We are incredibly excited to announce our August 2015 product release and share how we anticipate it impacting the daily lives of CSMs and Account Managers alike. In this release we have focused on helping you build enduring customer relationships. Towards that end, there are three newly launched features in this release, Relationships, Success Plans, and Surveys via CoPilot.
- Relationships: Model the structure of how you manage your customers beyond the boundaries of the traditional CRM Account Object.
- Success Plans: Establish and execute to a well-designed plan and specific objectives for a Customer
- Surveys via CoPilot: Capture actionable and consistent survey data with personalized, automated surveys
With this release, our goal is to provide you the right mix of tools to move the needle on the success you can deliver to your Customers. See coverage of this release on CMS Wire.
Reflect the Reality of How You Manage Customers with Relationships
Through our deep interaction with our 215+ Customers, we realized making a customer successful can be complex. If you sell the same customer multiple products or sell the same product multiple times to one customer – what does it mean to say that customer is healthy? If a CSM is responsible for one product within that customer – how do you enable that CSM to manage that portion of an overall Customer?
Relationships allow you to reflect this structure of how Customers are managed by the post-sales teams in Gainsight. You can model the structure by building out multiple Relationships associated to one Customer. Display all the data associated to the Relationship level and precisely assign CSM ownership. You can ensure that all Calls-to-Action (CTAs) and tasks are assigned appropriately to the CSM that owns the Relationship and also accurately report on your overall customer base and CSM team.
With Relationships, I can easily see all the existing Relationships related to a Customer from the C360 Page. I can now understand who else is involved at this Customer and manage our relationships in concert.
Then I can drill down into what’s really important to me, the Summary information, Cases, Usage Data and Subscription Details for the Relationship I own at the Customer:
Finally, we can build reports that accurately represent aggregate Customer information based on its Relationship information. For example, below I can break out one customer’s average NPS score by the products that Customer owns:
For more information on Relationships, visit our Relationships Overview article.
Coordinate and Execute a Strategic Plan for your Customer with Success Plans
At Gainsight, we are all about being proactive with your customers. Proactive CTAs based on data trends and event-driven notifications for important lifecycle events are certainly key to customer success management. With Success Plans, you can take your customer success strategy to the highest level; plan for success in your customer’s terms.
Those in more traditional Account Management will recognize Success Plans as a tool to support the ‘Strategic Account Plan’. For CSMs, Success Plans are a great way to record and execute against:
- A Customer’s immediate goals for your product post-onboarding
- A Joint-business objectives developed during a QBR or executive check-in
- An Internal growth-plan to upsell
Success Plans were designed to facilitate collaboration in development of the plan, cross-functional execution of it, and integration of its results into reporting. Most importantly, it’s an excellent method to track the plan’s execution internally and also demonstrate to your Customer the work you’ve put in to achieve their goals with your company.
With Success Plans, I can populate the high-level plan info and then gather input and buy-in from key stakeholder for this customer on the plan and its objectives:
Once there is consensus, I can specifically line-out the Objectives of the plan and the discrete tasks, owners and due dates that will make my plan a reality. The task and objective owners of these items will see them appear in their Cockpit so they can be picked up in their normal workflow. Success Plans create a central place from which tasks can be assigned, updated, and tracked:
Finally, I can integrate my Success Plans into my management dashboards, making it easy to present current and previous Plans for my customer portfolio and the effort and success of each.
For a video overview of Success Plans, visit Success Plans Overview.
Automate and Personalize Surveys at Lifecycle Milestones with Surveys in CoPilot
Consistent survey data can often be the key to both ensuring a customer’s voice is heard as well as gathering comprehensive data for analysis. Surveys in CoPilot can be scheduled to dynamically find customers with certain criteria and personalize the email sent requesting their feedback. Ensure that you reach the right customers with the right message and actually get a response.
For example, Surveys in CoPilot is a great way to gather feedback about your onboarding process once the Customer launches with your product. I can design the survey within Gainsight’s Survey Tool. Then, in CoPilot, I can define the criteria to find customers that are in a ‘Launched’ stage and the specific contacts from those customers that I wish to contact (i.e., exclude the ‘Billing Contact).
Then I will customize the email template with dynamic tokens and text to grab the participant’s attention. I set this Outreach to run on a schedule and I am ready to roll.
Now, every time a customer enters a ‘Launched’ stage they will be picked up by the Power List and sent a customized survey. It’s a one-time setup to consistently receive valuable feedback from your customers at any stage in their relationship with you.
For more information on Surveys in CoPilot, visit Gainsight.com.
