Item: Gainsight CS
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Gainsight is used by our Customer Success team. It helps us operationalize our processes in a repeatable (scaleable) manner. We have a significant growth ramp ahead of us (in employees and customers). We chose to implement this mostly for its workflow capabilities.

Pros and Cons

Workflow: Calls to actions and their rules engine allows us to build a lot of repeatable workflows. We can now trigger easily trigger workflows based on events and time.
Single source of info: Our CSMs now can go to one screen to see their to-do's, customer info and product usage data.
Charting: Their charting/reporting capabilities are pretty solid. It's no Tableau, but it covers most of the use cases of what a CSM needs to do their day-to-day work.

Their self-help resources isn't very good at all. Their KB is out of date (old screenshots and inaccurate information).
Their onboarding process is pretty bad too. The onboarding manager we got was excellent. She went above and beyond to help get us up and running. The collateral, process and tools that she has to work with are pretty poor though. I feel for her.
Change management is pretty weak. The way they roll out new features make life very difficult for us. They'd deprecate features before the new features are ready for our workflows. Documentation and help materials for the new materials are not well done either.

Number of Customer Success Managers

1 to 5 people

Return on Investment

Boosted employee efficiency
Boosted process compliance
Too early to tell re: upsell and retention

Gainsight User Community

I haven't used the user groups yet. The CS University is a good idea. It's average in terms of quality. The videos/slides are not well done. I've been to Pulse. I think it's good to get to at least once. It's not an event I'd recommend attending every year as the materials don't change much year over year. If you're there to network, that's a different story.

Alternatives Considered

Amity and Totango

I chose Gainsight for its Rules Engine and tight integration with SFDC.

Likelihood to Recommend

Despite the the negatives I called out [below] Gainsight gets the job done once you have it configured. The workflow and data visualization parts of the product work well. If you are at the stage where you're using predictive analytics to predict churn and upsells, you'll need to tack on another tool.

Good workflow engine. Good people. Poor customer experience journey.

Overall Satisfaction with Gainsight