How data.world dropped customer churn to zero one quarter after implementing Gainsight’s Risk CTAs and Scorecards

data.world is a cloud-native SaaS platform that combines a consumer-grade user experience with a powerful knowledge graph to deliver enhanced data discovery, agile data governance, and actionable insights. As a Certified B Corp and public benefit corporation, data.world also hosts the world’s largest collaborative open data community with more than two million members. data.world’s customer base was growing by leaps and bounds but their Customer Success team struggled to forecast issues with new and existing customers. In order to scale up to meet the challenge, they implemented Gainsight CS with a health score and risk CTA framework that identified risks earlier and led to increased customer retention.

Poor visibility into churn and unclear CTAs for risk mitigation

As a fast growing startup, data.world’s Customer Success team struggled to quantify its impact without a system in place to accurately measure and improve customer health.

“We had tripled in size, but we had no dedicated customer success tool—we were managing substantial ARR in spreadsheets and other CRM tools,” explains Carson Stones, Senior Customer Success Director, Strategy and Operations at data.world. 

Because they lacked great tools, they had little visibility into customer health and churn, which led to inaccurate forecasts.

There were several attempts to create a recurring risk mitigation meeting, but without a single source of truth for customer data, it was hard to align on the key indicators of customer churn and to assign ownership for appropriate risk mitigation activities. They needed a better way to analyze customer health, so they turned to Gainsight CS.

Weekly risk meetings driven by Gainsight data

The breakthrough came after their Gainsight Admin built a scorecard with 28 automated signals powered by integrations with core customer-facing tools including Gong, Jira, and Slack. Once their Gainsight Timeline started auto-populating with a wide range of customer data from multiple sources, that changed the game for the whole organization.

“Our team collaborated closely with our talented Operations Team to develop a sophisticated forecasting tool using an algorithmic scorecard created in Gainsight, which includes CSM sentiment, usage, support ticket sentiment, and any identified threats,” explains Stones.

Being able to algorithmically weight factors in the health score was a big deal. For example, threats were a major issue. “If we learned that certain factors were involved in an RFP cycle with an existing customer, it didn’t matter how many other positive criteria they had,” Stones said. “Those specific factors turned the whole account red which triggered an all-hands on deck effort to mitigate the underlying risk factors. That was a statistically significant signal for us that we now had a playbook to address thanks to Gainsight.”

How did GS’s Health Scores and CTAs inform the insights that drove the actions of the team? 

“I’ve been impressed at the engagement from others in our organization and how they have risen to the occasion, asking good questions and digging deeper into the root causes because we’re all genuinely curious and passionate about our customers.”

“With Gainsight, our team can confidently present unbiased, quantitative risk signals visually through dashboards,” Stones says. That has allowed our partners throughout the business to start asking more sophisticated questions such as “Can we put a dollar amount on this specific risk, and does it impact the overall health of the account? Does that customer’s CSM feel that the automated scorecard accurately reflects the health of the account? And most importantly, what is the cost/benefit to the organization to take the CSM’s recommended steps to mitigate the identified risk?”

Saved revenue equivalent to 15% of ARR

Accurate health score data and regular risk CTA updates proved to be a major turning point, not only for the Customer Success team, but also for the company as a whole. Compared with Q1 2023, the CX team was able to significantly reduce customer churn in Q2 and Q3 with a total risk mitigation for the year equivalent to 15% of total ARR.

“Now that we have these really sophisticated scorecards, there are considerably fewer surprises,” Stones says. “All of those risk signals are front and center for us now.”

Using Gainsight data has also had significant network effects. “I was so pleased when I noticed that people outside the CS organization were using the same customer-success language that we’ve been using for years.”

Stones looks forward to growing their customer success capabilities with Gainsight, utilizing not only the Gainsight platform, but also their thought leadership, best practices, and other community resources. “I have an affinity for Gainsight that I do not have for any other tool,” says Stones. “There’s just something magical about the community they’ve created through Pulse. Before Gainsight, I had no idea how many other CSMs were out there struggling with the same challenges that my team was. So it’s hard to describe what it was like discovering that such a community not only existed, but was thriving.

Gainsight’s AI capabilities have also delivered value for data.world. “Gainsight does AI very well,” Stones says. ”It’s one of the best tools I’ve seen yet, and I use it as an example of good in-tool AI all the time.” He uses Gainsight’s AI Cheat Sheet regularly and is “extremely excited to start automating some of our risk reporting with AI-driven insights from call transcripts, CSD sentiment, and health scores”.

“I couldn’t go back at this point— Now that I’ve used Gainsight, I can’t imagine running a modern Customer Success organization without it.”