CSM Home Experience

Related products: CS Other Features




Hi CSM @ Gainsight !





Please read through the post and give your feedback. I promise the time spent on this idea/project is worthwhile. Its going to make you much more productive while using Gainsight ! 





Goal





Make the CSM most productive, by giving her the best home experience possible in Gainsight (reduce the number of hops, keep most of what she needs at fingertips).





User Experience


 When a CSM logs in, she will be taken to the home page that looks like the following;





https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/EFgi47k5la0nrjf3I-gIPwKkbPqv9SrXoQNTvJWU5jz8Zdovb3Mpu0BVt5CFmvuOe6eSW81T6pzSEiZVXbGehYdhKImW3a9b-GQ23ID1FbWGhii8B42pFYVQPonJMlf1qu2Y1zDv 





Summary Stats





The summary widgets at the top tell her all important aspects of her portfolio. The mock above shows list of customers in the CSM’s portfolio, the total annual contract value of all the customers, Health Score distribution and the number of CTAs open across the portfolio.





Are these the right summary stats to be shown at the top ?





Do you want more summary stats ? What are they ?





Do you want to replace some of the above summary stats with more important ones for you ? 





Another idea about summary widgets is to make them smarter. For example by displaying trend information in the widget where it makes sense.





Customers 





The customers view in the left section below the summary stats shows the list of customers in the CSM’s portfolio. The idea here is give a glimpse of all the customers CSM managers at a single place along with some of the actions she can take on them (which is explained in the screen below).





The customer name, contract date and the segment the customer belongs to are the default attributes shown in the customer's view. The default attributes are set by the Admin. The CSM can use the “Attributes” feature available on Customers to pull in the attributes she wants on the customers’ view.





Relationships 





Below the Summary stats and to the right of customers’ view is the Relationships view. This view lists all the relationships the CSM manages. Like in Customers’ view the CSM can configure the list of attributes she wants to see on this view.





Tasks Due This Week 





This section lists the tasks the CSM has to work on with a due date in the current week. Again the goal is to serve majority of the the CSM’s needs from the home and thus make her productive.





https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/QoVgY6v-dTEOEUKmgbVmLo38wMKKJIHsswyXbkS5T5vxWRC3BdFnLf0COqo8urwNcWvHgXtlYVJFxt6_D1JOUKL-6DQmAA4RbHF7bgEsxlCQY2FGdblZq1rvlGa5EwOH2ZqgQzEo





 





Activity Timeline 





From the customers list, the CSM can invoke a the Activity timeline for each customer as shown in the above screen. The idea here is to serve majority of CSMs needs from the home page and make her most productive. Otherwise the CSM has to go to the individual customer’s 360 to work with its timeline. This will create a lot of back and forth between home and C360s.  





From customer specific Activity Timeline the CSM can invoke on the above screen, she can create a new activity by using “Activity” feature (shown is blue above).





What other aspects present in C360 today you would like to bring into Home apart from timeline shown above  ? 





The window that comes up by clicking a customer name in the customers list can be a multi tabbed one, where one tab can be dedicated to Activity timeline, while others features get into their own tabs.





https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/tRQqS0ldNWuLzpj2f2vFIYr6vSoTCRDkFVEGLONhZxu4pqF_xwBjr360FtlLw7Jfxen4LfqTLuNLlWSG0mGm3plx_tadEo7JfLML.pngaNZ4FOSYcNGGj-SHMJ3vUPbtU1V9rAQX





Other Dashboards or Favorite Dashboards 





The “Other Dashboards” shown below the customer's view is the list of dashboards the CSM would have to visit frequently for her day-to-day activities. The idea here again is to give the CSM best home experience possible by giving most of what she needs within the home.





This is the first attempt at imagining a comprehensive home for the CSM. The idea is to bring in more functionality as the CSMs demand into home and give them a great experience.





What else you would like to see part of CSM home ? 





General idea to go to the features not present in CSM home (at any given time) is to use the Global Menu available on the top banner.
I like this. Anything we can do to reduce the number of clicks a CSM/TAM has to follow to complete their tasks, or get important information, will only drive greater usability and early adoption.
This is so cool! 





Do you want more summary stats ? What are they ?




  • Lifecycle Distribution (how many customers are in each stage)

  • Upcoming Renewals this QTR

  • Open Risks (Could be total of Risk CTAs or total of Flagged CTAs)

I totally LOVE this.  
Big fan of this concept. 





Another capability should be to allow the addition of reports that manage KPIs and compensation related targets. 





I built the "zDan Home" dashboard to do this for me - provides a customer list at the top with common info (keeps me from having to click into each C360), along with metrics that are tied to our comp (DAU, CSQL, CSQA, etc) and support cases, upcoming renewals and NPS. 





To have the ability to expand and add more functionality to a "home" panel would be very cool.
First of all - truly awesome idea and very much needed!





A few thoughts -







  • Summary widgets as well as lists have to be configurable per client. For some clients ARR means nothing. For other Relationships will mean nothing. This has to be configurable by admin but ideally by user or at leas5 per user group


  • Would be awesome if there is some place here to capture other tasks notes not related to a specific client - i.e. a general timeline where you can keep track of tasks, notes from calls with manager, other notes - that's the only way we can truly get CSMs off OneNote


  • What about CTAs with no tasks - will there still be a way to see them? 


  • Showing all active Success plans in aggregate can be huge 


  • Ability to in-line edit some key attributes across customer base (similar to how mass scorecard view works but not just for scorecard but other attributes as well can be a big win 

  • Link to Outlook/Gmail calendar to show all upcoming meetings will be a game changer 

Hi Nadav, thanks a lot for the great feedback. You just mentioned enough ideas for a couple or more quarters 🙂.





Specifically talking about widgets, they capture numbers across the CSM's portfolio.





How do you want them to be configurable per client ?





By that do you mean multiple lists with in the home ? Lets say "My customers where ARR is important" is one list and you also create a list of customers where its not important and you want Summary stats by these categories? Could you give more details on how you are visualizing that ? 
Thanks for sharing all the details and screen shots for the CSM Home Experience!  Marie, Dan, and Nadav made some great suggestions.  I'm also curious how CTAs fit on this page since as Nadav pointed out there are some CTAs with no tasks. 





One other follow up question -- will we be able to both provide a default CSM Home AND allow for "customized" views of CSM Home like we have in Cockpit today?  





It would be really helpful if we could drop and drag containers to make custom views (like admins can do with dashboards today) since some CSMs are responsible for onboarding and some are not, some are responsible for renewals and some are not, etc.... so what "we" care about can definitely vary.  In addition, if I'm a CSM responsible for 400+ customers then the customer list may not be practical.  But I may want to only show customers with poor health so that I can manage to the exceptions in my portfolio.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, if I only manage 1 very large strategic customer I won't care about a customer list at all.
I think what Nadav is implying is that each GS customer should be able to configure what they summarize, instead of us enforcing what they see. Some might want to show cumulative ARR of their portfolio, while others might want to expose campaign dollars spent across brands they manage, just as an example.





The entire homepage layout should ideally be configurable by role (or perhaps some combination of User attributes), i.e., multiple homepage layouts within one instance of Gainsight, assigned based on what an individual User should see. Doesn't feel like one User would need access to multiple layouts, but would love to hear what others think!