How Gainsight Helped Devo Demonstrate the Value of Community and Gain Internal Buy-in

Devo Technology, the security data analytics company, was looking to build an online customer community that would support their customer lifecycle. They took a two-pronged, holistic approach. On the one hand, their community would directly help customers navigate specific stages like sales, onboarding, and support. At the same time, community would become a tool for internal teams that would turbocharge their efforts. Using Gainsight Customer Communities, Devo delivered on this vision, creating a community called Devo Connect that achieved measurable value and optimized the customer experience.

Devo Technology’s real-time security data platform serves as the foundation for their customers’ security operations. When Juan Del Rio, Head of Community at Devo, was building the Devo Connect community, he knew that those customers were looking for a reliable source of information about Devo’s products. “One of our big pain points was that customers were unaware of changes to the platform and didn’t have an easy way to find out when something new was introduced,” Del Rio explains.

Devo needed a way to centralize information and then distribute it in ways that were intuitive and helpful. “When you are sending information to customers via email chains, a lot gets lost,” Del Rio says. He wanted Devo Connect to become the go-to source for product information to provide value to customers in a one-to-many motion.

It was also important that the community serve the needs of Devo’s internal teams. “We wanted a community that was not just for customers, but also for our internal people to share their perspectives and use cases,” Del Rio said. “Whenever a customer gets in touch and comes up with something you’ve never heard of before, that’s brand new information and our internal teams can really use that.”

Del Rio wanted the community to become a source of value for stakeholders throughout the company. “I wanted the community to become the best answer for the challenges that our teams face,” he says. “Whenever a team—whether it’s Support, Product, Sales, or someone else—is overburdened, the community is gonna be your answer.”

To help bring his community vision to life, Del Rio leveraged Gainsight Customer Communities.

Devo used Gainsight CC to execute a holistic vision for the customer experience, providing support at every stage of the customer journey from pre-sales to onboarding to expansion. In fact, as soon as a customer enters the sales process, Devo introduces them to the community. “The community becomes their primary means of communication, and by the time they’re onboarded they’re ready to go and fully trained,” Del Rio explains.

“If you start your community story when a customer onboards, it’s already too late. You’re going to be fighting uphill,” says Del Rio. “But if you introduce the community the moment a prospect starts talking to the company, you start training them from the get-go to be engaged and become participants.”

This strategy has already paid off for Devo. After launching Gainsight CC, Devo saw engagement scores increase across their client base. For one client (referred to here as Client X), engagement increased by 133% after the launch of Gainsight CC.

New Tools for the Sales Team

For the Sales team, Del Rio defined a pre-customer role within Gainsight. As soon as one of their sales professionals is engaged with a customer and it’s going well, they can invite the customer to the community. There, the customer can see what other people are saying and how quickly they’re getting information and support. Gainsight has also enabled them to fully integrate the community with their CRM.

“When you’re buying a product, one of the first things you do is look for reviews and find out how people are talking about the product. For Sales, that can be a minefield,” says Del Rio. “Instead of prospects going to Reddit to learn about a product, send them to your community where you know every interaction is going to be positive.”

Empowering Customer Success

For Customer Success, Gainsight CC has become a powerful one-to-many communication tool. “Anytime a CSM gets a question they can’t answer off the top of their head, they can ask it in the community or instruct the customer on how to ask it,” Del Rio says. “That also trains customers to start engaging with the community directly.” This motion has had demonstrable results across Devo’s customer base. For example, Client X asked 200% more questions after the launch of the Devo community.

Gainsight also enables a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to ask a question for a customer and then tag them. “The customer is going to get the answer immediately—and the CSM is going to have another success story to tell.”

Gainsight helps the Devo community provide everyone, internally and externally, with a single repository for information. With Gainsight’s federated search tool, users can search multiple content sources. “You don’t have to send someone 15 different links or to three different websites,” Del Rio says. “And of course, they get the answers more quickly.” Additionally, they created a community dashboard within Gainsight so that CSMs have visibility into everything that’s happening.

Del Rio also used Gainsight to rebuild Devo’s onboarding template, putting the community front and center as the main resource for customers as they start learning the product. “One of the things I started reporting on was how many members each CSM got onboarded in the previous month. And that started a little competition among the CSMs!” Del Rio says. Del Rio uses Gainsight to send automated emails to customers throughout the lifecycle. They also have an incentive program to encourage community champions to invite their colleagues into the community.

Opening Up Communication for Product Teams

Community has been key in helping Devo’s Product team communicate more clearly with customers. They use the community to distribute release notes to customers, and then gather their feedback as it rolls in. “Giving Product access to a dedicated group of engaged customers has been a goldmine,” Del Rio says.

Community has also created a channel to inform Product teams about customer-generated use cases. “When customers take a completed product and then use it to accomplish something completely unexpected, that’s something the Product team needs to know about.”

To facilitate communication between Product and the community, Del Rio created a dedicated Slack channel connected with Gainsight. “There’s a Slack integration in Gainsight where you can feed new content from the community as it comes in,” Del Rio says. “That’s how we get the Product team engaged.”

They’ve also used Gainsight to create user groups for specific use cases. They typically invite the most active people in a sub-topic to participate in a user group in order to obtain the most valuable feedback. “When we want to beta test a new product that hasn’t come out, or we’re building a new resource that we’ve never done before, we use community to get early feedback so we can modify it before release,” explains Del Rio.

Support: Fast, Permanent, and Searchable

Support is one of the most important functions of Devo’s community. Devo helps customers with a mix of company-generated and peer-to-peer answers. Once a question has been answered in the community, they use Gainsight to transform it into permanent, searchable content. “The content becomes a resource for anybody else that finds that problem and they no longer have to open a support ticket,” says Del Rio. “The Support team is working smarter, not harder.” This is evidenced by a Client X reducing support tickets by 55%.

New support-related posts or replies are sent to a dedicated Support Slack channel integrated with Gainsight. “The Support team is constantly notified,” Del Rio explains. “They can click directly on the questions in the community or have a conversation in the Slack channel with other SMEs (subject matter experts) to figure out what the best answer is.”

Gainsight has helped the Devo community support and accelerate the sales process. “Participants in the community usually turn into a sale, and we track that,” Del Rio says. “When a community-using prospect turns into a customer, I know that we did a good job.”

For the CSMs, the community is constantly generating positive touchpoints that help them manage customer sentiment and execute more successful customer calls. The community arms CSMs with the information they need to manage the customer relationship from onboarding to renewal to expansion.

For Product, community has helped the company create a feedback loop, helping them build more customer-centric products. Being able to beta test and gain customer feedback before a product is released adds substantial value.

For Support, the community drives ticket deflection, lowering costs for the team and allowing them to focus on more high-value tasks. Del Rio says, “The Support team gets fewer questions in their queue, which means they don’t get behind on conducting investigations into bigger picture issues.”

Community has become a trusted partner for other customer-facing teams within the organization. And customers are achieving more value from Devo’s products.

With help from Gainsight Customer Communities, Devo Connect will continue to become the central component of Devo’s customer hub and lifecycle.