How GitLab Reenergized Their Gainsight Instance and Increased Engagement With Their Customer Success Team

DevOps leader GitLab had a well-established instance of Gainsight CS, but over time, their processes became overly complex, which limited day-to-day use to little more than viewing usage data. Focusing first on their scale motion, the team introduced a streamlined workflow that put Gainsight back at the center of daily execution. By unifying data, simplifying processes, and deepening integration with their CRM, they reset their instance to make it a foundation for scalable CS. The result was improved adoption, increased engagement and restored enthusiasm among the CS team and stakeholders across the organization.

GitLab’s AI-powered DevOps platform allows their customers to boost productivity and security with a full end-to-end software development suite. To help customers achieve their goals with the GitLab platform, the Customer Success team had built a set of very detailed processes using Gainsight CS. But as their business needs changed, some processes became redundant and, in some cases, discouraged customer success managers (CSMs) from using the system.

Keith Mattes, Senior Customer Success Operations Analyst and Gainsight Admin at GitLab, performed a deep dive with co-Admin Likhit Chilamakuru to find out why CSMs weren’t using certain Gainsight features like Cockpit and Dashboards. “We have very highly trained and skilled CSMs here at GitLab—they’re developers, they’re engineers,” Mattes explains. “We learned that some of the things we were doing with the tool just didn’t make sense anymore. For example, we were experiencing low usage of CTAs because there were simply too many of them.”

“Our CSMs ended up using Gainsight mostly just to look at usage data,” Mattes added.
With an unnecessarily complex setup and stagnant CSM adoption, GitLab needed to simplify and streamline their approach to better match the needs of the business and the CS team.

To streamline their processes using Gainsight, GitLab focused on three core components: trustworthy data, repeatable processes, and deeper integration with other tools.

Reliable Data

GitLab had usage data that was being pulled from different sources and in some cases these sources were out of sync with each other. They also didn’t have enablement on certain data conditions. Gainsight became the system of record for customer usage data that powered consistent, cross-functional decision-making. Now, every time they introduce a new data source, it is integrated within Gainsight.

“We’ve defined a single source of truth for customer usage data,” says Mattes. “But what’s even more critical to me is how we democratize and socialize the data within the organization—with great data comes great responsibility to make that data accessible.”

“Data management is one of the reasons I enjoy Gainsight so much, because it gives you flexibility and creativity, which benefits the business,” Mattes says.

Repeatable Processes

GitLab streamlined processes to help CSMs be more productive and efficient. For example, they had identified three core customer personas that they needed to communicate with via email. The challenge was that each persona had its own query and complex set of filters, so when the Program Team wanted to build a new email program, they had to create three queries. This process was time-consuming and inefficient.

To solve this issue, they developed a unified contact record approach in Gainsight. Using Gainsight’s robust integration with Salesforce, they created a Custom Object in Gainsight defined by the Salesforce contact Account ID and the email address, with the addition of a series of Boolean values. This Boolean “switchboard” within Gainsight became the single source for a query within an email program. “Gainsight happens to be pretty flexible when it comes to data,” Mattes says. “It’s very simple.”

Gainsight also made it easy to quickly build out more personas. When they need to launch a new persona, Gainsight makes it easy to create a new Boolean field in the object and then replicate the action in the filter.

“I’m a huge fan of custom objects in Gainsight. I think they’re super flexible,” Mattes says. “You can tweak them as much as you need to.”

Deeper integration

GitLab identified Salesforce as their most reliable source for customer data. For example, all of their contact records are held in Salesforce. They then synced those contacts to Gainsight. This process reinforced the existing integration of Salesforce and Gainsight and empowered each system to do what it does best.

This tight bidirectional integration between Gainsight and Salesforce allowed GitLab to overhaul their CTA process. First, they simplified and rebooted their CTA creation rules. Some CTAs were redefined as milestones and made queryable on the Timeline object.

They then designed a new process that created customer success cases in Salesforce, which triggered appropriate CTAs in Gainsight. That initiated a two-way communication between CSMs and other stakeholders, who had clear visibility into the fact that the Customer Success team was handling the issue.

Having a more streamlined customer success process resulted in more accurate communications that led to better engagement, better response rates, and better customer adoption and satisfaction with their product.

CSMs were most excited about automated success plan creation—driven by data sourced from their own platform—which eliminated duplicate work and surfaced insights faster, ultimately freeing them up to focus on other more strategic tasks, like success planning with customers.

These improvements renewed trust among CSMs, who bought into the rejuvenation process. The changes also sparked a lot of interest among other stakeholders within the organization.

As the changes were implemented, they brought a number of smaller wins that built momentum. For example, when they deployed a Tableau dashboard embedded in C360, they saw a huge uptick in clicking on that tab. And when they deployed a CTA case creation process for scale, they saw Cockpit usage and Timeline usage go up.

“Those kinds of wins became inspirational to the rest of the organization, and it became infectious,” Mattes recalls. “If you can find one aspect of the business or one process that you can really focus on and drive value with, that will really build momentum for using Gainsight within an organization.”

Ultimately, the renewed enthusiasm began showing up in GitLab’s Gainsight adoption data, which spiked from 40% to more than 65% in the 10 months after the makeover.

Going forward, GitLab is planning to expand their customer success capabilities. For example, they are looking to customize Timeline activity types to enhance CSM’s visibility into the complexity of user interactions. They plan to double down on Gainsight automation to support scale and free up CSMs for more strategic customer engagement.

In the big picture, the flexibility and power of the Gainsight platform provides the GitLab Customer Success team with the agility they need to pivot as their business needs change.