In Brief
TrendMiner, a Software AG company, is a leading Industrial analytics software provider with a solid reputation for delivering innovative solutions. They needed a flexible, Digital CS approach that would deliver value to both customers and individual users at scale. Using Gainsight Customer Success (CS) and Gainsight Produce Experience (PX), they created a digital-led onboarding program that would lead customers to value quickly. They also implemented a one-to-many approach for end users by automating key touch points along the user journey, driven by adoption data from Gainsight PX. Together, these prescriptive adoption journeys helped the team deliver results on key metrics of customer health such as an increase in NPS by 35 points and an increase in initial user activation by 10%.
Challenge
In recent years, Software AG shifted their business to a subscription SaaS model. To maintain retention and prevent churn—and in doing so increase recurring revenue—they needed to deliver a great customer experience and help customers achieve value. Driving the customer journey for decision-making customers was of course an important priority, but Software AG also needed to account for their individual end users, who achieved value by different metrics.
For the TrendMiner team to better serve individual end users, they needed the ability to launch in-app engagements and set up onboarding tours from within the product. To be effective, those tools needed to be driven by complete and reliable adoption data. But after evaluating their current customer success platform, Software AG realized their existing systems were not sufficient to achieve their goals.
As our customer base grew, we needed more flexibility to set up the right health scoring mechanisms using information from different data sources. We wanted to give our CSMs CTAs that would enable long-term planning, rather than just firing off a bunch of tasks.
They also needed better product adoption data. Their current data collection was often incomplete. “We needed a more complete view of our users to understand which features delivered the most value and where they were encountering roadblocks,” says Jef Vanlaer.
To solve these challenges, Software AG switched to the Gainsight platform. Gainsight enabled them to see a 360-degree view of the customer and operationalize the customer journey with playbooks, success plans, and email templates, all while feeding adoption data back into customer health scores and the customer view. And the seamless integration between Gainsight’s products supercharged the effort.
Solution
The first task with Gainsight was determining how and when to engage with distinct customer and user journeys within TrendMiner. The customer journey consisted of onboarding a customer lead and then achieving first value with key users. But for the majority of end users, the adoption trajectory started later and followed a different set of touchpoints.
Using Gainsight CS and PX, they mapped both journeys. The customer journey was operationalized in Gainsight CS via playbooks and automated emails sent to key customer contacts. For end users, the journey also included in-app engagements delivered via Gainsight PX, with additional programs built in Gainsight CS’ Journey Orchestrator.
Robust usage data analysis from Gainsight informed both customer and user journeys.
“We lean very heavily on PX data for reports, scorecards, risk CTAs, and so on. And as a standalone product, Gainsight PX helps us to more effectively communicate to our end users, really meeting them where they are to make sure they get onboarded quickly,” said Vanlaer.
Impact
TrendMiner saw quick results by switching from email communications to in-app communications when engaging with end users. They were able to reach and engage more users with digital engagement content. Responses to their NPS survey increased 5X, and the response to their webinar registrations increased 3X.
In addition to receiving more engagement, Gainsight helped their end users become more satisfied with the product, as NPS results improved by 35 points.
These results show that we have really taken big steps in terms of helping our customers along on their journeys.
Gainsight also powered a new onboarding initiative that combined in-app engagements, weekly onboarding emails from Journey Orchestrator, and monthly webinars to increase product adoption.
“Combined with product improvements that were specifically done for initial user activation, we were able to reach a 10 percentage point increase in initial activation, which is high,” said Vanlaer.
Going forward, Vanlaer is looking forward to building on their Digital CS model with Gainsight. “We will continue to make our customers more self-service, replacing touchpoints with automation,” says Vanlaer.
Regardless of your CSM model I am really convinced that Digital CS is going to be at the core of customer success going forward.
