The Essential Guide to

Customer Experience

At Gainsight, we think about customer success across two vectors. They’re interconnected so deeply that we can talk about them separately, but practically, they can’t be separated. Those vectors are the customer’s experience and the customer’s outcomes. Together, they equal customer success, or as expressed as an equation:

CS = CX + CO

Because each one is impacted through every interaction your customers have with your company—both in the product and out—they’ll always be intrinsically linked. But they can be understood individually using this two-by-two.

The top-right and bottom-left quadrants are pretty self-explanatory. If you have great outcomes and experiences, you’re doing great! If they’re both bad, you need to fix them—fast. But many companies find themselves in one of the other two quadrants, and each presents unique challenges and opportunities.

We see this scenario often: you have fantastic relationships with your customers. They rave about you, they seem happy, they leave good reviews online, and then… they churn. Often without warning. It doesn’t matter how great your experience is; if you’re not delivering on your customers’ desired outcomes, it’s just a matter of time before they leave. You can read all about how to get your customers to those outcome in the Essential Guide to Customer Success.

But we need to talk about the inverse: when your customers are achieving their desired outcomes but they have a negative customer experience.

This is a common scenario. You’re getting what you paid for, maybe you’re seeing good or even great returns on your investment. But it’s frustrating. Maybe the product or service is just really challenging to use, maybe your interactions with the vendor are difficult or unsatisfying. You feel trapped. This is a common feeling with ISPs, insurance companies, and utilities. In any market where there’s either not a lot of competition or the friction to leaving is high, you’ll often run into this issue.

But if this is your market, why should you care if your customers feel trapped? If they’re renewing and the revenue is there, should you invest in improving experience?

Without an elite customer experience in place, your customers may renew, but they won’t expand. This bears out in the data. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most common feedback metrics for benchmarking (among other things) customer experience. It turns out that NPS doesn’t correlate to churn at all, but it does correlate to growth—specifically a high NPS score indicates an opportunity and likelihood to expand.

Growth through expansion is one of the most important upsides to the subscription business model. In business-to-business, this is even further amplified. As your customers grow and become more profitable, they should be scaling alongside you. But if they don’t like doing business with you, they will not grow their investment proportionally. In fact, they’re more likely just biding their time until they can either accomplish what you sell them internally (a build vs. buy scenario) or until you’re disrupted by competition.

On top of that, poor CX hurts your ability to sell to new customers as well. After all, when was the last time you gave a great online review to a business where you had a bad experience? Online reviews are a cornerstone of any buyer’s journey in this era—regardless of market. Investing in CX will 100% have cascading benefits on new logo acquisition in addition to expansion within your customer base.

Oracle conducted research on the effect of CX and found that:

• 46% of consumers were pleased when an organization responded to a customer’s negative comment.
• 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.
• 24% of consumers who had unsatisfactory service interactions shared their experiences through social networks in 2010.

What does it mean to invest in CX

It’s one thing to say the customer’s experience is important, but how do you operationalize it? It’s all about feedback. You can’t simply tell your teammates to improve CX without having a roadmap for doing that, and the process is simple:

• Listen to your customers.
• Act on their feedback.
• Analyze the results.
• Iterate and reiterate.

A business that is deeply committed CX with every interaction is necessarily process-driven about engaging with customers through these four steps—across all functions, roles, and hierarchies.

What does it mean to invest in CX

It’s one thing to say the customer’s experience is important, but how do you operationalize it? It’s all about feedback. You can’t simply tell your teammates to improve CX without having a roadmap for doing that, and the process is simple:

1. Listen to your customers.
2. Act on their feedback.
3. Analyze the results.
4. Iterate and reiterate.

A business that is deeply committed CX with every interaction is necessarily process-driven about engaging with customers through these four steps—across all functions, roles, and hierarchies. To invest in CX is to invest in the processes whereby each teammate can get feedback on every interaction with the customer, understand where you’re succeeding or failing, follow prescriptive playbooks to solve the problem, close the loop with the customer, and repeat the process to benchmark progress.

How CX strategy relates to CS strategy

Your CX strategy needs to be deeply integrated to your CS strategy. In many companies, CX is owned largely by Marketing teams as a function of their proficiency with one-to-many communications systems. But the natural home of CX from a goal perspective lies with the department whose job it is to deepen and strengthen customer relationships—in other words, the customer owner should own CX. In most modern companies, that means the Customer Success team.

With the right tools, a CS team is better equipped to collect feedback at key touchpoints and put it into action with zero layers of abstraction at each interaction. They’re the closest to the customer and have the highest leverage on key CX metrics (we’ll cover those metrics further on in the Guide).

Closing the gap between CX and CS has tons of downstream benefits for enhancing customer outcomes as well. You’ll get the answers to critical questions like:

• Is our product easy to consume?
• Are we truly creating value?
• How do you define success?
• Are we helping you achieve that definition?

Those answers help you prioritize actions, get prescriptive with customers, and deepen the specificity of your customer interactions. But it’s important that CX—like CS—doesn’t get pigeonholed as a purely departmental activity. CX is what happens at every interaction your customer has with your company. That means Support needs to be aligned. Sales & Marketing need to be aligned. Above all, Product teams need to be aligned. Your most consistent and meaningful interactions are happening inside the product. Are your product managers on the same page as your CX managers?

Read our Essential Guide on Product Experience to get best practices for ensuring CX inside the product.

When we talk about CX processes we’re talking about a lot of different actions:

• Conducting surveys
• Analyzing data
• Developing playbooks
• Running those playbooks
• And more

But it doesn’t help to start with the tactical if you don’t have a holistic strategy in place. We’ve broken it all a simple, three-step strategy that can serve as a foundation for your CX tactics.

• Feedback: Capture insightful feedback by giving your customers frequent opportunities to submit feedback.
• Workflows: Follow up promptly so customers know that they are heard. Quicker response to customer feedback results in a greater impact.
• Insights: Assess progress against goals and measure improvement to keep the program on track.

None of this is possible without technology. At Gainsight, we’re not agnostic to that fact, but this Guide won’t serve to push our products on you. However, it does assume that you’ll need software tools to accomplish even the barest minimum. At various stages of scale, different toolsets will have different advantages and disadvantages. But that is the key word: scale.

In a face-to-face retail environment, one human can just ask every customer how they’re doing, how their experience is, whether they’ll come back, etc. You could even read it on their face. That’s not the world we live in anymore—even in retail! CX software automate repetitive tasks, from reaching out to thousands of customers to aggregating feedback.

Okay, if you’ve read this far, be warned: we’re about to make a software recommendation in good faith. There are lots of tech tools out there to bolster your CX processes. So far we’ve been 100% focused on pure best practices you can do regardless of your company size, scale, or tech stack.

But Gainsight CS is our preferred CS platform—it’s the one we use ourselves here at Gainsight with all of our customers, and it works really well.

It’s because Gainsight CS is an end-to-end, purpose-built CS platform. It’s more than just a survey builder. It’s a suite of applications that enable companies of all sizes to close the loop, act on feedback, and work towards proactively and consistently delivering a great customer experience. In fact, Gainsight CS is often the best place to start building a unified, companywide customer success strategy.

Gainsight CS was created with the best practices we’ve talked about thus far in mind:

Feedback: Gainsight CS combines visual journey orchestration with powerful automation to trigger personalized outreach at scale, drive higher response rates, and capture more insightful feedback.

• Scale customer feedback programs by building end-to-end workflows in Journey Orchestrator.
• Create high quality, personalized outreaches with native survey builder and email capabilities.
• Execute closed-loop processes by triggering the right type of follow-up, either human or automated, depending on the specifics of the response.
• Collect and understand both qualitative (raw text replies, manual meeting notes, call transcripts) or quantitative (NPS, CSAT, etc.) feedback.
• Listen to indirect (3rd-party sources like G2 and Salesforce) and behavioral signals (usage data, adoption, support tickets through built-in connectors).

Workflows: With Gainsight CS’s cross-functional Playbooks, your team can quickly close the loop with customers to drive improvements in customer satisfaction and retention, as well as take advantage of upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

• Follow up with detractors or turn positive experiences into positive reviews, advocacy, or new references with best-practice playbooks.
• Make life easy for your team with pre-populated email templates and playbook tasks.
• Set goals on follow-up actions and report out with portfolio-level reporting.

B2B CS vs. B2C CS

We’ve been talking explicitly throughout this guide about B2B, but the reality is there’s a lot of overlap between B2B and B2C CS in theory and practice. But there are also some key differences, and we’ve built Gainsight CS specifically to address those variables in a way that’s pretty unique in the marketplace. Here’s an example we can all relate to that crystalizes both the difference between B2B and B2C CS as well as where Gainsight CS has a an advantage over B2C point solutions.

Let’s say you have a pretty negative experience boarding a flight. It’s delayed, you’re mistreated or stereotyped, they downgraded you or moved your seat. You can tweet the airline, who can understand and triage your complaint, credit you with a bunch of frequent flier miles, and tweet or dm back to you what they’ve done—and this could all happen before the flight takes off! And that’s scalable through technology for simple problems at an individual level.

But CS challenges in B2B are almost never as simple as one person experiencing bad service on an individual case-by-case basis. In B2B, you’ll be getting multiple signals through disparate channels that point to a complex root cause that requires cross-functional coordination to solve. Gainsight CS is unique among CS and CX solutions in that it’s purpose-built to understand and diagnose the root cause of account-level CS issues and run cross-functional playbooks to solve them.

Insights: Powerful reporting capabilities let you identify trends in your business, optimize feedback programs, and prioritize strategic investments.

• Report out on a wide-range of survey metrics including NPS, CSAT, Customer Effort Score, and more
• Leverage customer health scorecards to turn raw feedback into customer health.
• Use sentiment analysis to understand what drives promoters and detractors.