How Consensus Doubled Self-Serve Community Engagement in Just One Month

Consensus, the leading Product Experience Platform, has many customers with thousands of users, so while the main points of contact have direct access to customer success managers (CSMs) to answer questions, train, and troubleshoot directly, the vast majority of their user base needed a way to get what they needed, when they needed it. Using Gainsight CC, Consensus built an online customer community to create a self-service channel where users could find knowledge base content, articles, product walk-throughs, and more, all in one user-friendly location. As a result, they doubled their content views in just one month.

Consensus helps their customers scale revenue motions with interactive video demos, product tours, and simulations all wrapped into a Product Experience Platform. Since creating the Demo Automation category back in 2021, the market has responded enthusiastically to their offering and their user base has grown quickly. Obviously, this has been great news for the company, but for their Customer Success team, the rapidly expanding user base posed a challenge. 

Mark Green, Director of Buyer Enablement & Presales at Consensus, explained the challenge: “Excellent customer experiences are part of our core DNA, so we wanted to make sure that as we built this world-class journey for our customers, we also provided world-class tools for our CSMs. They are the cornerstone of the customer relationship.”

This was all the more important because Consensus’ customers had already come to expect high-caliber service. 

“We wanted to make sure that wherever a customer interacts with Consensus, they receive a helpful experience,” Green continued. “We want them to say, ‘You know, they didn’t have to do that, but they made my day better.’ We want those little moments littered everywhere and a digitally-enabled CS motion suits this need perfectly.”

The challenge was that they didn’t have a way to communicate with customers during “asynchronous” moments—i.e., outside of direct contact with CSMs or other customer-facing staff. Green explained: “There may be people at a customer account who are not yet users of our system, and they want them to learn what it is that we do and how we can help across the rest of their organization.” 

To meet that challenge, Consensus decided to launch an online customer community.

“I strongly believe in ‘ungating’ the knowledge around our products. Community allows us to provide that power to as many people as possible,” said Green. “There are a lot of people who want to know about what we do but who may not have a connection with a CSM yet. We want them to be able to learn in a self-service way.”

After searching for the best partner to help them launch their community, Consensus chose Gainsight CC.

As an industry leader, Gainsight was able to provide Consensus with a robust platform backed by deep thought leadership and expertise. Using the Gainsight CC solution, they created the Consensus Customer Hub.

With the Customer Hub up and running, they began by focusing on onboarding and expansion. They built an onboarding page that connects different parts of their Knowledge Base and best practice articles into one community destination. They also created interactive product tours and video demos that could be accessed through this self-service community. 

According to Green, “We like to look after our customers in a world-class way because ultimately, we want them to renew and we want them to expand. We’re very pleased that our renewal rate is amazing, but because we are growing so rapidly, maintaining that rate will become harder and harder.” 

Another reason that Consensus chose Gainsight CC was for its federated search capabilities, which makes it easy for customers to find product information and resources within the Consensus Customer Hub. By consolidating information from the Consensus website, knowledge base, and academy, Customer Hub enables users to easily access information and education about the product’s capabilities—helping them become more proficient with the Consensus platform on their own.

Green explained: “When you have a customer with thousands of users, those users can’t all contact a CSM directly to find answers. They need a way to self-serve.” 

Many of their users want to learn about Consensus but don’t necessarily have a specific topic in mind. Green describes the challenge: “They need a place where free-form thinking is allowed, rather than diving or searching for a specific topic. Gainsight empowers them to explore a topic in a self-directed way with custom pages.”

With the help of Gainsight, the launch of the Consensus Customer Hub was fast and straightforward, and the impact was almost immediate. Just one month after launch, they doubled their view rates of knowledge base content. 

Green explained why their users flocked to the community: “I believe it’s because when people go to our community, everything is posted by real Consensus employees—we’re scaling the power of real people, plus it’s much nicer than our previous tool.” 

Getting their community established quickly was important because the company is entering another period of rapid growth. With the Consensus platform’s own AI able to interrogate the growing Knowledge Base and Community groups, this customer-led experience is quickly becoming that single, trusted source of truth.

“To grow well, we needed to get the right processes in place that would support our cultural shift toward an incredible customer experience. If we hadn’t been able to get Gainsight up and running so quickly, that cultural shift would have been delayed. We hit the ground running, which has been really valuable to myself and the rest of the leadership team,” Green said.

Consensus plans to start leveraging their community to drive overall customer success efforts. One objective is to start tying community usage to customer success metrics. To accomplish that, they plan to connect the community with their data lake. Ideally, they would like to find hard data that connects the use of the Consensus Customer Hub with business outcomes, demonstrating that customers who have community admin-certified users renew more reliably.

“My advice for others looking to leverage Digital CS motions with the Gainsight CC platform is start early—work with the Gainsight presales teams on your strategic objectives, and start the project in time to deliver those quick wins!”

Overall, Consensus plans to continue to partner with Gainsight to build the best customer experience possible.