In Brief
Synack, the premier security testing company, was growing rapidly, but their Customer Success team lacked visibility into their customer data. Gainsight enabled them to transform Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data into customer success insights and then align their customer success processes around a more collaborative approach. Using features including Gainsight Home (Dashboards), Timeline, and Customer 360, Synack improved the end user experience and made strong gains in renewals and expansion opportunities.
The Challenge
Synack’s security testing platform harnesses a community of researchers and smart technology to deliver actionable results for their customers. Their Customer Success team plays a critical role in that mission, helping deliver demonstrable value to customers—which in turn, leads to renewals and expansions for the business.
“We take customer success really seriously,” explains Jude Long, Regional Manager (EMEA), Customer Success, at Synack. “We have a large number of CSMs, and they are the linchpins that connect all the pieces together when it comes to delivering a great customer experience.”
Prior to joining Synack, Jude spent most of her career in the government sector as a customer. Now, she has transitioned to serving customers. Pivoting into customer success has been a meaningful evolution for her. “With customer success, the drive is to always be thinking about how to deliver outcomes for clients in a real way,” says Jude. “Which really matches my values.”
When Jude joined Synack, the Customer Success team was still using a CRM tool to manage their customer data. “The CRM was very sales oriented, and wasn’t quite doing what we needed it to do from a customer success perspective,” Jude recalls. “And customer success was still pretty new in our organization, so we were on a journey of maturity.”
As their customer success manager (CSM) team grew, Synack was looking to professionalize the function, making them more strategic and proactive. To accomplish that goal, they turned to Gainsight.
The Solution
“At first glance, Gainsight was almost too good,” Jude laughs. “There are so many features for us to grow into. But our implementation partner helped us to develop a phased approach that was tied closely with how we were growing the Customer Success Team.”
Phase one was diving into their existing data. Because most of their data originated in Salesforce, it was not delivered to the Customer Success team in a CSM-friendly format.
It was difficult to see the state of our data. The first thing we did was to pull the data into Gainsight and start cleaning it up.
Their goal was to make customer information meaningful and transform it into actionable insights that would help them meet business objectives, like managing their regions more effectively. They used Gainsight to gather more data in a central location. Not only did this help determine actions for CSMs, it also made it easy to keep the executive team informed.
Synack used Customer 360 to integrate consumption metrics, Zendesk data, and Jira tickets to provide a full view of the customer. And integrating Gainsight Timeline with Google has allowed them to share updates and tag stakeholders when it is important.
Another early use for Gainsight was health scoring. Starting with a relatively qualitative health score, they worked with Gainsight to automate the health evaluation and make it less opinion-based. Having a more accurate health score within Gainsight drove CSMs to prioritize and focus their activities in a better way.
Throughout the implementation, Synack leaned on the thought leadership of Gainsight.
The Gainsight ecosystem has been really helpful. We attended Pulse, and we have made quite a lot of use of the Gainsight training, as well as the community.
Gainsight’s GameChanger Community is the place where more than 10,000 customer success professionals go to discuss ideas, learn about upcoming events, and get Gainsight product updates.
Impact
Before Gainsight, CSMs were often reactive because they were a step behind in terms of data. Now they can be more proactive. “We can better see customer pain, but also where that pain matters most,” Jude says. For example, Gainsight allows them to identify and focus on high priority customers who had been marked for expansion plans—and make sure they don’t stay in the red.
Perhaps the biggest impact of Gainsight has been enabling a more collaborative approach toward customer success.
“Our CSMs can see all accounts within Gainsight, so they can start to spot patterns and learn from other CSMs who might have similar accounts. We used Gainsight to develop a collegiate, team working approach all the way through everything we did.”
– Jude Long, Regional Manager (EMEA), Customer Success, at Synack.
While CSMs are the most active users of Gainsight, Synack also leverages viewer licenses across the company.
It’s really important that everybody in the pod is up to speed with what’s going on with an account. Before Gainsight, CSMs were sort of on their own in terms of identifying and acting on risk, but Gainsight has helped us make things more of a team sport.
What’s next for Synack? The company plans to explore more Gainsight features.
“Success Planning is definitely the next big topic for us as we work with clients to understand their goals. As a company, we are driving toward much more strategic long-term partnerships with our clients. Gainsight supporting us in doing that has been really helpful.”
– Jude Long, Regional Manager (EMEA), Customer Success, at Synack.
