How Swoogo’s Revenue Operations Team Boosted GRR 7 Points and Increased Customer Health 15% with Gainsight

Swoogo is a leading event management platform, helping event professionals deliver fully bespoke and branded events. Swoogo’s Revenue Operations team leveraged Gainsight Customer Success (CS) to unify their view of customer health and revamp their churn mitigation process. After implementing Gainsight, Swoogo experienced rapid results, increasing customer health scores 15% in the first six months and improving GRR 7 points in the first year. They were also able to increase the number of accounts in each account managers’ book by 25%.

As Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Swoogo, Sarah Jennings was looking for new ways to increase revenue retention and reduce churn. Part of her challenge was an incomplete view of customer health. “We lacked a clear understanding of the health of our clients,” Jennings recalls. “We didn’t really have visibility into the leading indicators of churn at our fingertips, and we didn’t have them in one snapshot. That meant that it was often too late by the time we identified a client that needed additional support—they’d already made the decision to leave.” 

Swoogo needed a way to identify at-risk accounts sooner, but their account managers (AMs) were wasting a lot of time just looking for information. They had to log into four or five different systems to really understand what was happening with their clients. That often meant they were not sufficiently prepared for client calls.

“If I’m an AM and I have a client call, it’s a very time-consuming process to prepare before I even get on the phone,” Jennings explains. “To increase the number of accounts an AM is able to manage, we needed to give them a tool that would reduce the amount of time they spent preparing for those conversations.”

Swoogo realized they would benefit from a dedicated customer health platform. After a thorough vetting process, Jennings and her team chose Gainsight Customer Success.

Swoogo implemented Gainsight CS in January 2023. The teams that use Gainsight include the AMs and the strategic accounts team, as well as the Customer Success team, who function as technical account managers paired with the Strategic Accounts team..

Swoogo quickly integrated their product data and usage metrics into Gainsight, making the platform the primary source of data for day-to-day operations and managing accounts. AMs use Gainsight for everything from customer health to identifying expansion opportunities.  

For example, Swoogo set up calls to action (CTAs) for their AMs that were triggered when an account was using all their licenses and all users were logging in regularly. These CTAs alerted the AM that there was an expansion opportunity within that account.

Gainsight scorecards have been critical for improving the quality of their customer health scoring system. One important capability has been cross-referencing revenue forecasting from within Salesforce with the Gainsight-generated health score. As a result, they can identify when a customer that has been forecasted to successfully renew is red in Gainsight, and vice versa. 

The Revenue Ops team can then surface those findings at the executive level. They then work with other stakeholders, such as the Customer Experience team, Support team, and Product team, to determine the reason for these misalignments and fix the issue. “Gainsight gives us a check-and-balance system so that we are not reliant on just one system or one AM to evaluate risk,” Jennings says.

Gainsight has helped Swoogo revamp their risk mitigation process. Prior to Gainsight, they would begin monitoring for churn 90 days before a contract renewal. Now, they leverage Gainsight integrated with key data sources like Salesforce to forecast every account within the first 90 days of a customer joining Swoogo. “Without Gainsight and Salesforce, there’s no way that we would be able to manage those forecasts so well,” Jennings says. “It would be too hard to pull the data and it would be impossible to expect our account management team to know that level of information on every single account.” Now the AMs have enough time to thoroughly review the data on all their at-risk accounts.

“Before Gainsight, a client had already made the decision to churn before we even knew that they were thinking about it,” she recalls. “Gainsight has allowed us to track leading indicators of churn in one place that is easy for an AM to access. Gainsight generates a CTA and the AM is quickly reaching out to the at-risk customers. We are catching those accounts far earlier now than we were before.”

Another useful feature has been the integration between Gong and Gainsight. “There is a ton of potential for that integration,” says Jennings. “For example, we can use the capabilities in Gong to surface in Gainsight whether a call was positive, negative, or neutral.” Swoogo is looking at building those Gong reports into the health score. They also plan to integrate their Gainsight-powered NPS program into the score.

Implementing Gainsight CS made an immediate impact on operations for Swoogo. The Revenue Operations team began saving time because they weren’t having to log into multiple systems. They also saved money and were able to scale faster. 

“Prior to implementing Gainsight, our AMs could only manage a certain number of accounts,” Jennings says. “It was important to us to keep costs low while continuing to accelerate growth, just like every other tech company. With Gainsight, we were able to increase the number of accounts that an AM can manage by almost 25 percent.”

Gainsight has also been a massive contributor to growing Swoogo’s GRR, which increased by seven points in the first year after implementation. Part of that is their improved ability to identify expansion opportunities. “We have seen pretty strong indicators that Gainsight is supporting our revenue growth. We believe Gainsight played a role in our ability to hit our revenue targets in 2023, and we actually increased our target for 2024 by 70 percent,” Jennings explains. “We are on track to meet that goal for the year.”

They have also maintained existing revenue by improving customer health. In the first six months after implementing Gainsight, Swoogo saw a net improvement of 15 percent in their health scores. “By being able to identify red accounts and then working on those, our account managers have been able to take action before it is too late,” Jennings says.

Going forward, Jennings is excited about using Gainsight to drive their Time to First Impact project, which involves using customer data to segment their customer journeys. For example, they want to understand how long it takes a customer to go from their contract start date to the first meaningful value achieved in the product.

“Gainsight is helping us be more customer-centric, before a prospect even becomes a customer,” Jennings says. “We’re helping our Presales team to be consultants in the process and guide prospects through the buying cycle to ensure that they meet that first critical event or deadline.”

Overall, Gainsight has been a great investment. “I’m very grateful for Gainsight and I don’t think there’s anyone who would say it was an investment not worth spending. Gainsight has 100 percent earned its value.”