Item: Gainsight CS
Rating: 9
Author: Sacha Laskow

Overall Satisfaction with Gainsight CS

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Gainsight is used by the Client Success Department and management/executive team for the client services organization. The goal was to address a number of business goals:

Accurate health scoring across our client base to manage escalations, track advocates, and give management better visibility
Manage the tasks and workload of the CSMs day-to-day through the use of a mix of automated and manual triggers for Calls to Action
Provide a central hub for client information, usage stats and CSM contact history (Timeline)
Reduce the number of tools the CSMs were having to log-in to and use each day

That mandate has also expanded much further to include various reports and insights as well as automating tasks and emails using Journey Orchestrator.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Gainsight is massively flexible and can be configured to do almost anything with the Rules Engine and being built on the Salesforce platform.
The team at Gainsight is amazing, super helpful and will always make time to help improve and achieve the goals of the implementation.
The community, documentation and support are all quite mature and provide a lot of resources to understand a complex system with many features.

Cons

Along with the flexibility, the complexity of implementing and thus the learning curve is quite high.
Some Admin functions could be made more user-friendly with some simple UI tweaks, for example changing 'Subtract N+7 days' to 'In the last week'.
Could also use more consistency across the UI, for example sometimes you hit 'Save', other times you just close the window etc.

Return on Investment

It is still early but we are definitely seeing an increase in our proactive outreaches
Our automation goals will definitely help reduce repetitive tasks for the CSMs
The health score has given us greater cross-departmental visibility and the power to manage escalations as well as identify advocates

We started with Totango as it was seemingly a much more simple implementation, and it was definitely user-friendly, however ultimately the lack of flexibility was not going to work for us. I also attended demos of the other major players such as Amity and generally found they all had interesting perspectives and differentiation; however the Salesforce integration and thought leadership of Gainsight took the edge.

Likelihood to Recommend

Due to the flexibility Gainsight could likely be adapted to a multitude of scenarios and functions within a customer success organization. The key to getting the most out of it is ensuring your organization has their data in order (this is not a small task), and the business goals are clearly defined and supported.

Gainsight CS Feature Ratings

Using Gainsight CS

Users and Roles

120 - CS, renewals, TS, sales (viewer)

Support Headcount Required

1 - Customer success, data analytics, Gainsight certification, CS Ops

Business Processes Supported

CSQL
JO
Health Score

Innovative Uses

AI automated health scoring and churn prevention
Risk management
Automated onboarding

Future Planned Uses

AI driven automated workflows
Renewal forecasting
AI driven content flows

Likelihood to Renew

Competition from partners

Gainsight CS Support

Support Rating

There have been times my CSMs have not been as responsive or missed meetings / follow-ups; but, generally they are super helpful and the general technical support is excellent. Everyone is busy and I understand that, but they can work on being more organized or having smaller portfolios if they need to keep follow-ups from slipping through the cracks.

Comments

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