Front Empowers Customers Through Digital Self-Service for Success

Front is a customer service platform serving over 8,500 businesses. In order to empower their customer base with proactive support, Front used Gainsight Customer Communities as a venue for self-service that not only helped customers learn with each other, but also foster community among problem solvers, power users, and creative thinkers.. With so much peer-to-peer support and active engagement from customers, Front wanted to further equip their customers for success. This is when they turned to Gainsight Customer Education (formerly Northpass) to deliver personalized, actionable learning at scale. To build this new digital customer education program, Front created automated training and value-driven learning paths that increased product adoption, while also freeing their Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to focus on strategic business objectives and customer relationships.

Front’s customer service solution combines the familiarity of email with the complex, automated workflows of a ticketing system. Due to a diverse customer base spanning across industries and professions, their Customer Success team is routinely challenged to deliver an amazing experience to customers with different use cases.

In the past, Front’s Customer Success team operated on a somewhat reactive basis, often leaning on their Support team to triage customer issues as they came up. Over time, Front established a high-touch model that allowed their CSMs to proactively lead their customers towards achieving success with their product. However, despite the dedicated efforts of their team, they quickly realized that the high-touch approach wasn’t scalable.

Front’s first move was to utilize a self-serve and peer-to-peer support model fueled by community. Before Gainsight, Front had a discussion forum that served as a basic Support channel. Using Gainsight Customer Communities, they launched a customer-driven community to boost self-service engagement and peer collaboration.

One early win for the Front community was the Workflow Discussion category, where their users could help each other on setting up simple to complex workflows, share best practices, and get second opinions on their approach..

“Our community invites our customers to connect with other Front users or developers to support and get inspired by each other,” says Matthew Meeks, Director of Customer Education at Front.

The best part of their self-serve offering is that it was customer-driven, and designed to benefit every customer no matter their company size. This freed up the Front team to focus on the customer relationships that needed more 1:1 time, and even leverage their community resources themselves to inform focus areas and other programs.

Front’s community success was a signal to the company that self-service was a valuable way for their customers to engage, seek answers, and educate themselves at their own pace. This had a domino effect on looking to formalize its customer education program with this same model.

Prior to Gainsight, Front’s customer education consisted of sending customers PDFs, conducting one-to-one training, and hosting webinars. “We wanted to deliver tailored customer education content that we could create and manage from one central location. And do it in an automated way that guides customers down the right learning path for them — all while reducing the workload of our CSMs”, says Meeks.

Front used Gainsight Customer Education to build Front Academy. Initially, they concentrated on onboarding, looking to create digital learning for customers who weren’t assigned a dedicated CSM. That said, they quickly realized that all of their customers would benefit from digital customer education and Front Academy. 

“We used Gainsight to translate our high-touch, VIP service to the onboarding experience for the entire customer base,” Meeks says. 

To get started, Front repurposed existing training into digital education content. Since the initial push was onboarding, they began introducing new customers to these resources by showing them the dedicated places in Front Academy where they could access relevant courses and meet other new customers or product experts. 

“We used Gainsight to get folks enrolled in coursework via email,” Meeks explains. “And we created built-in learning paths personalized to user type.” 

Front has received a whopping 6,000 reviews on its courses with a 4.4 average course rating. Meeks says this has been a win for the team not only with the above-average rating, but also showing that the learners are completing the courses in order to rate them.

“Gainsight Customer Education makes it really easy to build groups, which helps us ensure we’re delivering relevant content to our customers,” he continues.

With their academy in place, Front started using the data collected within Gainsight Customer Education to inform and optimize further educational content. For example, they reviewed course feedback and course engagement analysis in regular working sessions with their customer-facing teams to inform how they should modify courses and add new ones.

“At Front, we include Gainsight surveys at the end of our courses,” Meeks explains. “If you aren’t integrating customer feedback—the customer’s voice—into your content, customers can feel they aren’t being listened to. We’re always looking at our courses to see what we need to iterate on, leveraging the data within Gainsight.”

Gainsight data also allows Front to track and measure education’s impact on key customer outcomes. They’re able to integrate learning data seamlessly with their existing tools like their internal back office systems and data visualization dashboards via enterprise-grade data sharing — helping them align analysis with business goals. 

Adopting both Gainsight Customer Communities and Customer Education provide many seamlessly integrated features that the team can manage in one place. For example, when users take an educational course, they can access a discussion space within the course that is directly connected to the community. Similarly, when a user creates an account in a course, they automatically have an account in the community. And when users finish a course, they receive a badge that is displayed within their community profile.

This seamless customer experience from structured to peer-to-peer learning is yielding early results when it comes to product adoption. Front has found that users who engage with their Academy and Community show a 20% higher adoption rate compared to those who don’t engage. 

To keep up the momentum in creating Front power users, the Education team launched a Front Certified Administrator certification program that reached 100 FCAs in the first five months.

The Front Academy and Community are helping Front customers and Front staff all-around.

“With Gainsight, our team is so much more efficient,” says Meeks. “We can operate faster, not only as a Customer Education team, but alongside our other teams—Sales,  Customer Success, Customer Support, even Marketing.”

Most importantly, their new digital onboarding program produced results. Front quickly began hitting their “Day 30” goals demonstrating that customers were reaching significant milestones early — such as setting up a shared inbox and building their first automated rule within the product. The success also helped establish the value of customer education within the organization.“After we posted our first digital training on our Knowledge Base, it quickly became one of our most used pieces of content ever,” Meeks recalls. “That sold the concept to leadership.” Meeks also advises putting together a business case that calculates the ROI of Customer Education.

Meeks and the rest of the Front team are excited to roll out more of the integrated features of Customer Education and Customer Communities. Overall, they are looking forward to continuing to enrich their customer education and community experience.