Gainsight CS vs. Planhat

I really enjoy using Gainsight CS because we can track our customers through their life cycles through our CSM/Implementation teams, Customer Community, and even our Academy! All of the information is in one spot for us to use and see. I would recommend this product (as well as CC & CE) for any SaaS company that needs visibility across all products and teams.

Incentivized

For someone working in the Customer Success team, Planhat is a must-have software. All your client-level data can be easily managed, stored, and reviewed at any point in time by Planhat. It also helps the management and the leadership team better see each account and its usage. It also helps in identifying potentially risky customers and taking the required actions to engage and retain the account. It also gets integrated easily with other meeting recording tools wherein the summary from the tool gets easily synced with Planhat

Incentivized

• One source of truth for all things CS - managing day-to-day tasks.
• Getting ahead of the risk by having a very detailed and evolving health score system. Gainsight's CSM was incredibly helpful in building our risk mitigation plan using the health score, sharing their best practices.
• Having a mutually agreed upon Success Plan that you can share with the customer. It was also incredibly helpful with assigning other parties to take actions, along with due dates and reminders

Incentivized

• Reporting - you can set up filters with boolean criteria to give you insight into everything you need to know.
• Playbooks - these are very good for less-experienced CSM's who need a step-by-step guide on how to deal with different stages of the customer lifecycle. More experienced CSM's may not need the playbooks.
• Usage data for customers - there's a wide range of charts in Planhat that tell the story of client consumption.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Allow for cc'ing of AEs or others within the same organization from the messaging center. When I went to send a message from within Planhat, I had to manually type out the AE's email address every time if I wanted them cc'd.
• The fonts were funky if I went to add text into an existing email template. For example, if I added in an extra sentence or paragraph, in Outlook on the recipient's end, the font was different despite looking the same within Planhat. Gmail was all consistent, Outlook was showing a different font.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Gainsight CSGainsight's usability is extremely intuitive. The dashboards are modular and the ability to click into each to learn more is helpful to gain visibility and strategizing where to prioritize time as a CSM. Logging activities is also extremely intuitive as is the CTA function. There is some confusion on "Where can I find..." if there are multiple dashboards so an internal AI tool to ask would be helpful as well.

Incentivized

It takes a while to learn Planhat even for experienced users. It has limitations in terms of what data you can present where, but its important to set internal guides outside Planhat as well so everybody working collaborative. But as CSM Planhat is a great- and critical tool which I use daily to optimise my work schedule and customer interaction with various topics.

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

The support team couldn't be better. They are quick to respond, very helpful, and thorough. Our CS manager was always happy to schedule calls to go through specific feature queries and she ensured we had a smooth and quick setup.

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 CS and Vitally offer distinct strategic advantages depending on organizational maturity. We used Vitally for a year and it is pretty decent for mid-market teams requiring immediate agility. We just had a hard time getting our CSM's to adopt the tool. In contrast, Gainsight CS serves as a comprehensive System built for enterprise complexity. Its architectural depth allows for intricate data modeling and parent-child hierarchies, while its Bionic Rules engine provides professional-grade automation that handles nuanced triggers far beyond the capabilities of standard, trait-based systems.

Incentivized

I was not the person involved in choosing Planhat, but it seems to me that Planhat is much better suited to an account management style role, whereas Hubspot is closer to a sales CRM instead. In my position, Planhat is better suited as it is more graphical, more flexible, and easier to find information on.

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

• 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

Incentivized

• Planhat has, for the first time, given us a 360-degree view of all our customers and access to all the different types of communication we have with them across different departments and functions.
• The ability to automate workflows, tasks, and assign playbooks to the various phases of our customer lifecycle has aligned all our departments.