Item: Gainsight CS
Rating: 9
Author: Meredith Giersch

Overall Satisfaction with Gainsight

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Gainsight to manage our enterprise accounts. As a manager, I use it daily to understand the health of my portfolio of accounts and the status / progress of each customer's Success Plan. In addition, it serves as a critical 'single source of truth' if a CSM is on vacation / sabbatical or if we're transitioning the account to another CSM.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Offers a single place for CSMs to enter all notes and success plans so that everyone across the organization can access that information - key for knowledge capture and transfer
Allows leadership / management to roll up the health of their accounts / portfolios and sort by various health factors

Cons

Timeline becomes a mass chaos especially for high engagement / touch accounts - it lacks the ability to reference various objectives / initiatives. A CSM will regularly talk to a customer on one status call about 4 objectives / initiatives, but we can't ask them to click between 4 objectives / initiatives while in one call.
There's a lack of sufficient hierarchy in success plans for what we need to do in the high touch enterprise space.
The user experience for Success Criteria is poor - the current functionality limits us from building a "value log" of the benefits a customer is receiving from our software and services.
Cockpit is a nightmare - it's a massive list and not intuitive to search / filter / query.

Support Rating

Our Gainsight CSM is highly engaged.

Executive Visibility

Executives can see Account Health, but we limited it to one Health Factor (our fault because of lack of skill in our org), so there's a big lack of granularity into Account Health. And we still struggle with building dashboards because the user experience is tough for our team.

Return on Investment

All of our Customer Success Plans are now in Gainsight - no longer in Excel / tagged in SFDC and out of date.
Transparency in account health

Alternatives Considered

Totango and ClientSuccess

Gainsight is more robust than the others - and its success plan is a big differentiator.

Impact of Data Connectors/Integrations

We're pumping in consumption analytics from PowerBI, account team info from SFDC, consulting info from Tenox. While we still need to go to those tools for details, at least CSMs have one place to start from.

Likelihood to Recommend

Gainsight is currently the most robust platform in the CSM industry, however, I've seen 90% of my peers do a poor job of implementing / customizing it. So make sure you have a strong team to focus / clarify how you want CSMs / managers to do their job first... then a team to implement the tool and do proper enablement. Without that, you'll likely fail round one.

Gainsight CS Feature Ratings

Comments

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Gainsight is the Cadillac of CSM platforms, but still has work to do on its UI