This is Part Two of a series on evaluating Customer Success solutions. If you haven’t read Part One, “Settling for a ‘Good Enough’ Customer Success Solution Will Cost You,” check it out here.
In our last post, we discussed the risks of settling for a “good enough” Customer Success software solution. Moral of the story: if you settle for a short-term solution that doesn’t put you in a good position to scale, you risk wasting a lot of money and time. For this second installment, we sat down with three Gainsight customers who evaluated dozens of CS solutions to learn more about their thought processes. Why they ultimately chose Gainsight was unique to each business, but their reasoning shared a lot of commonalities. Read on to learn why they decided Gainsight was the right choice.
5 Reasons Why Customers Choose Gainsight Over “Good Enough” Solutions
Reason #1: Gainsight Offsets Headcount
“With Gainsight, we’re able to gain efficiency and improve the productivity of our existing team. Even at this early stage of adoption and usage, we’re already seeing the benefits. The team now has an identity. Using the same tool, methodology, and processes has created a sense of belonging. They’re part of something bigger than themselves.”
Marco Marchisio, Head of Customer Success at LRN
Establishing a tech-touch customer outreach from the get-go puts you in a position to scale aggressively—and without having to add headcount. In fact, Gainsight was found to increase customer interactions by 250% while providing three times the number of metrics available for reporting compared to companies not using a CSM tool. Using Gainsight’s automation capabilities, you can orchestrate complex customer journeys and create perfectly-timed email outreaches based on a variety of factors and triggers.
Reason #2: Gainsight is scalable
“Gainsight to us became best-of-breed. It was separated in terms of what it was capable of in a feature-sense and, of course, the staff experience behind it. As we moved forward, we wanted to make sure it could also grow with us and help grow our team so we could shift from the reactive support that we’re known for into something more proactive.”
Kenny Watts, Client Services Manager at ACS Technologies
In Part One, we talked about the dangers of choosing a solution that only fits your needs now, and not the ones you will have five years from now. Your business will grow, so your CS software needs to grow with it. If your platform isn’t a springboard, it’s a roadblock. Especially when customers are involved.
Gainsight’s Elements of Customer Success are prescriptive processes based on hundreds of implementations and decades of experience in company-wide Customer Success. It’s a good place to start when figuring out your long-term plan for CS. For a personalized maturity score, take our 5-minute Maturity Model Assessment. Gainsight stands apart because its features drive processes that help you ramp up your CS strategy and mature it. You can waste a significant amount of time and money ripping and replacing Customer Success solutions that you outgrow. This is something you absolutely can’t afford if it means customers could churn in the meantime.
Reason #3: The Gainsight Team is Highly Experienced
“[Onboarding] has been great. We’ve set up our cadence and our weekly sessions are very productive. Your team has asked me questions and challenged me to think about how we’re doing things and why we’re making decisions. They’ve provided best practices that are adding value for us. So, it’s been a very positive experience to date.”
Kevin Lamair, Enterprise Professional Services Director at Virtual Instruments
“Your team did a good job of understanding who we were and what we were trying to accomplish. We took a great deal of time upfront talking through our key goals and, particularly, our early goals. They were really effective in sharing the Gainsight features that would help us achieve our goals. They helped tie our dream goals to the paths we would need to take to accomplish them.”
Kenny Watts, Client Services Manager at ACS Technologies
The software you choose is only part of the equation. It takes people and processes to make your solution, well, an actual solution. You need a partner that will not just teach you how to use a solution, but how to grow your actual Customer Success strategy. Gainsight’s got an army of industry professionals, benchmarking data, and resources at your disposal. This knowledge base helps us cater our solution to each business’ specific needs.
Reason #4: Gainsight Promotes Cross-Functional Visibility
“We have a very deep and broad view-only license setup that encompasses the entire company. So as we grow and find out the value of certain teams having access to certain types of analytics, we can roll that out. For example, from a client retention perspective, our Sales team can go into an account and see a customer’s health score. This way, when they’re going into an upsell scenario, they can quickly know what they’re getting into. It’s view-only, so it’s not driving work—it’s informational.”
Kenny Watts, Client Services Manager at ACS Technologies
We preach company-wide CS because we know that’s what you need to build a healthy customer base. Stakeholders can have full access or a limited view of Gainsight through in-app widgets and viewer licenses. This makes it easier to ensure every department plays a role in the mission of CS. Gainsight can help you share customer insights across your company so every employee has full customer context and the means to drive outcomes and experiences.
Reason #5: Gainsight’s Dedicated to the Customer Success Community
“The vibrant user community was a pro—being able to participate in the new community as we went through our journey of building a Customer Success organization. Because it’s not common that an on-premise solution like ours would go down this road [of implementing Customer Success].”
Kevin Lamair, Enterprise Professional Services Director at Virtual Instruments
A supportive user community gives you the opportunity to expand your network and explore new strategies. It connects you with others who may be going through the same stage as you and have overcome challenges you’re currently facing. At Gainsight, we’re dedicated to giving the Customer Success community means to network and learn together, and from each other. Every year, we offer a variety of events that give you the chance to uplevel your CS knowledge while growing your own personal network.
Pulse: Annual conference that brings together over 5,000 CS professionals to learn and network. Pulse 2019 will take place May 20-23 at Moscone Center. For our friends overseas (and any interested jetsetters), we also offer Pulse Europe and Pulse APAC.
PulseCheck: Annual virtual workshop where CS industry experts dive deep into the hottest topics from Pulse. This year, PulseCheck 2018 is streaming live from Gainsight HQ on August 7.
Pulse World Tour: Half-day workshops visiting cities like Boston, Chicago, and Austin. We’re packing up the best from Pulse and bringing it on the road to make best practices more accessible to everyone.
PulseLocal: A global network of community groups that hold regular meetups featuring local CS practitioners. Visit our website to learn more about joining, leading, or hosting a PulseLocal chapter.
3 Reasons Why Customers Didn’t Settle for “Good Enough” Solutions
Reason #1: “Good Enough” Solutions are less mature
“[Good Enough Solution] was immature and had gaps in functionality and capability…too much development was going to be involved, so it was risky for us to go with a product like that.”
“Gainsight stood out as best-of-breed and ultimately what we were wanting to achieve, we felt it was the best equipped. The fact that we’re a technology company, we may have a slight leg up on getting started with Gainsight compared to [Good Enough Solution]. We don’t think long-term that we will be very taxing as a partner for Gainsight as opposed to [Good Enough Solution].”
Going with a solution that’s still gaining traction in the market can be risky. They can still be in the process of developing their features and if they haven’t encountered a company like yours before, there will be a huge learning curve for the both of you. Gainsight is a Leader in the Customer Success software space. Our substantial market presence and high ratings have earned us this position on G2 Crowd’s Grid for Customer Success for two years in a row. Our feature set covers a wide variety of CS needs and we are deeply involved in industry thought leadership that we then pass along to you.
Reason #2: “Good Enough” Solutions will not scale with you or worse, limit your growth
“Once we started to go down the road of a manual solution, that’s when it became very clear that our long-term trending and reporting would be a lot easier with a solution that was not homegrown…We know that [Gainsight] is going to be extensible for us—for what we may want to do with our own program. We believe that we’re not going to run into limitations.”
Whether you’re looking to buy a solution or build one on your own, make sure it’s able to scale with your company. Gainsight is already equipped with a variety of features and analytics capabilities that can be cumbersome and time-consuming to build from scratch. Instead of having to guess the right next step when you are ready to scale, they’ll already be available for use.
Reason #3: “Good Enough” Solutions are less flexible
“We actually have no contracts—we’re a month-to-month software subscription provider. That in itself is very different in the Customer Success world. We felt the configuration and what we learned about Gainsight spoke to helping us maintain that better. A big focus for me is the health scores. We don’t have the benefit of looking 90 days before a renewal. When an account becomes at risk, we have to be able to quickly respond, and our impression of Gainsight was that it was better built for that as well.”
If you don’t fit the cookie-cutter SaaS model (annual contracts, recurring revenue, existing CS org in place, etc.), you need a solution and support system that will help you develop a strategy that works for your situation. The Gainsight Vault and Resource Library are packed with templates and best practices inspired by industry-leading CS orgs and the ways we use our own product internally. This way you can hit the ground running without having to start from scratch.
When it comes down to it, you’re the expert in knowing what your company needs. These companies found that Gainsight was a better solution because it put them on the right path to Customer Success maturity. If you’re thinking in the long term, Gainsight should no doubt be on your list.
