As the new year gets underway, I am excited to introduce new capabilities that address the most central challenges in Customer Management.
- Federated Customer Management: You no longer have to choose between deploying each of your business lines on their own customer management system or forcing them to operate within one restrictive, shared environment. Optimize customer operations for each business line while maintaining one unified system for organization-wide continuity and visibility.
- Bionic Rules: Scale your data investment by harnessing cutting-edge technology to transform customer data into value delivered. Bionic Rules can perform multi-step, in-memory data processing to convert raw customer data to real-world action.
- CoPilot Template Variations: Easily create and send multiple variations of an email within one Outreach to scale personalized customer communications and simplify reporting. Now you can handle sophisticated multilingual campaigns or A/B testing through variations to a single template and analyze results across all variants within one unified report.
Federated Customer Management: A New System Standard
Your customers are nuanced. They have purchased multiple products from you, operate in different departments or regions, and have engaged with you on multiple service projects.
You’ve organized your teams accordingly to best serve your customers. While this organization optimizes for real-world delivery, it is nearly impossible to support with current technology. Often, there are two outcomes:
- Each business line sets up its own independent system to deliver Customer Success. Then each team can configure the system to perfectly meet its own needs, including process-definition, configuration, and data integration.
- All business lines must operate out of one centralized system. The business jointly configures the system to best meet the needs of each team while maintaining full visibility and continuity into all parts of the business. This approach has the added benefit of significantly reducing overhead.
But each of these outcomes have meaningful disadvantages for your customers and your business:
- By deploying each business line on its own system, you lose the full picture of your business and customer base. You are unable to compare one team’s processes against another’s and how they impact a customer’s experience. You lose the ability to spot trends across your entire customer base. Not to mention, you exponentially increase your maintenance overhead by duplicating data and data integrations within each environment.
- Forcing all business lines into one system can hamper every team’s ability to operate. System configuration and data structures have to be shared by all and change requests are often routed through one central team with long backlogs. Each team is heavily restricted from operating with the latitude and speed it needs.
Federated Customer Management aims to combine the best of both outcomes. Each team can configure and use Gainsight to meet their specific needs while remaining within one overall environment.
Our Winter Release builds on our unique Relationships functionality to further enable teams to define their own workflows without impacting each other. Each team can have a unique process to address and resolve their customer’s Risks, Opportunities and Lifecycle events. The definition of a Risk and Opportunity can also vary by team, while retaining the ability to create reports and aggregate customer status across all teams. We look forward to pushing the envelop in Federated Customer Management.
Bionic Rules: An Evolutionary Upgrade
The concept of a Rules Engine is often characterized as the “brain” that controls data, triggers and actions within a software tool. In this release, Gainsight’s “brain” has undergone an evolutionary upgrade with bionic technology.
We are excited by the potential of this powerful technology to help our customers get more out of their data while reducing rule volume, complexity, and ultimately, cost of system ownership.
With typical Customer Success tools, data transformation and advanced calculations are often performed externally to the system through a multi-step process with an ETL or other tools. Then, only the results would be ingested into the system and subsequent rules would be built on the summary data to take action (e.g. create alerts, health scores, trended reports, etc.). With Gainsight’s Bionic Rules, entire processes can be completed in a single step.
For example, Bionic Rules can help you:
- Integrate raw customer data into Gainsight and design multi-step data transformations, including merges, pivots, and aggregations to transform your data into a polished, actionable dataset
- Craft the perfect dataset to drive Customer Success action (e.g., Calls-to-action and Healthscores) by performing in-memory merges of data stored in separate objects
- Create new time-series aggregations and calculations to precisely monitor trends in customer data over time
- Identify missing steps in a customer lifecycle or journey by spotting gaps in data sets
To learn more about what Bionic Rules can do, visit our blog post.
CoPilot Template Variations: Scale and Simplify
Gainsight’s CoPilot is a proven and widely adopted tool for Customer Management teams to gain efficiency in managing their customer portfolio. Email interaction data can also serve as a powerful indicator of customer engagement. We anticipate that further extending CoPilot’s ability to support complex email communication will have a tremendous impact on team scalability.
Our Template Variations feature delivers new sophistication to Gainsight CoPilot. Within one CoPilot Outreach, customers can send variations of an email to different recipients to deliver the right message to the right contact at the right time. Encapsulating these variations in one Outreach massively simplifies setup and also unifies the response data into one single report.
Now you can easily scale your multilingual campaigns or A/B testing through one Outreach. For example, suppose you need to send a CSAT survey to recipients in several different countries. With Template Variations, you can adjust the message for each language using one template and also schedule the email sends according to the local time zones. Then, responses across all languages will flow into one report for easy analysis.
With these three new capabilities, Gainsight meaningfully answers some of the biggest challenges in Customer Management. We are excited to continue to give you the tools you need to spend less time managing technology and more time managing customers.
