In Brief
Hospitality technology company Shiji Group serves a vast array of customers, from large chains to individual owners. To ensure that each customer achieves value without stretching the Customer Success team too thin, they needed a partner that could help them analyze their customers, prioritize their efforts, and efficiently manage the long tail of smaller operators who are best served by a high tech touch strategy. Through Gainsight Customer Success (CS) and Gainsight Product Experience (PX) they were able to ramp up digital outreach and establish a consistent, productive dialogue with their customers that led to increased engagement and reduced churn.
Challenge
ReviewPro Needed A Standard Customer Success Approach for A Wide Range of Customers
ReviewPro is no stranger to scale. They are the world leader of Guest Intelligence solutions, with more than 60,000 hotels in 150 countries. ReviewPro’s Global Review Index™ (GRI), the industry-standard online reputation score, is based on review data collected from 140+ OTAs and review sites in 45+ languages. With over, 60,000 establishments in +150 countries, Shiji’s ReviewPro offers the technology, support, and education to empower hoteliers to be better. And while many of their customers are large businesses that operate hundreds of locations, the company’s customer base also includes a long list of smaller businesses.
For ReviewPro, this wide range of customer types posed a dilemma: should the post-sales motion be targeted, or can a onesize-fits-all approach do the trick? The answer came in the form of retention data.
“About six years ago, we were experiencing a lot of attrition in our smaller accounts,” recalls Neil James, Chief Operating Officer at ReviewPro and MyCheck. “We were very good at managing our large accounts, but we weren’t doing a good job with smaller customers.”
The company needed scripts and process flows to make sure they were speaking to those customers proactively, on a regular basis.
“Our goal was to educate them as much as possible on the solutions we offered so we could reduce the churn with that particular market”
Solution
Powering A One-To-Many Dialogue With Gainsight CS
To accomplish these goals, James and his team launched a formal Customer Success function powered by Gainsight CS. The team was focused on maintaining a dialogue with customers, and then using those conversations as a jumping off point for renewals or expansions by the Sales team.
“The way we set up the Customer Success team, we didn’t want them to sell. We wanted them to plant the seed that we had solutions for their challenges, But they were never the salesperson,” said James.
The role of the Customer Success Manager (CSM) was to earn the customer’s trust and educate them on how to use the hospitality technology platform, so they could get the best out of what they were currently paying for. Once the customer was experiencing value from the product, the CSM could then identify opportunities for an expansion or upgrade.
“The CSMs would just spend five or 10 minutes speaking about the product and determine if the customer would be willing to get a demo for that new feature,” said James.
If so, the CSM would then log a touchpoint in Gainsight Timeline. Gainsight would automatically send a notification over to the salesperson AND create an opportunity in the CRM to start the upsell process.
Driving Engagement all Along The Customer Journey With Gainsight CS
At the beginning, ReviewPro, a Shiji Group Brand also focused on the customer health score, which was built from multiple sources: usage data from the product; ticket data from our ticketing system; and data from touchpoints that were being logged in the Timeline. Touchpoint data included sentiment assessments by the CSM, as well as the total number of touchpoints logged in a given time period.
The Customer Success team also used Gainsight CS to roll out success plans to help with onboarding. Once they identified key actions that indicated customer engagement, they used that information to develop success plans for use by the account manager or the CSM to ensure that each customer was as fully implemented as possible.
After onboarding, the Customer Success team uses Gainsight CS to deploy newsletters that go out to customers on a monthly basis. “They are called Product Spotlight,” explains Neil James. “It’s a client-only email and it’s not driven by marketing, although they do help with the final copy. It’s driven by the Customer Success team and is solely about education, functionality, and training sessions that are coming up. We get a well above the industry standard for open rates on these emails.”
Six months after launching Gainsight CS, Neil James’ team saw the results.
“Our customers were gobsmacked that we were spending the time to speak to them, even though they were just a small, independent hotel. But secondly, from those conversations, we were starting to identify that they weren’t just an independent hotel—maybe they had three other hotels that weren’t at that point using our solution. All of a sudden they wanted to expand it out to those solutions.”
Expanding CS Capabilities With Gainsight PX
The initial success generated by Gainsight CS encouraged James to expand ReviewPro a Shiji Group Brand’s customer success capabilities. The next step? Leveraging the power of Gainsight PX.
“We were looking for a PX solution that did more than just gather usage data, We also needed engagement functionality. Gainsight PX just made sense,” said James.
James worked with his Product Dev team to integrate PX into the product set. They started using Gainsight PX to add tooltips within the application. Now, every time a new feature or widget is added into the tool, the developers think about how to add a specific ID element to make sure that PX can read it. They saw results almost immediately.
Impact
Eye-popping NPS results
“Gainsight PX was revolutionary for us. As a SaaS tool, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is very important for us. But prior to adding PX, we were getting maybe 150 NPS responses a quarter. After six months, that increased to around 6,000 responses per quarter.” Those eye-popping increases meant that NPS became an even more reliable metric for the team,” said James.
Low-touch Onboarding With Massive Reach
ReviewPro a Shiji Group Brand also used Gainsight PX to generate onboarding guides in-product for new users, especially for smaller customers, because it is a low touch, high tech strategy. And because the actions take place in the product, the Customer Success team can go back and look at the usage data to improve the onboarding process or fill in gaps.
Part of the strategy for onboarding and beyond is using Gainsight PX to push out training programs to customers. “We have driven a huge amount of signups for webinars and client training sessions through the PX popups,” says Neil James.
“We used to do a full training session every month for clients and we would get two or three attendees a month. Using Gainsight PX, we changed our strategy to make the trainings more topical, around a specific feature or best practice.”
This new approach resulted in a massive increase in attendance.
Using in-product dialogs, ReviewPro a Shiji Group Brand lets customers know in advance about training and encourages them to pre-register or download recordings afterward.
“We then send out surveys about the training sessions, and we’ve had some amazing feedback,” said James.
The Customer Success team uses the feedback to identify future topics for trainings.
An Unmistakable Uptick In Customer Engagement
Beyond onboarding, ReviewPro a Shiji Group Brand uses Gainsight PX to drive consistent engagement at scale, without the need for direct CSM communication. One approach is through low-touch product article content. Using Gainsight Knowledge Center Bot, Shiji Group creates and shares article content from within their application, getting a considerable amount of article views per month, well above the KPI that we had initially set. This has also resulted in about 150 cases/ month generated by the KC Bot’s feedback form which indicated that clients enjoyed having a simple way to interact with our team directly from the tool.
Generating Upsells With Gainsight PX
Further along the customer journey, ReviewPro a Shiji Group Brand uses Gainsight PX to generate upsells and assist the Sales team. This process starts with customer journey mapping by the Customer Success team, delineating which parts are dealt with by technology, and which parts are handled by people.
“With Gainsight, the journey mapping was pretty straightforward, The previous tool we had was very complex, it actually needed a support case in order to do it. Now, we have the power to do it ourselves.”
When a customer reaches a key upsell opportunity in their journey, Gainsight PX generates a use case (or business case), which is logged as a touchpoint type in Gainsight. Gainsight PX then automatically generates emails with the use case out to the Sales team.
Summary
The future is bright for ReviewPro a Shiji Group Brand and Gainsight
ReviewPro a Shiji Group Brand is looking forward to more customer success collaboration going forward. So far, Gainsight CS and Gainsight PX have facilitated collaboration between the Customer Success, Product Dev, and Sales teams, and Neil James expects that to continue.
“Our teams work very closely together“ said James. “There is a lot of excitement around the fact that onboarding is so much quicker and easier based on what we’re doing through PX and the data that we can get about usage.”
And no matter what moves the company makes moving forward, the customer will continue to be at the center of their efforts, with the help of Gainsight CS and Gainsight PX.
