce.
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
We increase account coverage by more than 20% through the tools within Gainsight CS to generate actions for our CSMs to prioritize accounts.
Now that we are using Success Plans, we are seeing 65-75% of customer outcomes realized within a 12-month period. This was something we weren't able to track before.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
