In our 2023 Customer Success Index report, we found that nearly every company (98%) is maintaining or increasing their investment in Customer Success (CS)—and many are using Customer Success Platforms (CSP) to do so.
CSPs as standalone systems provide companies of all shapes and sizes with the insights and levers they need to:
- Eliminate retention and expansion blind spots: Get more granular and accurate retention and expansion forecasts with health scores and a 360º view of every customer.
- Scale with human and digital touch: Give your customers the attention they deserve with engaging journeys that offer the perfect blend of human and digital touch points, while saving your team time with automated interactions that reach the right person at the right time.
- Turn customer success into a revenue machine: Show revenue growth impact with customer success qualified leads (CSQLs) and use robust workflows to identify expansion opportunities and streamline account planning,
Net-net: CSPs provide customer-facing teams with a clear path to your customers’ success, and that’s a win in my book. Said another way, a CSP is the perfect foundation for your CS program—and always will be—but there’s more you can do to get to the next level.
How? By implementing additional digital post-sales touch points that enhance the customer experience and empower your customer-facing teams with more data they can use in their CSP to drive your customers to success.
Taking Your Customer Success Strategy Even Further
While CSPs are incredibly powerful on their own, there’s always more you can do to take your CS strategy to the next level. By adding additional post-sales touch points via an LMS, community, or in-app engagements, you can instantly enhance your customers’ experiences and empower your team with more actionable data.
Think about your customers’ journey after they sign the dotted line.
After the sale, you continue to engage your customers through onboarding, product training, marketing emails, and support.
Now, consider if these touch points can provide you with insights into your customers’ overall health.
Of course.
- A slow onboarding process can indicate potential friction or confusion with your product, which can quickly lead to dissatisfaction. This account might need some extra love and attention.
- Engaging in your community can signal active interest in your product and the desire to get the most value from it. Sounds like a potential power user to me.
- A popular course in your academy could draw your attention to complex features that are tripping your customers up. Let’s talk to the product team to see how we can simplify this feature.
Now ask yourself: Are you using these insights as indicators of customer health?
Maybe, but if you aren’t using digital tools to power them, it’s tough to track and measure their impact on the customer experience.
Without digital tools you also can’t sync the data from these touch points back into your CSP, which can give your CSMs a more complete view of customer health.
Hopefully, the opportunity to take your customer success strategy to the next level is coming into view. But to help make it even more clear, here’s how we’ve digitized post-sales touch points to not only deliver a better experience to our customers, but empower our teams with data they can use to guide customers to build relationships, boost customer satisfaction, and drive strategic decision-making that translates to long-term success.
How We’re Elevating Customer Success at Gainsight
I don’t think the idea of completing the post-sales journey with these touch points will be anything new to most of you; it just makes sense that you’d want to keep the momentum going with your customers after they sign the dotted line, especially in an era dominated by net-retention revenue and durable growth.
Still, I’m a visual person and often find it helpful to actually see new concepts and strategies in the real world—and then take a step back and ask myself how I can apply them to my situation. And what better way to do that by showing you how we empower our customers and teams across the post-sales journey?
Gainsight University: Empowering Through Tailored Learning
Touchpoint: Product Training
In the words of Lila Krutel Meyer, Gainsight’s Director of Global Education Services, “Gainsight University is at the forefront of empowering our customers, providing a centralized destination where they can dive into learning experiences designed specifically for them.” In other words, Gainsight University provides our customers with a centralized location for structured learning experiences personalized to their needs – based on their role, the product they’ve purchased, or even the features they have access to. For example, Gainsight University offers Admin Training to customers using our Customer Success product. At the same time, we have a training course dedicated to Administrative Settings for those using our Gainsight Communities product.
We have learning opportunities for non-Gainsight, too, like certificates for CS professionals looking to advance their careers.
Now here comes the data.
By collecting data from Gainsight University we traced our customers’ learning behaviors to our business outcomes to better understand how our digital customer education program is impacting our business.
And lucky for us, because we’re using an LMS, we can see that there are higher returns from our trained customers than untrained ones. For example, trained accounts have a 51% higher average expansion ARR than untrained ones. For this reason, we will continue to encourage our customer education courses knowing that it makes an impact on our expansion and growth numbers.
GameChanger Community: Fostering Connections and Self-Serve Support
Touchpoint: Support
We know structured, more formal courses aren’t the medium everyone is looking for. What if a customer has a quick question, like “How can I use [insert feature] here?” or “Has anyone used [insert product] for this use case?”
Our GameChanger Community is a place our customers can rely on to connect with their peers, learn from each other, and quickly find the answers to their questions, so they can keep making the most of whichever Gainsight product(s) they’re using.
And our community is creating tangible results for our team and business. According to our study, 77% of respondents reported achieving their goal when visiting the GameChanger Community, while 43% said they’d otherwise have contacted Support or their CSM.
What’s the moral of the story? By empowering our customers to problem solve independently, we reduced the dependency on our teams, ultimately saving 450+ hours per month.
From a bottom-line standpoint, we found that customers who were highly engaged with our community had a 3% higher GRR than those with low or no engagement. At the same time, highly engaged customers expanded at a 2.2x higher rate than those with low or no engagement.
KC Bot and In-app Guides: Personalizing Support in Real-Time
Touch Point: Support
Personal. Real-time. Contextual. Embedded. Those are a few words I’d use to describe our in-app engagement strategy. Using our Knowledge Center Bot (KC Bot), in-app guides, and more, customers receive instant support—without having to navigate away from the product.
And we’ve seen real results. For example, 75% of our customers respond to our initial engagement during onboarding—asking them to select their role so that we can personalize their learning experience—and 84% returned, which correlates to lagging indicators like product adoption.
How a Complete CS Tech Stack Helps Your Teams Empower Your Customers
Adding these critical touch points is necessary to enable our customers from day one on. It’s product empowerment and enablement in its purest form. But, again, you’re not at the finish line until you connect these technologies—and their data—to your CSP.
By flowing this data into your CSP, your CSMs have a single pane of glass to look through to quickly respond to customer needs, improve satisfaction, and focus on the tasks that lead to better retention and customer outcomes—and that’s the ULTIMATE win in my book.
Learn More
Want to hear what Gainsight’s Chief Customer Officer, Kellie Capote, had to say about this topic? Check out the on-demand webinar, I Love My CSP, Now What?
