Item: Gainsight CS
Rating: 9
Author: John Applebaugh

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using Gainsight within Customer Success. We use it to automate some account processes such as renewals and contact management. We use the Rules Engine to generate Calls to Action for CSMs as well as make modifications to account records. We also use Gainsight to send mass communications and our NPS survey.

Pros and Cons

Gainsight makes reporting from various data sources very easy and intuitive. It is easy to generate reports on-the-fly and add visualization before publishing to a Dashboard. It is also easy to re-arrange data to make it faster to create reports or generate contact lists to use for outreaches.
The Rules Engine is a powerful tool for generating Calls to Action as well as being able to update fields on account records.
The Program function in Journey Orchestrator allows us to send a variety of email communications especially with multiple message variants and if we need to send follow-up emails automatically or create a Call to Action for the CSM.
The shareable functions of Gainsight - Share 360, Success Plans - are really great features for being able to provide additional value to customers and provide them insights into their account and usage.
Timeline is so much more robust than creating activities or tasks just within CRM. Timeline provides a way to track meetings and other events, add multiple participants, and even create follow-up tasks (CTAs).
The Support from Gainsight as well as the Community has been very important to helping us get the result we want quickly.

It would be helpful to have more integration with email and calendar applications so that email could be sent from within Gainsight from any email within Email Assist (CTAs), or CSM calendars could sync to the Timeline function on the C360 view.
Reporting is a great feature but it could be more aligned with how we can build datasets within Rules Engine or Program queries (bionic), allowing us to combine data from different sources without having to create a new data table to query.
Folders, folders, folders - we build a lot of email templates, outreaches, and rules, and there is currently no way to organize these so it just becomes a giant list that has be queried to find the one item you want to work with.

Support Rating

Gainsight has helped us accomplish much of what we set out to do. The limitations we encounter now have a lot to do with how much we are pushing the product for our needs. I am happy with how responsive support has been to our tickets and helpful at answering details around expected behavior. Documentation is good but there are some places where more information would be helpful. Product development is actively involved in answering questions on the Community portal and training has helped fill in some gaps in best practices.

Executive Visibility

We haven't fully developed Executive-level dashboard views but we are able to quickly give this visibility if needed as well as email reports as needed. There are some ideas for showing retention trends and forecasting that we'd like to explore soon.

Return on Investment

We've seen the most improvement in efficiency. As a result, we've been able to hire fewer employees for certain positions in Customer Success.
The Rules Engine in Gainsight has given us a way to quickly identify customers that might be having issues and require follow-up from CSMs proactively, whereas before we had no way other than being reactive.
We've been able to reduce staff time on activities that can be automated allowing contributors more time for more proactive or difficult workflows.

Impact of Data Connectors/Integrations

We are integrated directly to Salesforce, which is bi-directional. Many of our other systems integrate with Salesforce, which we then pull into Gainsight. We've looked into possibly adding additional data sources into Gainsight - such as Jira and our data from our online community.

Likelihood to Recommend

Gainsight is great if there are multiple data sources that aren't easily viewed in a combined way or if users do not have access to all these data sources. Gainsight provides a way to get this information into one area that is easy to view by anyone that is involved with the account. It also allows for data back to other systems like Salesforce which is important for contributors that may not be in Customer Success. Gainsight is helpful for automation as well as building scenarios with a specific goal in mind - all of which helps with scaling across segments.

In other areas, Gainsight can be harder for users to adopt if they are used to different workflows like working from support cases or direct email. It also doesn't have much machine learning that would increase the ability to automate workflows. If your product isn't true SaaS you can't make as much use of some of the areas of Gainsight that work well with usage data. Gainsight is also good for workflows that produce an output - an email, a survey, etc. - but not as good with taking inputs from customers.

Gainsight CS Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

Yes - We have a need for support escalation and a dedicated team to work on our issues since we have a limited admin staff but ambitious ideas.

Bug Resolution

Yes - Resolution was confirmed as soon as the next release was available.

Exceptional Examples of Gainsight CS Support

Support took the time to explain a difficult and less-than-well-documented feature of Gainsight. After resolution it was something that I could then much more easily use, understand, and explain to others so that we could replicate results. This happened in a similar way with another feature and I was given a great alternative that ultimately produced a much better result.

Gainsight made our lives easier and happier

Overall Satisfaction with Gainsight