When I joined Coveo, they had a great Customer Success (CS) team and were doing an excellent job servicing customers. They were a small group fully committed to their customers’ success. Coveo was innovating at an incredible rate, and the Customer Success team was fortunate enough to start experiencing some of the challenges related to rapid growth. Over time, it became clear they needed a plan for long-term success with their customer base.
Creating a Clear, Consistent View of Customer Data
As a CS leader, you are focused on the critical objective of supporting your customers in achieving the outcomes and value they expect from your platform or software. At the same time, you need to identify and mitigate any potential churn, start to build advocates, and grow the customer base. As a new Coveo team member and a data-driven decision-maker, my first challenge was bringing together all the relevant customer-related data points into a single view that could be used for servicing-related decision-making. Although data was being captured, it wasn’t easy or quick to access, which slowed operational decision-making. It was a challenge to segment customers, understand customer health in real-time, and drill down into the specifics of each account for long-term success planning.
It became clear that we needed a tool that would allow us to consistently capture the timeline of interactions and engagements happening with customers across the full team. As can often happen, customer call notes and follow-ups were in disparate locations depending on (Customer Success Manager) CSM preferences (Salesforce, email, Excel, etc.). It was very difficult to understand the specifics of what was happening on any given account without contacting the CSM for a download. As a leader wanting to get into the specifics of customers and who believes in being able to self-serve, this was extremely problematic as it didn’t allow me to work with the speed and agility that was needed for a rapidly growing business.
As the team and types of customers grew, we needed processes, tools, and measurements that would allow us to standardize and provide consistent servicing levels across our customer segments. We also needed to build and operationalize a customer health score that would enable us to proactively engage customers regarding any adoption and optimization challenges that were surfacing.
Gainsight’s Impact on Customers and the Team
With Gainsight, we’ve been able to:
- Understand our customer trends at a high level, but then quickly dive into every important detail for any given customer.
- Proactively review and action “red” health customers weekly with our Management team.
- Capture every strategic customer touchpoint and all Customer Success calls and emails.
- Quickly understand our customer history and data points when escalations occur.
- Streamline workflows and deliver a more consistent customer experience.
- Provide the team with Playbooks and CTAs to prioritize and optimize time spent on customer activities.
How has this impacted our CSMs?
- We’ve been able to give our CSMs the critical operational data points they need at their fingertips (customer health, use cases, renewal dates, open cases, NPS, etc.)
- We’ve created a space where CSMs can easily log their calls, emails, and strategic touchpoints. No more digging through files, folders, or emails.
- We’ve taken many one-to-one tasks and emails and operationalized them across the customer base, freeing up time and allowing our CSMs to focus on high-value activities.
What’s Next for Coveo?
Our Renewals team is now using Gainsight, which has fostered better collaboration with our CS Team. Renewal playbooks will yield better internal coordination, customer experience, and on-time renewals.
Our Account Managers have started using Gainsight, enabling them to capture critical learnings and data points that will influence their account growth strategy.
At Coveo, we pride ourselves on our high-performance culture in Customer Success. As a CS leader, I always want to bring my team the best-in-class tools that are available now but are also innovating for the future; after extensive evaluation, that was Gainsight. We’ve been on a journey of transformation over the last three years, and Gainsight has undoubtedly been a critical tool in helping us achieve our bold objectives.
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