Gainsight

What is Gainsight

Gainsight is a leading software platform for Customer Success and Product Experience. The main purpose of the tool is to help businesses understand their customers better, reduce the number of customers who leave (churn), and find opportunities to grow revenue from existing customers. It combines data from many sources to give a complete view of each customer. Gainsight was founded in 2009, originally as JBara Software. The company is a major player in the customer success industry and has its headquarters in San Francisco, California. It provides tools for customer success managers (CSMs), product managers, and community managers to work together to improve the customer journey.

Gainsight Features

• Customer Health Scores: This feature lets you create a score to measure the health of each customer account. You can use data like product usage, support tickets, and survey responses. This helps teams focus on customers who are at risk.
• 360° Customer View: It gathers all customer information into one place. This includes contact details, communication history, support issues, and usage data. It gives a full picture of the customer relationship.
• Automated Playbooks: You can create standardized processes for your customer success team. For example, you can set up automated steps for onboarding new customers or for when a customer's health score drops. This ensures consistent service.
• Product Experience (PX): This module allows you to create in-app guides, announcements, and surveys. It helps you understand how users interact with your product and guide them to valuable features.
• Journey Orchestrator: This tool helps you map out the entire customer lifecycle, from onboarding to renewal. You can automate communications and tasks at key moments in the customer's journey.
• Reporting and Analytics: Gainsight provides powerful dashboards and reports. You can track key metrics like churn rate, net revenue retention (NRR), and customer satisfaction. This helps measure the impact of your customer success efforts.
• Surveys and Feedback: You can build and send surveys, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys, to collect direct feedback from your customers.
• AI-Powered Insights: The platform uses artificial intelligence to analyze data. It can predict which customers are likely to churn, identify upsell opportunities, and automate tasks for CSMs.

Gainsight Pricing Plans

Gainsight does not list specific prices on its website. The pricing is customized based on the size of the company, the number of users, and the specific products or features required. They typically offer different packages tailored to the needs of various businesses.

• Starter Packages: These are designed for smaller companies or those just beginning to build their customer success program. They include the essential features to get started.
• Professional Packages: Aimed at mid-sized companies that need more advanced features, more customization, and integrations.
• Enterprise Packages: For large organizations with complex needs. These plans offer the full suite of Gainsight products, advanced security, and dedicated support.

To get pricing information, interested companies must contact the Gainsight sales team for a custom quote and a demonstration of the platform.

Gainsight Free Plan

Gainsight does not offer a free plan or a free trial. The platform is designed for mid-market and enterprise companies and requires a significant setup and integration process. Instead of a free trial, Gainsight offers personalized demos where their team shows how the product can work for your specific business needs.

How to use Gainsight

Getting started with Gainsight involves a few key steps to properly set up the platform for your team.

1. Integrate Your Data: The first step is to connect Gainsight to your other systems. This includes your CRM (like Salesforce), help desk software (like Zendesk), and product analytics tools. This creates the 360° customer view.
2. Configure Health Scores: Define what a 'healthy' customer looks like for your business. Set up rules to score customers based on factors like product usage, survey feedback, and number of support tickets.
3. Build Customer Journeys: Use the Journey Orchestrator to map out the key stages of your customer's lifecycle. Create automated emails, tasks, and alerts for stages like onboarding, training, and renewal.
4. Create Automated Playbooks: Design playbooks for your CSMs to follow in common situations. For example, create a playbook for when a customer's health score turns red, with clear steps to take.
5. Engage with Users: Use Gainsight PX to create in-app messages to guide users or collect feedback through surveys.
6. Monitor and Analyze: Regularly check your dashboards to track key metrics. Use the reports to understand customer trends and the performance of your customer success team.

Pros and Cons of Gainsight

Pros:

• Comprehensive Platform: It offers a very wide range of features for customer success, product experience, and community management.
• Highly Customizable: The platform can be configured to meet the specific needs of almost any business.
• Powerful Analytics: Its reporting and data analysis capabilities are very strong, providing deep insights into customer health.
• Strong Community: Gainsight has a large community of users and offers many resources, including training and events like Pulse.
• Scalable: It is built to support the needs of large enterprise companies with many customers.

Cons:

• Complex Implementation: Setting up Gainsight can be a long and complicated process that requires dedicated resources.
• High Cost: The price can be very high, making it unsuitable for small businesses or startups.
• Steep Learning Curve: Users may need significant training to learn how to use all of the platform's features effectively.
• Can be Slow: Some users report that the platform can be slow to load, especially with large amounts of data.

Gainsight integrations

Gainsight offers a wide range of integrations to connect with other tools in your technology stack. This allows you to create a single source of truth for all customer data.

• Salesforce: A deep, bi-directional integration allows for seamless data sharing between your CRM and customer success platform.
• Zendesk: Pulls in support ticket data to include in customer health scores and the 360° view.
• Jira: Connects customer feedback and issues directly to your product development workflow.
• Slack: Sends real-time notifications and alerts to your team's Slack channels.
• Marketo: Aligns customer success activities with marketing automation campaigns.
• HubSpot: Integrates with HubSpot CRM to sync customer data and activities.
• Snowflake: Connects to your data warehouse to bring in large datasets for analysis.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365: Syncs data with Microsoft's CRM platform.

Integrations are typically set up in the administration section of the Gainsight platform.

Gainsight Alternatives

• Catalyst: A popular alternative that is known for its modern and intuitive user interface. It is often considered easier to set up and use than Gainsight, making it a good choice for fast-growing tech companies.
• ChurnZero: This platform focuses heavily on automation and real-time engagement. It is designed to help CSMs manage a large number of accounts by automating personalized communication.
• ClientSuccess: A more straightforward and user-friendly platform focused on core customer success management. It is a good option for teams that need a simple, effective tool without the complexity of Gainsight.
• Totango: Known for its modular approach. It uses 'SuccessBLOCs,' which are pre-built templates for different customer success goals, making it easier to get started and show value quickly.

Gainsight API

Gainsight provides a robust set of REST APIs that allow developers to programmatically interact with the platform. This enables custom integrations and allows you to push or pull data from Gainsight into other applications. To use the API, you need to be a Gainsight customer. API keys and access credentials are created within the Gainsight administration console. You can find detailed documentation for developers on the Gainsight website.

Here is a conceptual example of an API call to fetch company data:

GET /v1/company/{id} HTTP/1.1
Host: api.gainsight.com
Accesskey: YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
Content-Type: application/json

This call would retrieve information for a specific company identified by its ID. The developer documentation provides full details on all available endpoints and authentication methods.

Gainsight Affiliate program

Gainsight does not have a traditional affiliate program where individuals can earn a commission for referrals. Instead, they have a Gainsight Partner Program. This program is designed for companies, not individuals. It includes technology partners who integrate their software with Gainsight, as well as service partners and consultants who help clients implement and manage the platform. If you are a consultant or represent a technology company that would be a good fit, you can apply to become a partner through the Gainsight website. For individuals looking to promote the tool, it is best to contact their marketing or partnership team directly to inquire about potential collaboration opportunities.