How Info-Tech Research Group Gained Customer Visibility with CSP and Product Analytics

Info-Tech Research Group is a leading global research and advisory firm, serving over 30,000 professionals worldwide. Their unbiased, highly relevant research helps business leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions.

Because Info-Tech’s business model is driven by conversations and relationships rather than software usage, many customer health metrics used by software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies are not as effective when measuring customer success. They needed a different approach.

Jim Dunlavey, VP, Customer Success, at Info-Tech Research Group, explained the challenge: “Our use case really is unique in that our product isn’t software, but rather the guidance and insight we provide. Gainsight has delivered flexibility for our needs where more transactional, SaaS-based tools can’t.”

Using a combination of Gainsight CS and Gainsight PX, Info-Tech built a bespoke customer success strategy that deepened engagement and uncovered actionable insights, helping them adapt to client needs and industry changes.

Info-Tech Research Group is a research and advisory firm whose “product” is consultative conversations with their clients, supported by proprietary research and other resources.

They needed a customer success strategy that would help them track the effectiveness of customer engagements across multiple internal teams, as well as to help them understand how their customers were using Info-Tech’s valuable research.

Dunlavey highlighted the visibility challenges Info-Tech faced, explaining, “We asked our business leaders, how well can you see what your clients are actually doing? And how do you measure how well or poorly you’ve been managing those clients? They told us that Salesforce alone couldn’t give them that visibility.”

To solve the challenge of visualizing customer health, Info-Tech created customized dashboards and reporting in Gainsight that provided a 360-degree view of every client. They used advanced features like the Gainsight Rules Engine to track customer actions and understand how their clients were using their memberships.

Dunlavey explained how they use Gainsight: “The way we architect our data is very drill-down driven, which can’t always be captured in Salesforce because it mostly visualizes simple parent-child relationships. Gainsight enables us to view customer engagement throughout our organization, from managing partners to advisors, and every level in between.”

Now, every customer-facing team within Info-Tech has the power to see the total picture of their book of business. Gainsight’s robust data capabilities have been integral in creating that picture by weaving together all of their client data.

Dunlavey shared how they use Gainsight: “The Horizon rules have given us essentially unlimited flexibility. We can store and link things together, which is the key to consistency. We have probably 30 or 40 different objects that we’re pulling over from Salesforce—and we tie it together in Gainsight.”

Gainsight also enables them to visualize company-wide trends across different business lines. For example, they used dashboards to analyze the outcomes of their benchmarking business. Now, they have real data that they use to pitch the service to new customers.

“Our research analysts and consultants help our clients renegotiate their vendor contracts,” Dunlavey explained. “There was an anecdotal understanding of how much money we’d saved for our clients. But when we built a dashboard that showed real numbers, it was a game changer. We have been able to use the Gainsight dashboard to grow that business.”

Another advantage of Gainsight dashboards is their real-time updates, ensuring that information remains current, centralized, and accessible across teams. Unlike Salesforce, where varied filters can lead to fragmented or skewed data views, Gainsight offers a more consistent, standardized approach to data visualization. This consistency helps eliminate silos and keeps everyone aligned with accurate, actionable insights.

Tracking Website Usage With Gainsight PX

Gainsight also helped Info-Tech understand how clients were using their research content. Using Gainsight PX, they tagged all user interactions within their website as custom events and then sent that data to Gainsight CS.

The Customer Success team could then see exactly how each member was interacting with the research, which allowed them to identify customer needs and better manage the customer journey.

“Gainsight PX is a huge factor for understanding website usage—we know all the transaction level details. I can see all customer activity very quickly,” Dunlavey shared.

Gainsight PX empowers Marketing and Product Management teams to seamlessly engage clients with targeted pop-ups and in-app messages, creating impactful campaigns that drive interaction and value. With real-time visibility into campaign outcomes, the Customer Success team gets insights within Gainsight CS so they can deliver valuable feedback, closing the loop with Marketing. This cross-functional collaboration, fueled by the Grainsight’s products suite, maximizes collective impact and enhances operational efficiency across the organization.

Gainsight has been adopted widely within Info-Tech. They have hundreds of active users across the Sales, Marketing, Research, and Product teams, in addition to Customer Success. So far, they have achieved an 89% average adoption rate among enabled users.

The widespread adoption of Gainsight is evidence of its scalability. They can quickly onboard anyone onto Gainsight and get them working with a great set of data. “Gainsight feels infinitely scalable,” Dunlavey said.

Gainsight PX data has enabled Info-Tech to tailor their product and marketing strategies based on real user behavior and preferences. And the integration of PX usage data into the Gainsight CS platform helps Customer Success make informed decisions by aligning user behavior insights with customer management strategies, ensuring that all engagements are timely and relevant.

Furthermore, the combination of Gainsight CS and PX has facilitated collaboration among Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, Research, Engineering and Product. Now, they are all working from a single source of truth, which gives them strategic consistency that enhances customer experience and satisfaction.

“With Gainsight, everyone is looking at the same information the same way. So there’s no question as to whether it’s accurate or not,” Dunlavey explained.

Going forward, Info-Tech is looking to continue scaling Gainsight into other areas of their business. For example, they plan to leverage Success Plans to support their Global Services team, who provide coaching and advice for their clients. Gainsight will provide them actionable insights they can use day-to-day.

They are also planning to scale the use of Gainsight to optimize their performance at conferences and other events. By creating a calendar of attendees at each global event, they have created Gainsight dashboards that give customer-facing folks visibility into their clients’ activities, so they can better plan and manage face-to-face interactions.

As a core use case, Info-Tech plans to continue using Gainsight to visualize a full picture of the customer. Dunlavey concluded: “We are able to really stitch client data in a way that holds the whole thing together. Gainsight is the only reason we’ve been able to do what we’ve been able to do.”