In Brief
Coveo’s AI-powered e-commerce and enterprise search platforms deliver value to millions of customers, but their Customer Success (CS) team wanted to be more effective at communicating that value and making sure the customers were achieving their desired outcomes. Using Gainsight CS, they shifted to a more outcomes-focused strategy that provided better visibility into customer health that they could then share with both customers and stakeholders within the organization.
Challenge
A New Strategy That Required Greater Visibility and Efficiency
Coveo powers many of the world’s most innovative brands. To help customers understand the value they were achieving with Coveo products, their CS team went through a strategy shift. They moved away from an engagement-centric approach and toward a model that focused on customer outcomes.
While this new strategy had the potential to improve both the customer experience and Coveo’s recurring revenue, the CS team needed to rethink how they used Gainsight to bring it to life.
One of the biggest challenges they faced was the need to integrate all of their customer data into a single source of truth. Angelo Sandiford, Senior Director, Global CX Operations at Coveo explained: “A lot of our challenges were that the tools we use outside of Gainsight don’t necessarily connect with each other.”
Beyond the technical complexity of managing large volumes of data efficiently, there was also a challenge with accessibility, i.e., surfacing insights from data that was buried in hard-to-parse formats.
They also needed to make sure the strategy worked cross-functionally with teams like Sales, Marketing, and Subscription Management. For example, their Subscription Management team handled renewals and was responsible for customer risk. To work effectively under the new strategy, Coveo needed to make sure they were speaking the same language as Customer Success.
To achieve their goals, Coveo explored the full range of Gainsight capabilities, many of which they had never used before.
Solution
Tapping Into the Depth and Breadth of Gainsight CS Tools
To support their new strategy, Coveo shifted from traditional sentiment tracking to a more structured, Gainsight-driven risk management approach. Emily Lachapelle, Operations Manager at Coveo, described the evolution: “We adopted Gainsight CTAs to organize ourselves in a more efficient way for better reporting and better visibility, which also helped us align Customer Success more closely with how we segment our customers.”
Using Gainsight, they have been able to measure and document customer outcomes, and then easily share that information outside of the CS team. To accomplish this, they leaned into several key Gainsight features.
“Our Customer Success team is constantly using the Gainsight Timeline. They love having their calls sync from Salesforce, with everything visible in one giant notepad of sorts, like a diary of the account,” said Lachapelle.
“My favorite feature and the one I use the most is everything related to reporting,” Lachapelle added. “I’m constantly in the dashboards and Customer 360 (C360) getting updates on different accounts.”
Sandiford really appreciates AI-driven features like Gainsight Copilot and Customer Cheat Sheet, which automate insights and save customer success managers (CSMs) time while improving proactive engagement.
“Gainsight AI provides a quick snapshot of the customer that is useful,” Sandiford said. “Especially when we’re trying to get insight from a director or VP level.”
Unlike a typical CRM platform, Gainsight is purpose-built for CS, reducing complexity and enabling faster adoption without heavy customization.
“Gainsight answers the specific needs of customer success,” Sandiford said. “As much as you can do with CRMs, which can be very customizable, they are not an out-of-the-box platform. As such, Gainsight eliminates the heavy lift that would be required to customize a solution within a CRM, as well as the need for very technically advanced expertise.”
Impact
Effective Success Plans That Deliver Value to Customers
Gainsight has helped Coveo redefine customer risk tracking and streamline success plans, improving internal alignment with renewal teams and demonstrating the value of Coveo’s products to customers.
“We’ve seen great outcomes in a very short period of time with success plans,” Sandiford said. “Gainsight allows us to bring a lot of customer information together in a concise and easy-to-read format, which CSMs can then quickly relay to executive leadership and customers.” He continued, “In the past, it would take them hours to bring together this information or they wouldn’t always necessarily have it at their fingertips.”
Gainsight’s native integrations have also helped Coveo overcome longstanding connectivity issues. Integrations with tools like Zoom, Salesforce, and Snowflake have improved data syncing and increased organizational access to insights—without added cost or administrative complexity.
“The bidirectional functionality in Gainsight has made our lives a lot easier,” Sandiford said. “It’s been a big game changer for us, giving us more flexibility in terms of native integrations with other platforms and helping us sync information more easily between our different systems.”
And because of Gainsight’s seamless integration with Salesforce and Snowflake, Coveo has made Gainsight insights accessible across their organization without requiring additional licenses, which has helped them keep costs under control.
What’s Next
Going forward, Coveo plans to expand the use of AI automation in their digital touch and pooled CSM accounts. They also want to leverage Relationship 360 (R360) for more precise customer segmentation.
Lachapelle sums up their Gainsight experience nicely: “With our new strategy, we have had to rethink how we use Gainsight and to explore new functionalities like R360. With support from Gainsight, I think we now have the strategy that is going to be built for the long term.”
