How Gong Uses Community to Fuel ARR and Customer Retention

Gong wanted to create a space where their customers could interact with one another beyond just their in-person events. They turned to Gainsight’s community tool to enable their customers to share knowledge at scale.

In 2021, Gong customers tasked the Revenue Intelligence platform to find a way to bring them together to share and learn from one another. This led Gong’s CCO, Eran Aloni, to implement a community as the central part of its customer strategy.

When Gong’s Head of Community, Nisha Baxi started in 2021, Aloni had already discovered Gainsight’s community tool. He was looking for a tool that could combine community into existing workflows. The ability to integrate with Gong’s existing technology stack like Zendesk, Skilljar, and Gainsight CS was a large factor in choosing the platform.

But beyond integrations, Baxi says the standout feature that Gainsight’s community tool offered was its federated search functionality.

“The community is impactful in two ways. One it’s discovery. How do I discover things I can access and learn that I haven’t before? The second thing is I’m looking for something and need to find it. That’s why Google is so impactful.”
– Nisha Baxi, Gong’s Head of Community

“You can ask anyone in Customer Marketing, Sales, Education, and Training team; we all care about federated search because people are looking for something, and it may not be in the community, and I don’t care if it’s not in the community, as long as they’ve found it. That’s what I like about Gainsight— the nod to the overall customer experience and not just trying to keep people in the community. It was about the broader community and what the user is looking for.”

The ability for users to find the answers they need, whether in the community or any external content like a Zendesk guide, has also saved Support individuals and community members valuable time and increased the self-service resolution rate.

Shared lift and results between teams

From day one, Gong has embeded community into its broader business to avoid any silos. During the 72 days prior to launching, Baxi says it was all hands on deck, with about 100 Gongsters involved throughout the process. This included every function leader to align responsibilities, workflows, and KPIs.

Community, along with Customer Success, Education and Training, Solutions Strategy, Support, Professional Services, and Customer Success Operations, all sit under the Chief Customer Officer.

Although community works closely with each of these functions, Baxi says the Education and Training team has been one of its strongest partners. The community has found a natural fit within the Gong Academy.

Rather than customers moving from one education module to the next, Gong wanted to create an immersive and fun learning experience. With some video-game inspiration, Gong launched “Gong Quests” for customers. As they level up from one learning path to the next in full fantasy-like armor, Gainsight’s embeddable widgets pop up with relevant community content curated for that user. Users can even travel into “taverns” with other Gong community members to connect and share learnings.

But it isn’t all fun and games for community. Baxi also works closely with the Customer Success Operations team to ensure the community is measuring its success and driving business value.

“I’ve been finding it useful to have someone within CS Ops who helps with community drive those goals. Because of that, we can track our ARR influence and NDR impact in a meaningful way.”
– Nisha Baxi, Gong’s Head of Community

“We can see people registering for the community before they become customers, and when we see that they become a customer, we count that as influence.”

In addition to enticing prospects to become customers, Gong has also been attributing higher retention rates to community participants.

“We can see how long they are active in the community. Active users upsell three times higher than people that aren’t, so we’re tracking those numbers and seeing higher retention rates, Being able to attribute community as a touch point in the sales cycle is just another way the community function has become an integral part of the overall business and has reinforced its value.”
– Nisha Baxi, Gong’s Head of Community

With increased retention, 36% registered Gong users (about 4.5K individuals), 12K unique visitors, and 800 one-on-one meetings under its belt in year one, Gong is going full steam ahead on taking the next step to embed community further into its over-arching customer strategy.

In October 2022, Gong released “Visioneers.” This new experience connects everything from the Gong Academy, Customer Advocacy, and the Help Center in one centralized hub. When someone becomes a Gong user, their first touchpoint will be with this hub. Depending on how long you’ve been a Gong user, your experience will be tailored to you.

“Everyone wants to be their own steward of their ship, so I’m glad Gainsight has the capabilities to make it possible,” Baxi says.