How Pipedrive Gave Its CS Team 8,000 Hours Back with Gainsight

A CSM could open Gainsight at the end of the day and find thirty open calls-to-action (CTA) waiting in the Cockpit, each one requiring a few dropdown selections, embedded tasks, and five minutes of administrative work before they could move on. Multiply that across a book of business and the math turned ugly fast.

“If a CSM got to the end of their day and their Cockpit had 30 CTAs, and each took five minutes. That’s a crazy amount of hours to be in Gainsight just doing busy work,” said Aurelio Cunha, Director of Customer Success, who’s led the transformation to simplify the team’s Gainsight-powered CS motion and refocus CSM time on helping customers get more value from Pipedrive.

The stakes were especially high because of Pipedrive’s customer mix. The company serves roughly 115,000 customers globally, most of them small businesses. Its strategic segment is much smaller, with about 3,500 strategic accounts, but those customers represent more than 30% of revenue. That high-value segment is supported by a lean team of around twenty CSMs, which meant that every unnecessary task had a real cost.

Over the years, Pipedrive’s Gainsight instance had absorbed the needs of multiple operating models, each with their own fields, CTA types, and alerts — which each made sense on their own, but together created friction.

The result didn’t: more than 250 object fields, 40 CTA types, and a risk model that surfaced too many false positives. For example, every time a customer exported data — a routine thing for a CRM that plugs into 400-plus marketplace tools — a risk alert could prompt a CSM to follow up. Nine times out of ten, the customer just shrugged and said they do that every month.

“There was just a lot of busy work that was primarily set up to try to tackle all risk all the time,” Cunha said. “And it was just counterproductive.”

So Cunha and Gainsight Operations Manager Alin Rusu took the opposite approach. Instead of adding more workflows, they asked a sharper question: what actually deserves a CSM’s attention?

Working alongside CSMs to understand which actions they actually used day to day, they cut the model down to its load-bearing parts: 40 CTA types collapsed to 10, and more than 250 object fields were trimmed to under 100. Instead of creating a separate CTA for every segment and every flavor of risk, they merged anything that served the same purpose. Risk became exactly that: anything related to risk management. They also rebuilt risk detection on the customer health score, so alerts fired on a genuine pattern of churn signals, not a single harmless export.

At the same time, Journey Orchestrator became the scalable layer for Pipedrive’s lifecycle motions — trial, optimization, upsell, and cross-sell journeys, triggered by signals like product usage and health scores. That gave the team one clean mechanism for testing and launching new motions without spinning up a new CTA type every time.

The same simplification mindset extended to customer feedback. Pipedrive also wanted to reduce disconnected tools and make customer sentiment easier for CS teams to act on. On the product side, Pipedrive consolidated its NPS program natively into Gainsight PX. The old approach, which relied on email surveys through a separate tool, drew just a 1–2% response rate. Delivered in-app through PX, response climbed to 9.6%, representing more than 4,100 responders a month. Just as importantly, the results flowed back to the CS team instead of being exported, manually tagged, and re-uploaded.

The payoff showed up where it matters: in time.

Pipedrive attributes roughly 8,000 hours of eliminated manual work to the transformation, representing over 1,000 working days — the equivalent of four to five full-time employees of freed capacity. The team also reduced Gainsight technical debt by 60–70%. Over the same period, net revenue retention moved from 91.8% to 92.7%, giving the team another indicator that a cleaner, more focused CS motion was moving in the right direction.

The relief extended to the people who keep the system running. Before the cleanup, Operations Manager Alin Rusu spent much of his week absorbing tickets — a CSM who couldn’t find the right CTA type, or a Journey Orchestrator flow misfiring and sending customers the wrong emails. With 10 CTA types instead of 40, standardized journeys, and a field model cut by more than half, those fire drills largely went away. For a lean ops function — one manager supporting a 40-person organization — moving from constant triage to a maintainable system is as valuable as the hours handed back to CSMs.

For Cunha, the real value of that freed capacity is what it allows CSMs to do next: spend more time with customers. “The easier it is to do things in Gainsight, the more time the CSMs and CSSs have to schedule calls and make new connections — because that’s what generates revenue.” Busy work, he’s quick to add, generates none of it.

Pipedrive is now building on that foundation. In 2026, the team plans to bring Customer Goals and Spaces to its top strategic accounts for a more focused way to align on outcomes, prepare business reviews, and keep customers engaged around the goals that matter most.