Acquia’s Digital Success Programs Drive a 12-Point Increase in Renewals and Generates Significant New Pipeline with Gainsight

Acquia, a leading digital experience platform (DXP), is recognized for its products that enable organizations to maximize the value of their content, from customer engagement to conversion. Gainsight played a pivotal role in its success story with its Customer Success (CS) and Product Experience (PX) offerings, helping the Acquia team drive impressive accomplishments, including a 12-point renewal rate increase. Gainsight CS and PX also helped Acquia uncover and capture a significant amount of  new pipeline.

Victoria Griffin, Vice President of Account Management and Customer Success, manages Acquia’s core customer base of mid-market and enterprise customers with three Account Manager (AM) teams and one CS team. As Acquia created a proactive engagement initiative for these segments, their tools and timing proved critical.

The first task was reaching every customer with meaningful communications and content while reducing busy work. Managing hundreds of customers meant digital customer success was necessary to scale, but connecting with their customers in meaningful ways felt compromised by ill-timed questions and impersonal emails that undermined their value-based messaging.

Offering a large platform with multiple solutions, Acquia needed to discover where customers were in their customer journey and how to deliver value at each stage. Then, they needed to align effective messaging to get customers’ attention and drive growth. Understanding email open rates and other prompts was crucial for program success. By understanding where customers were at in their journey with Acquia, they worked on targeted messaging to capture customer’s attention, leading to more value realization.

Gainsight’s product suite offered the right solutions to enhance Acquia’s customer journey orchestration and communication at scale. With Gainsight’s product adoption and engagement tools,  Acquia increased user engagement by tracking and surfacing user behaviors in the product and offering digital engagements to users at the right times to drive more value at scale. Acquia tied user behaviors in product to their overall customer experience and health in Gainsight CS, where they orchestrated the complete customer journey in Journey Orchestrator (JO) and tracked overall customer health. Gainsight’s features also let Acquia track and surface new revenue opportunities with a combination of usage, health, and engagement that let them capitalize on upsell and expansion.

Acquia’s adoption of Gainsight’s Journey Orchestrator function was a game-changer, marking a significant shift in customer engagement strategy and maximizing team efficiency. JO seamlessly blended human and digital touch and delivered personalized attention to customers via email and in-app engagements at scale. At the same time, it transitioned reactive responses to proactive approaches for various use cases like upsells, renewal reminders, and, most importantly, value communication.

The results of improved communication helped Griffin’s teams set up campaigns within the solution, enabling customers to act on emails and generating Calls-to-Action (CTAs) for Customer Success Managers (CSMs). Gainsight created better alignment by allowing both CSMs and CS leaders to view and manage all tasks in one place. This helped Acquia’s teams better manage their workflows and create more value-added views and reports in a centralized location. Overall, Gainsight created efficient collaboration among the groups and opened the doors to drive growth opportunities for customers.

Lastly, Griffin and her teams were motivated to leverage product utilization information and JO to proactively right-size customers that were over entitlements. Knowing that each entitlement conversation was also a prospect for expanded revenue, they used Gainsight to identify risks and engage early to ensure customers were properly sized on the Acquia platform.

Acquia has already benefited from the complementary integration of automation and the human touch of CS efforts, and it sees them as gateways to future results. Griffin envisions leveraging Gainsight as the vehicle for additional programs that will drive greater outcomes and success.

Open Rates

Acquia found tremendous value in email campaigns sent through Journey Orchestrator with exceptional open rates. According to Griffin, giving customers the convenience of in-email value-added content saves a lot of time and effort for CSMs. Depending on the program, open rates increased to between 40 and 85 percent, demonstrating a definitive ROI for customers and far exceeding industry averages.

Expansions

Griffin’s team found that growing or expanding a customer’s subscription could be as simple as sending the customer an email demonstrating value realization and asking questions like “Did you know Acquia offers X product?”. Customers can choose a provided link to learn more about a product and open a conversation with an Account Manager. This motion avoided leg work, providing leads to follow up on in CTAs.

These CTAs created incredible value. Additionally, proactive renewal reminder programs have resulted in a 12-point increase in renewal rates.

Upsells

Acquia’s use of Gainsight has created a robust upsell program. This collaboration has led to at least $1M in new pipeline from their upsell-specific programs. Further, Gaisight’s use has led to another advantageous pursuit—white space mapping. This methodology has allowed Acquia to expand its customers into other product areas.

“We do a lot of what we call white space mapping with our accounts. We have a big digital experience platform that allows us to offer many different solutions to our customers. For example, are you just using Acquia Cloud [Platform] today? Well, we have an opportunity to expand you into all the other areas of our DXP.”

Entitlements

One area that particularly challenged Acquia’s CS teams was entitlements. Previously, when customers were over their entitlement limits, the organization sent several email reminders that focused on the subscription and action required. Customers were dissatisfied with the communication method and message, so the team started personalizing their efforts in Gainsight.

They created a story with a CTA click embedded in the email, which presented an offer to customers to have a meeting to better understand their usage. Customers felt compelled to click on the CTA and engage with Acquia’s experts. This led to more positive outcomes and ultimately provided a better partnership with their customers. “It makes me feel really good because I know we’re trying to do right by our customers and proactively communicate with them,” Griffin shared.

Acquia is leaning into Gainsight’s newer features to further evolve its business goals, efforts, and outcomes. One such feature, AI Cheat Sheet, is a good example. AI Cheat Sheet is a Gainsight AI feature that quickly summarizes critical customer data, enhancing preparation and responsiveness to evolving customer needs and risks. Griffin sees it playing a pivotal role in their team’s executive involvement, management, and accountability process. Acquia has already begun leveraging Cheat Sheet and has seen almost instant value.

While AI Cheat Sheet has already proven its value, Acquia is eager to explore other Gainsight AI functionality, such as Write with AI, which provides AI-generated content aligned with CS use cases when drafting emails in Gainsight.

While some may have reservations about AI, Griffin sees it as an opportunity to enhance their operations and improve the lives of their teams and customers.

“I think just as far as making people’s lives easier, Gainsight has certainly improved that. From a leadership perspective, it makes me feel better and makes me feel certain that we are proactively communicating with all of our customers.”

Overall, Acquia has effectively used Gainsight to automate proactive customer communication at scale across use cases like upsells, renewals, and value realization, driving tangible business outcomes. Their efforts to drive a cohesive customer experience will continue to deliver new value to Acquia’s customers in the future.