Item: Gainsight CS
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Gainsight

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Gainsight is being used primarily by our Customer Success Management and Implementation Services teams.

Our primary drivers for adopting & using Gainsight are:

Customer source of truth with a record of customer history
Consistent customer experience across CSMs & Implementation Specialists
Risk identification & management
Customer marketing
Lifecycle management
Reduced time to onboard new staff
Reduced time to first value

Pros and Cons

Pros

Customer source of truth: the C360 view of the customer is unparalleled. It gives our CSMs a true view of everything going on with the account in one place. Getting ready for client meetings is much easier when there's only one place you need to look!
Salesforce Integration: if you're using SFDC as your CRM, Gainsight is a no brainer! Our sales organization has a quick view of what's going on with the customer in the widget and on the other end, our CSMs have a view of what's going on in terms of expansions via opportunity records surfaced in the C360.
Information Surfacing: Gainsight is great at surfacing the information you need in a JIT fashion via CTAs & linked objects.

Cons

Zendesk Integration: Zendesk integration is extremely rigid and hard to customize. We have struggled to properly surface our customer support tickets in Gainsight.
Release communications: I've been caught off guard by pages totally redone with no warning and no explanation of the new workflows of those pages (particularly in Administration).

I've reached out to their support organisation and in multiple scenarios I get confusing, contradictory responses from their team. I find this especially true after a release when I'm looking for guidance in navigating new features/workflows - they seem just as confused as me sometimes!

Return on Investment

Reduced 'real' onboarding time by approximately a week (playbooks go a long way in guiding our new CSMs!)

Alternatives Considered

Totango and ChurnZero

We went with Gainsight above Totango or ChurnZero primarily because of the maturity of their organization. They are the market & thought leaders on Customer Success management and we wanted that in our corner when maturing our own CS organization. Gainsight is also the most seamless to integrate with Salesforce which was a large driving factor as well.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited:
- There is a dedicated CSM team with a 1:1 assignment of accounts.
- More mature CS organization with defined processes for your CSM team.

Less appropriate:
- There is a services fulfillment team that does not have access to Salesforce—the lack of direct integrations with other tools makes it hard to communicate with other teams.
- Less mature CS organization with no real processes defined.

Gainsight CS Feature Ratings

Comments

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