Benchling Adopts a Digital Customer Success Approach, Powered by Gainsight CS + PX

For over a decade, the Benchling R&D Cloud has helped unlock the power of biotechnology by helping scientists, research institutions, and companies modernize their scientific processes and accelerate collaboration. As their customer base grew, their Customer Success team—and their customer success platform—needed to manage a growing customer base at scale. Benchling upgraded their capabilities with Gainsight CS + Gainsight PX. They used Gainsight to implement a Digital Customer Success (CS) approach that provides a personalized customer experience, ultimately helping to deliver the right guidance, to the right customer, at the right time.

Benchling is the pioneer of the R&D Cloud, helping the biotechnology sector modernize scientific processes and accelerate collaboration so they can convert the complexity of biology into world-changing results.

After more than a decade in business, Benchling solutions have been adopted by more than 200,000 scientists at over 1,100 companies and 7,500 academic and research institutions. For the Benchling Customer Success team, that growth necessitated a reevaluation of their existing customer success software to ensure they were set up for scale and the highest level of customer success.

Benchling’s existing customer success platform was an out-of-the-box solution. As their customer base grew, the company needed a more sophisticated set of tools that could advance Digital CS.

Benchling wanted to continue driving consistent adoption and expansion by delivering a more personalized customer experience. To do this, they devised an omnichannel strategy based on a mix of personal and digital touchpoints, all driven by rich data.

The problem? Their existing platform did not have the right tools to execute it.

“We had outgrown our previous customer success platform. For example, they didn’t have cross object querying, so it was very difficult to do any type of reporting, or any sophisticated call to actions that would require two objects,” said Andor Fuhrer, Head of Customer Success Operations at Benchling.

Benchling needed a way to notify CSMs when to act based on specific and sometimes nuanced customer behaviors. In addition to this and reporting capabilities, the previous platform did not have an effective digital component to their software.

To solve these challenges, Benchling made the switch to Gainsight CS + PX.

One of Benchling’s goals in adopting Gainsight was to have CSMs focus on customers who could become strategic partners on an accelerated path for growth. Benchling used Gainsight Journey Orchestrator to build a digital, low-touch model that still offered the support and personal elements needed for great customer experiences.

“Gainsight helps us do more with less,” said Fuhrer.

Benchling also takes full advantage of synergies between Gainsight CS and Gainsight PX. For example, Benchling uses Gainsight Adoption Explorer in CS to automatically pull customer usage and engagement data into their CSMs’ view.

Gainsight CS helped Benchling upgrade their risk management capabilities. Using a new Gainsight-powered and more accurate health score, they implemented an effective at-risk motion and started receiving risk alerts at the first sign of declining customer health. “Our CSMs really like the health score,” says Fuhrer. “We were able to give them a powerful signal that alerted them to early signs of risk.”

As a result, Benchling has realized more effective renewal forecasting. “CSMs own the renewal intelligence of our customers, and the team has been able to develop a nice workflow there,” Fuhrer says.

Benchling CSMs who manage enterprise customers are also getting a lot of value from Gainsight when it comes to success planning and other strategic initiatives.

Overall, CSMs are finding efficiencies with Gainsight. They are spending less time to get the insights they need, because the customer information is all in one place.

Gainsight has also provided value to the organization beyond the Customer Success team. For example, Benchling rolled out Gainsight to the Sales team for account planning. Through Gainsight, Sales receives inproduct usage data, and having product analytics and product metrics available in Gainsight C360 has been very valuable.

“We gave Sales a very specific Gainsight C360 view, which they really liked because it streamlines the data and leaves out metrics they don’t really use,” said Fuhrer.

Benchling will also be using Gainsight as they roll out a Technical Account Manager (TAM) team. Their TAMs will use Gainsight success plans to track big initiatives and use Gainsight Timeline to document meetings and updates. Benchling also plans to create executive level dashboards that allow the Customer Success team to share insights with the organization’s leadership in a standardized way.

Fuhrer had experience with the Gainsight Technical Account Manager (TAM) service in a previous role. He knew that TAM engagement would be helpful for Benchling because they were looking to deploy Gainsight so quickly.

With a TAM on board, Benchling was able to get CSMs up to speed on the Gainsight platform almost instantly.

“Having a TAM made it much easier for CSMs to get the insights they needed and stay organized,” says Fuhrer.

Gainsight’s TAM helped Fuhrer and his team spot check their work on Gainsight tools they were already familiar with, like Journey Orchestrator. They also helped Benchling take advantage of Gainsight’s integrations, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Zapier, and Snowflake.

The TAM engagement also helped in terms of implementing Gainsight PX. Benchling’s TAM collaborated with the team on projects like creating CSAT surveys from Zendesk ticket closures.

The Benchling Customer Success team is doubling down on Digital CS. They are going to start leveraging Gainsight Surveys to capture meaningful customer information and sentiment. In addition, they are implementing a verified outcomes framework with their customers using the new Customer Goals feature in Gainsight.

Using Gainsight CS and Gainsight PX, Benchling was able to develop a sophisticated Digital CS approach that improved CSM performance, scaled up to manage more customers, and made customer success insights available to the entire organization.

To learn more about Digital CS from Gainsight, click here.