How Menlo Security Used Gainsight to Automate and Optimize Customer Success

Browser security leader Menlo Security is trusted by their customers to protect them from cyber threats. But while they understand their customers’ security needs very well, they needed to find a more efficient way to engage with customers and gain visibility into their product usage. Using Gainsight Customer Success (CS), Menlo Security enhanced their customers’ experience by automating many customer success processes, including NPS surveys and health scoring. As a result, their CSMs are working more efficiently and serving their customers more effectively, and NPS responses have increased along with an NPS improvement of 17% YoY.

The Menlo Security Customer Success team was saddled with several outdated, manual processes.

“Our existing NPS process was very, very manual, with a lot of rules you had to use to construct a list of customer emails using an Excel spreadsheet,” recalls Ben Wanless, Customer Success Operations Lead at Menlo Security. “Then you had to manually exclude certain emails according to certain criteria—it was just a big headache.”

Customer health scoring was also a challenge. They were looking for a way to take the guesswork out of assembling a health score and make the best use of their existing customer data.

Finally, the Customer Success team needed to implement a customer success qualified lead (CSQL) program for their CSMs, who wanted to be attributed for the work they were doing with customers when they discovered a new expansion opportunity.

To solve these challenges, Menlo Security turned to Gainsight CS.

Automation

Menlo Security used Gainsight CS to revamp and automate their NPS process. Now, their contact list lives in Gainsight and all they have to do to assemble a survey is to create the right set of filters. Gainsight automation also allows them to send out NPS surveys on a monthly basis, whereas before they were sending them out manually every six months.

Their CSMs also lean on automation with Gainsight Journey Orchestrator, automating customer communications for their digital segment of customers who do not have an assigned CSM. This allows the team to have regular outreach, such as welcome letters and renewal notices, without taking valuable time away from other customer activities.

Health Scoring

Several Gainsight capabilities have helped Menlo Security give their customer health score a makeover.

First, Wanless has used the Custom Objects tool in Gainsight to better understand how their users are consuming their services. “Custom Objects have been incredibly useful for our product usage data,” Wanless says. “Product usage has a heavy weighting in our health score, so the model we created for product usage in Gainsight really helps us understand overall health.”

Gainsight’s AI Scorecard functionality has also been a game changer for Menlo Security. Using this tool, they are able to get AI-recommended measures and measure weights for their scorecard, helping to better capture and understand customer usage and giving them a clearer picture of the customer.

“The AI Scorecard is like AI wizardry for our health scores. Optimizing my scorecards with AI helped demystify what metrics to include to accurately see a customer’s health by recommending data points that weren’t currently included in the scorecard; for example, support ticket creation,” says Wanless. “These recommendations took the guesswork out of what to include, and enabled us to have quality health data.”

They have also used Gainsight to implement a clear CSQL process. Now, their CSMs collaborate with the Sales team on expansion and renewal opportunities, and they have metrics that reflect their contributions.

Since adopting Gainsight, Menlo Security has seen a 17% increase in NPS year-over-year.

“We have seen a really good steady improvement in NPS,” Wanless says. “We use the NPS analytics section in Gainsight, and it shows us the trend line really easily – in this case, going up and to the right. And the number of responses increased, as well.”

Their new Gainsight-powered NPS system is also more transparent to CSMs, who now know when their accounts are getting surveyed. Throughout the year, they receive continuous NPS information instead of just once every six months.

Thanks to Gainsight, heath scoring has become more data-driven and clear—and requires a lot less work by the Customer Success team.

“Having a mathematical, scientific approach to health scoring is just phenomenal,” Wanless says. “We can now do this in Gainsight, but had previously worked with our Business Intelligence team to manually update the health score. It’s interesting because they found the same results that Gainsight AI Scorecard did, which is a real validation for Gainsight.”

Wanless and his team are looking forward to implementing more Gainsight CS features in the future. One of their high priorities is launching a customer advocacy program. “I saw that Gainsight has rolled out the Person 360 feature, which is really cool,” says Wanless. “I would love to do more work with helping our team identify our customer advocates.”

As Menlo Security continues to grow its customer base, they will continue using Gainsight CS to better understand their customers and deliver the best possible customer experience.