In Brief
CData Software, a leading provider of data connectivity solutions, was looking to optimize their community and produce tangible impacts on the business. They wanted to increase customer support capabilities while reducing costs. And they wanted to use the community to drive sales revenue. Gainsight Customer Communities (CC) gave them the tools they needed to increase engagement, implement a robust community strategy, enhance self-service customer support, and demonstrate ROI by tying sales revenue to community activity.
Challenge
A community in search of measurable impacts
CData Software is a leading provider of data access and connectivity solutions. When John Summers joined the company as Community Manager, he had several objectives.
First, he wanted to increase engagement. “Engagement means bringing your customers together in this shared environment, fueled by a common purpose. People are looking for connection—and they’re looking for answers,” Summers says.
To drive engagement, Summers was looking to implement a robust content strategy that would encourage member interactions. He decided to start with customer support content. His plan was to create content that would answer user questions, and then mine those answers to build a knowledge base. And as they built out their support capabilities, Summers needed to be able to quantify their impact on the business.
Summers also wanted the community to become a revenue generator for the company. “The holy grail for community managers is sales,” he explains. “I’ve known for years that community members have a higher propensity to purchase. But I have always struggled to directly demonstrate the impact of community on sales and revenue. Too often, information about community engagement is siloed from sales information.” Summers was looking for a way to attribute sales to community activity and empower his community to drive expansion.
To help him accomplish these goals, Summers turned to Gainsight CC.
Solution
Better content distribution, improved support, and revenue attribution
Increased engagement driven by content and email strategies
At the core of CData’s engagement push was their content strategy. Gainsight CC provided them with a range of content and search features that helped bring their content strategy to life.
“Gainsight has been an important part of our content strategy. They helped us to get to the point where our content became self-sustaining,” Summer says.
CData’s content strategy is horizontally integrated across the organization, with teams outside of the Community—Support, Product, Marketing, Education—providing a steady flow of content.
“We’re now doing product updates in the community, product ideation, and corporate newsletters, as well as our knowledge base,” Summers explains.
Summers gains efficiency and quickly surfaces insights through reporting and analytics using AI. He states, “AI enables me to predict predictive trends based on past data.”
Gainsight CC has also helped CData implement gamification strategies that have driven engagement. These gamification tools include a rank system, leaderboards, and badges to reward skills and expertise.
“Points, reputation, gamification: these things work extremely well. They get new people excited, but they also keep power users engaged,” Summer said. “You want to reward your community members and make participating in the community fun and exciting.”
Automated emails powered by Gainsight have been an effective way to bring customers into the community. “Every time we send out an email, we see a boost in registration,” says Summers. “I am constantly using Gainsight to come up with ways to send emails.”
Summers also uses Gainsight to trigger automated emails based on community member activity. “If people haven’t logged in for a while, they receive welcome messages when they log in,” he explains. “We also send emails for things like events or new content.” Gainsight allows the company to be a bit nimbler with email, creating mini campaigns rather than full-scale marketing campaigns.
Robust customer support content
Leaning on the Gainsight platform, Summers has built enhanced customer support capabilities into the CData Community. Gainsight gives them clear visibility into metrics around support questions being answered and viewed.
“Gainsight allows me to really see where the views are for support content,” Summers explains. “Most people who read our content never post—they arrive at the community via search, and they are probably not members.” To reach those viewers, he uses Gainsight CC tools to make sure content is visible, indexed, and optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
By providing this SEO-optimized content, CData is able to satisfy self-service support needs, regardless of whether the user is a registered community member or not. This effectively reduces the volume of support tickets, lowering operational costs and freeing up resources for more complex customer issues. This self-service solution not only enhances user satisfaction, but it also improves the overall efficiency of the support team.
Directly tying sales revenue to community activity
Gainsight also helped Summers tie sales directly to community registration and engagement. Gainsight gave them clear data on community activity and seamlessly integrated with their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform.
“The first thing we had to do was establish a single identity for community members with SSO and integrate that information into our CRM platform as a campaign,” Summers explains. “We have a community campaign set up within our CRM. For those sales, community was the first touchpoint—we get attributed.”
The next step was to place active community members in the Sales funnel and turn them into Marketing Qualified Leads. They were able to connect community members back to their customer account, tying them back to the revenue that resulted from expansions and new purchases.
Gainsight integrations make it easier for Summers to align the organization around the community’s revenue metrics. “We are able to surface revenue metrics in dashboards, which then bubble up into our Sales platforms in an automated way—I don’t have to separately send revenue reports to executive leadership.”
It’s amazing to be able to show the impact of our community on revenue with real numbers. People are buying because of the community—it’s not just correlation.
Impact
Increased engagement, decreased support costs, and attributable revenue from community-driven sales
Summers tracks community engagement metrics in a Gainsight dashboard—and the needle has been pointing up. The engagement rate and page view growth have risen steadily over the past year..
Those engagement gains have enhanced customer support and led to tangible results. Based on the metrics they gathered with Gainsight analytics, Summers developed a formula to calculate the CData Community’s Support case deflection and the cost impact on the company’s bottom line.
Working with his Finance team, Summers determined that the average support case cost was about $200. They then determined a deflection rate of one deflection for every 10 views. The total cost impact of the CData Community? They saved the company over $650,000.
“As a mid-sized company, those are significant savings for us,” Summers says.
But perhaps even more impressive than the savings was the community’s impact on revenue. Summers was able to track results by integrating Gainsight data with his CRM. The CData Community influenced $4.7 million of revenue over the course of the year, with $1.6 million in shared revenue and about $100K in direct sales.
What’s Next
In the coming year, Summers plans to use Gainsight to expand their revenue reporting to measure total customer lifetime value. He also wants to expand his content strategy to include more customer education.
Overall, Gainsight has become a valued partner for Summers as he pursues his vision for the CData Community. “Our community fosters a sense of collaboration and belonging, driving empowerment and value creation for our members.”