Cloudinary Goes from One Size Fits All To Tailored Customer Journeys

As one of the fastest growing companies in the visual media space, Cloudinary knows a thing or two about scale, both in terms of customers (over 10,000) and data (60 billion assets under management). But when their Customer Success (CS) team needed to start creating more targeted customer journeys based on different customer types across multiple industries, they weren’t sure where to start. Fortunately, they already had the Gainsight platform in place and were able to quickly ramp up their customer success strategy to meet their new business goals.

With Gainsight in place, Cloudinary scaled their CS team from 2 to 30 globally

Since their founding in 2012, media experience company Cloudinary has been on the leading edge of one of the biggest technology trends of the past 10 years: the explosion of visual media. As advances in processing power and internet speeds opened the floodgates for images and videos to dominate social media, e-commerce, and just about every other digital environment, Cloudinary became the industry standard for developers, creators, and marketers looking to manage, transform, and deliver those visual assets online.

But while Cloudinary had the foresight to see how media would transform our online lives, they didn’t envision all the challenges their rapid growth would bring for their

Early in the company’s history, Cloudinary’s CSMs were doing a bit of everything. “We had just started working with CTAs and were still wrapping our heads around what our customer journey should look like,” recalls Eyal Matz, VP of Customer Success at Cloudinary. But in 2019, the company’s growth reached a tipping point. Because their customer base had become so large and diverse, they knew they could not assume each customer had the same goals. They needed a segmented approach to help them determine the kind of engagements each customer should have with their CSM. The problem was that the Customer Success team didn’t have full visibility into customers’ journeys.

And while in the early days of the company, Cloudinary only had one product that targeted a single persona, they now had multiple products. “This product evolution as we grew carried a lot of implications,” explains Matz. “For the first time, we were serving not just a technical audience, but also marketing, creative and business audiences. Customers were using the user interface in new ways.

Cloudinary needed to move from a one-size-fits-all approach to understanding a wider range of customers across different segments. To solve this challenge, they decided to unlock the full suite of capabilities that the Gainsight platform had to offer.

The first step was to clearly define their customer journeys. Using the Gainsight Journey Orchestrator, they delineated every customer touchpoint. Then they started inputting multiple events and using a variety of playbooks.

The user-friendly Gainsight UI and admin made it easy to get going. “Gainsight actually made it possible, because at the time we weren’t budgeted for an admin or a dedicated CS operations role,” recalls Matz. “And as we progressed, we had more and more ideas as we continued working with customers and figuring out which touchpoints were the most important.”

Being able to deploy multiple playbooks turned out to be a huge differentiator. The ability to manage that in Gainsight’s backend made it intuitive to associate a task to a playbook, and a playbook to a CTA. They also used Gainsight to develop a health score that included usage data from multiple products.

Gainsight also helped the team stay nimble, as they didn’t need to bring on a dedicated CS Ops role for the first two years. Now, the CS team has grown from 2 to 30, distributed across the globe.

Seamless integration with Salesforce

Cloudinary took advantage of Gainsight’s out-of-the-box Salesforce (SFDC) integration, which enabled them to take any customer touchpoint or interaction captured within Salesforce and trigger an alert to the CSM. Not only did this integration allow Cloudinary to fold their CS practices into their existing tech stack, but they were also able to configure it almost instantly despite lacking an internal CS operations team.

Gainsight’s seamless integration with Salesforce made it easy for Cloudinary to transform customer data into meaningful Customer Success activities. Their CS team began identifying risk areas, such as the first three months for a new customer, and opportunities in the customer journey for promotion and growth.

For Cloudinary, the greatest outcome from Gainsight has been the simplicity of implementing new strategies that consolidate and streamline CS workflows while providing stakeholders and cross-functional teams the tools to do their jobs well. Implementation is quick, and it all happens within one system.

With Gainsight, Cloudinary can create a health score, a customer journey, and reports, and then feed that data to different stakeholders within the organization.

The Sales, Product and Solutions teams all rely on Gainsight data. For example, the Product team has a new pool of data to help them feed customer insights into the product roadmap. And almost every team can use the health score to identify moments of opportunity and risk.

Going forward, the Customer Success team is looking into the Gainsight Business Modeler to help them manage multiple relationships. For example, if a customer has multiple products managed by different teams, Gainsight can help them manage those complex relationships under one umbrella.
With creating value for customers at the center of its ethos, Cloudinary is looking forward to using Gainsight to further enhance the effectiveness of the Customer Success team and its relationships with customers. The results so far have been positive, and the rest of the company has been taking notice.