A single strand of rope can get the job done, but a triple-stranded rope is practically unbreakable.
That is how you should think about complementary platforms and tools for your business. As stand-alone solutions, they are necessary. Together they can improve your processes, practices, gain insight into your customers, and scale your company.
Now consider this: what if each of those tools is also best in class? And what if they are similarly designed to be customer-centric. Alone, they are powerful. Together they become systems of integration that optimizes your business. Essentially, they are magnificent game-changers that transform your company into a synchronous organization elevating your performance.
That was the focus of the discussion of a recent NRR-TV episode—one of the internet’s rising tech television broadcasts hosted by Gainsight’s CEO, Nick Mehta. In this program, Nick sat down with Robin van Lieshout, CEO of inSided, and Eran Aloni, CCO at Gong, to discuss the importance of Community and the interconnectedness of their products to elevate and scale customer success. And the industry was waiting for the conversation with great anticipation.
Defining Community from the Beginning
As many know, Gong is a patented Revenue Intelligence Platform™ that captures and understands every customer interaction. By grabbing frontline conversations, Gong helps you better comprehend your deals, teams, and market to create actionable steps.
As for inSided, they are the newest addition to the Gainsight family of products. It is a leading Customer Success Community platform designed to leverage the capability of communities. The community function has evolved past the “break-fix” motion of the past and has become a driver of product engagement and adoption, increasing retention and building lasting customer relationships. That is why the subject of “community” became central to Nick’s conversation.
Nick posed the question, “When you hear the word community, what community are you part of?” Like all of us, Robin and Eran had their own individual definitions.
“To me, first of all, ‘community’ is about either a connection to other people and about my own growth,” Eran explained. For him, there were two sides: personal and professional. Eran found a connectedness of relationships and experience from both that led him to learn more about himself and others in similar positions as CCO.
For Robin, his definition was particular to him as it emerged from his passion for creating communities. “To me, being part of communities and customers has been a long journey,” Robin began. It was a definition derived from a lesson learned early on—selling to the wrong customer. Essentially, the mistake that was made led to a lack of adoption, poor fit, and no long-term match with customers. From the error, however, Robin leaned into the transformational practice of customer success and discovered the power of Community.
Community and the Customer Journey
All three shared their belief that Community is part of the unified product experience throughout the conversation. It should never be a silo where customers go to solve for lost support tickets. It truly is a critical part of the customer journey.
Community is vital for companies building a new category or industry. Essentially, if you are thinking about creating a community, it must be well engrained into the customer journey. You want to build an optimum customer, and product experience carried through onboarding, engagement, and eventually, renewal. It also includes educating customers about the Community and the enablement of its use.
By building a community, you create robust forward momentum for customer retention and business growth. In summary, the use of Community helps solve four primary pain points:
- Experience: Customers can have a very disjointed experience through their journey. Having a Community allows the customer to be empowered to see themselves as heroes, learning to solve problems through a self-service experience.
- Engagement: Customers want to see use cases and best practices for your software. Giving them an active community allows them to become more engaged with the product and other users.
- Connection: Customers want to feel connected. Community provides a place of inclusion, especially for those who have a passion for learning from others. Together they can share stories, best practices, learn from mistakes and success stories, and 1:1 experiences.
- Ideation: Community provides feedback and ideation. Customers can submit feature requests that help improve the product and keep you close to your customers.
Community and Customer Success
What was revealed from Nick’s conversation with Eran and Robin is that Community isn’t just about customer success. Though CS may own your company’s Community, it is just one part that contributes to its formation. It takes CS, product, all customer-facing teams, and in the end, your whole customer-centric company in a joint effort to help customers reach goals, outcomes, and ultimately success. Community really helps solve this. Now, with Gainsight and inSided “joined at the hip” in a combined effort, companies can enrich the customer experience.
There is no doubt that each company’s offerings are strong. Gong unlocks the reality of the customer experience, and inSided has the decisive vision of the customer community. And Gainsight? They are the category creator of customer success. Together, these three software platforms are incredibly complimentary, utilizing customer success and Community to improve the customer experience and journey. That is why when it was announced that Gainsight and inSided would be joining forces to create a new customer success and community organization, the news resonated throughout tech. And no one is more excited than Gainsight and inSided.
It makes perfect sense. Community and CS is a very human first pursuit in business. It is a natural fit because both want to make customers and users successful. Now Gainsight and inSided, along with their partner Gong, are a CS superpower that makes company and customer success not only possible but seamless. And that is what customers want.
To discover the details and secrets surrounding Gong’s, Gainsight’s, and inSided exploration of the power of Community, check out Season 2, Episode 2 of NRR-TV.
