Dealerware Turbocharges Customer Success with Gainsight CS + PX for Rapid Scalability

Fleet management company Dealerware knows a thing or two about acceleration. Their connected car platform helps car dealerships, dealer groups, and OEMs automate cost recovery, improve efficiencies, and elevate their customers’ experience. The speed and power of Dealerware software helps these companies lower the cost and complexity of managing their fleets of courtesy vehicles and rentals. Dealerware helps them shift their business into a higher gear and become wildly successful. The result of such a valuable solution was exponential growth for the Dealerware team. Their Customer Success team needed a way to optimize implementation and get customers onboarded without adding additional staff. Dealerware used Gainsight CS + PX to help scale their efforts quickly without adding extra costs.

Following the company’s launch in 2016, the marketplace responded enthusiastically to Dealerware’s offering. The unmatched combination of speed and efficiency of their platform resulted in their customer base quickly growing from 3, to 300, to now over 1,000 customers in a few short years. This turbocharged growth presented a huge challenge for the Customer Success team: they needed to optimize implementation and get customers to value without having to invest major resources in additional staff. In other words, Dealerware needed their Customer Success team to go from 0 to 60. Their solution? Souped-up solutions from Gainsight.

“We knew we needed customer success software that would help us scale implementation,” says Melissa Terrell, Executive Vice President of Operations at Dealerware. “We adopted Gainsight CS to manage the entire onboarding process from start to finish. We also use Gainsight to manage risk and get more sophisticated about the health of our dealerships.”

Gainsight CS was an effective solution, but Dealerware soon faced another challenge: they weren’t gathering good enough product usage data. “For us, it was really important not to rely on something like Google analytics data; we needed the usage data to be connected to a person and an account so we could take action on it,” explains Terrell. “We did our due diligence looking through multiple tools and offerings out there, and we chose Gainsight PX.”

“We have a very transactional product. So usage is a pretty high indicator of satisfaction,” says Terrell. “Having robust product usage data was huge.” Gainsight PX not only provided the data Dealerware needed, but it also provided the insights necessary to improve the customer experience. With features like path analysis, feature adoption reports, and audience and account explorers to drill down into specific user activity, the team could create comprehensive views into customer health.

Gainsight PX also amplified their ability to scale existing programs by capturing feedback and promoting trainings in-app. Onboarding improved time-to-value as well, allowing Dealerware to move beyond high-touch processes to product-driven programs that immediately showcase value to customers. This included in-product walkthroughs that guided users through the product at their own speed.

In addition, Gainsight capabilities have created a strong feedback model that has had a major positive impact on NPS. Dealerware now receives consistent feedback from customers via a rolling NPS survey that is precisely targeted within each customer’s journey. The Customer Success team then pushes out the feedback internally with weekly Friday emails.

An unexpected benefit of Gainsight has been the growth of cross-functional collaboration within Dealerware. “The consistent feedback through Gainsight organically created a biweekly product quality meeting with Product and other teams,” explains Morgan Redwine, CS Ops and Strategy Manager at Dealerware. “We go through a range of topics, including bugs, NPS, and churn reports. It’s really cool, because everyone is taking an interest in customer success.”

Greater visibility into the customer journey has helped the company refine their release strategy for new products and features. Not only can they create awareness by exposing release notes within PX, they can also embed supportive training within the Knowledge Center Bot. Gainsight also connects seamlessly with Zendesk, their customer support system, to make support ticket submission a breeze for customers.

From an operational standpoint, Gainsight has enabled Dealerware to be more tech touch. “We have over a thousand customers with two account managers,” says Redwine. “Being able to interact with customers within the platform takes a lot off their plate.”

What’s next for Dealerware’s Customer Success team? Rolling out their NPS strategy on mobile. While a large majority of their users are web, many day-to-day power users are primarily mobile. With this initiative, Dealerware hopes to make their customer feedback model even more robust.

Dealerware also plans to overhaul their Knowledge Center Bot to make it more actionable. They plan to target more specific content for admins and non-admins to make their self-service bots more impactful. “We are also working with the Gainsight team on using PX to auto-assign personas based on usage,” says Redwine. “I’m excited about that!”

Perhaps more important than any one initiative is the strong working relationship with Gainsight. No matter what new programs they pursue, the Dealerware team is confident Gainsight will get it done. “The transition from the Salesforce edition of Gainsight to NXT was the smoothest process I’ve ever been a part of—the Gainsight team was incredible,” says Redwine. “We immediately could get benefits out of the new UI and all the new features. It was incredibly seamless. I would do it over and over again, if I had to!”

Fleet management company Dealerware knows a thing or two about acceleration. Their connected car platform helps car dealerships, dealer groups, and OEMs automate cost recovery, improve efficiencies, and elevate their customers’ experience. The speed and power of Dealerware software helps these companies lower the cost and complexity of managing their fleets of courtesy vehicles and rentals. Dealerware helps them shift their business into a higher gear and become wildly successful.