Gainsight for Customers

Related products: CS Data Management & Integrations

Hi All,





You collect a lot of information about your customers and track the health as part of C360/R360. There are various touch points which you have with our customers on a day to day basis where you paint a portrait of how a customer is doing.





How can you share relevant,useful information with your customers?





Idea - 





We have divided this into two use cases -





Use Case #1





As a Gainsight customer, I want more insight into how my team is using Gainsight





As part of the MVP , we have taken an approach where we(Gainsight) will first build our own customer application and share with you. This is a work in progress and we will have an update regarding when it will be available to customers.





But looking ahead , we want to help our customers manage their customers similarly with a customer facing portal which is the second use case





Use Case #2





I want to enable my customers in directly seeing some of what I maintain about them in Gainsight





Gainsight Customer Portal is a customer management portal where you can configure sections applicable to customers and share information with them.(could be a certain subset of sections which you have configured in C360/R360 for the customer)





There are few aspects which we need your feedback on -





a. Integration with other portals - How many of you already have customer portals and would like Gainsight to integrate some sections(success plans,scorecard etc.) in the portal?





b. Separate Gainsight Customer Portal App - Would you prefer a standalone Gainsight Customer Portal App where your customers would want to login and access some selective information which you would want to see?





c. What do you think are the relevant information which we could share with customers via our customer app?





Based on the feedback , I would reach out to you in order to have a deep dive on authentication and how you internally map the user to account in salesforce. Your feedback and comments would be valuable in helping us decide the direction we would want to go.





Thanks





Abhishek S
Hi Abhishek this is an exciting project I'm looking forward to see come to fruition!





For A and B - are these two ideas mutually exclusive?  I can see value in having both.  For us, we do have an existing customer portal which would be great to be able to integrate things like reports/dashboards and Success Plans....and here's a thought, what about an external chatter feed allowing customer and CSM to communicate via chatter?  Don't know if that would be possible.





It would also be useful for us to have a separate app as well, for our "internal" customers.  I would love to discuss more with you.





As for relevant information to share...I think anything you can share via a reports i.e. support case information, usage data, perhaps specific value-driven CTA actions which the CSM has performed (i.e. webinars, proactive alerts, etc) and Success Plans would be ideal. Healthscore I'm not entirely sold on...it depends on if your score is built upon the customer's health from their point of view, or from yours.  In any event I would hope these would be customizable - admin determines what can be shared and visible in the portal.





Hope this helps.  Look forward to talking to you in more detail!
Thanks, Abhishek!





A.


Our other customer portals are Zendesk and Skilljar, and of course, our product itself. Frankly, it all becomes a bit overwhelming. I think it could be challenging to add Gainsight as yet another interface that a customer would have to learn, not to mention another [i]concept the customer would have to learn ("What do I go to Gainsight for? How does it compare to Zendesk, Skilljar, and just emailing my CSM?") So, that's all to say, I wonder if Zendesk could become the Grand Central Station for our customers. It wouldn't necessarily need to [i]integrate with these other systems, especially since there are so [i]many systems it [i]could integrate with (Basecamp, Jira, Clarizen, etc etc etc). But if it could provide a central organizing point for a customer to start at, and then hop to the resource that they actually want, via a set of "useful links" or something, then maybe that would be a good universal starting point.





B.


The greatest challenge here is that I would like our CSMs to be able to see just what the customer is seeing, and that's more difficult for them if the customer portal lives elsewhere. I would also want the CSMs to be able to easily demo the portal to a customer via a screenshare.





C.


Some ideas that come to mind:




  • Product usage from Google Analytics

  • Success Plans and key upcoming CTAs

  • Key milestones or Timeline Activities (e.g., "this is when you exited adoption","we had a QBR")

  • Contract information from Salesforce (e.g., "you're currently paying $X per seat", "here's a PDF of your contract that's attached to your Opportunity")

  • Who our primary contacts are at that company (e.g, "Who do we consider to be your Executive Sponsor(s)?")

  • CSM contact info
I'd also point out that a lot of this information would be dandy to have in a portal, but that doesn't mean that the customer would think to log in and access it. I would love to be able to push them a monthly email with the info, some of which would change (like product usage) and some of which would not (like contract info or CSM contact info). I would want full control over that email template, so I could include only the info I want and let our designers control the look-and-feel.





Hope that's helpful off-the-top-of-my-head thinking! I'm looking forward to Use Case #1, so I can get a CSM-by-CSM breakdown of who's using which areas of Gainsight each week, and get a sense of who's just hopping in once a week to close CTAs versus who's actually using it as a day-to-day organization tool.
"I would love to be able to push them a monthly email with the info, some of which would change (like product usage) and some of which would not (like contract info or CSM contact info). I would want full control over that email template, so I could include only the info I want and let our designers control the look-and-feel."    





Can't this already be done today via Co-Pilot?  We don't do that at this point, but I know we get usage reports from Gainsight on a weekly basis.  Maybe the static data (contact info, etc) could be added via tokens?
Probably true -- I haven't investigated setting up reports as part of CoPilot emails. But right now it would be trickier, than it ideally would be, to include things like Success Plans and only certain CTAs or Timeline Activities.
Abhishek,





For us there would be several layers here. For A, we would want this to integrate with an existing portal for our Partners and possibly a Home Grown Portal for other customers.





For B, we would not be opposed to a stand alone if that is easier to do first with the plans to integrate following quickly behind.





However, we would like to elevate different items to different plan types.





For C, we will need to think on this a little more.
#2 would be of great value. We have an existing portal we would want to go with option a.  
For #2 integration into another portal would be excellent.
A customer portal the customer can log into would be most excellent. We are running into issues where are having to revert to excel tables to work through status and meetings with customers on the call.