The old days when businesses were simply reactive are over. Customer success enables a business to be proactive and thus reduce churn to identify upsell opportunities and problems before they happen. Ideally, one of the best customer success solutions in Gainsight. Even before you can contact a customer success team and customer success managers, Gainsight comes in to act as your ideal Customer Success personal assistant.
Before you implement Gainsight, here’s how to make sure you plan your project to achieve high adoption. There are three things to consider from a change management perspective to achieve high adoption and make Gainsight yield satisfactory customer journeys:
- Enroll executives in endorsing Gainsight as the new customer success system, and commit to using it during weekly/monthly meetings with the team.
- Identify early adopters/champions in the implementation process. They should be involved in all status meetings and review sessions during the development. Finally, have them train the other users on the customer success solution when the development phase is complete. Gainsight has a lot of experience in “training the trainer” – leverage it! Soon enough, you will manage to get the whole organization aligned with customer success.
- Plan the project in a piecemeal approach. I recommend all my clients who wish to have better customer success to consider the following as factors in deciding scope.
FVD
For an easier customer success adoption, choose a process(es) that already exist and the users are well adapted to. Specifically speaking, pick a process where challenges exist and Gainsight could add significant value. By using this approach, the users only have to learn one thing – the new technology. This simplifies adoption and increases the chances of high adoption and instant high-value realization. With this, Gainsight helps in identifying upsell opportunities, flagging customers at risk, sending NPS surveys with calls to action, reducing churn, and monitoring CSM inputs.
Note: Try to pick a process that doesn’t have to rely on data outside of Salesforce (SFDC). This would ensure your first value delivered happens sooner rather than later.
Phase 2
This phase should ideally be timed for when users have already “warmed up” to Gainsight as the new customer success system. In other words, the users are comfortable using Gainsight and are already realizing the value. In this phase, you want to consider integrating NEW processes into Gainsight. The only ‘new’ thing that the users would have to learn at this stage is the new process or one new module for the customer journey since they are already used to the customer success software. For example Customer lifecycle (if you’ve never had those formalized and consistent prior to installing Gainsight), customer campaigns, etc.
External Data
I recommend dealing with external data in parallel to these phases. In an ideal situation, you first roll out the first two phases quickly without getting held up on external data shenanigans. Unless you have a data warehouse that’s squeaky clean and perfectly mapped to your Salesforce Account IDs. That being said, in my experience, you want to start with external data that’s easy to bring in. Here you want to consider starting off with Gainsight’s awesome connectors. If you have a Zendesk ticketing system – why not start there?! It’s easy and would provide you and the team with ample and immediate value. Next, if you have a data warehouse – not a bad place to start with at all. All other sources, trust me when I say, you want to pace yourself and take a piecemeal approach. The bottom line, Data integration does add a lot of value, but it could also get complicated very quickly. Start with simple, clean data sources if possible, and run the external data efforts in parallel to your phased project plan for business use cases whenever possible. If it’s not possible – hire a customer success manager to help you plan this aspect of your project ‘the right way’ and bring in the appropriate resources to make it as successful a project as possible.
Implementing Gainsight can be different depending on the systems you already have and the business you work within, if you have a different experience in implementing Gainsight or any questions then please leave a comment below! Similarly, if you know anyone who would find this information useful then please share this blog.
“Gainsight has always been a massively helpful resource for those who are interested or work in Customer Success… it helps to streamline our projects, correlate data, and is always on hand to help if you get stuck. We at CSM Practice wouldn’t use anything else.” – Irit Eizips, CEO, CSM Practice