Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Last week, I wrote about how Customer Success can play a critical role in enabling cross-functional collaboration. This week, I’ll explore in detail one of those cross-functional processes: Onboarding Management. At Gainsight, our Onboarding team (which we call Services) is distinct from our
On August 4th, we’re hosting the Pulse Online Career Fair. It’s is a great opportunity for you to chat one-on-one with representatives from 20+ companies with open positions in Customer Success. This event is virtual, so all you need is a computer, smartphone or tablet and an internet connection. On the day of the event,
Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight At the Chief Customer Officer Summit that we hosted several months ago, one of the group exercises was to imagine an ideal model for customer success, ignoring all practical constraints (and, of course, demonstrating the model through some kind of theatrical performance, in
Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight. We’re excited to unveil the latest innovation from our Customer Success incubator at Gainsight: a new framework for addressing risk, using a combination of Scorecards and
Before we get started, if you’re an NPS purist, you need to know that I’m going to violate norms you hold near and dear in this article. I do suggest you have a solid understanding of how to use NPS the standard (right?) way, so you should check out the recording of a webinar Tracy
Since Customer Success Management isn’t just about reducing churn by retaining customers, but also growing their use of your product over time, I often talk about everything from churn mitigation to Customer Nurture campaigns. When I talk about all of those things, I’m almost always asked which they should focus on first; retention or nurture.
We were planning last year’s (inaugural) PulseCheck virtual workshop on the heels of World Cup 2014 fever. Companies across the globe carried on with business as usual, but typically with a TV on in the background streaming the matches live. The most passionate fans would conveniently schedule a team happy hour or lunch when their
I have to admit, I’ve had my fair share of career crushes throughout my professional life. When I dreamed of becoming an investment banker, Michael Lewis was a major influence. When I pivoted that dream into a short-lived attempt to join the Pittsburgh Steelers, “Mean” Joe Greene was whom I looked to for inspiration. That
I had the opportunity to sit down with Neil Jain of Waterstone Management Group and ask him about the challenges and opportunities in bringing Customer Success to Hardware companies. Q. What are some of the challenges facing hardware companies today? A. We are seeing a few key challenges in hardware. First, hardware is becoming a commodity,
Allison introduced this framework for managing risks at Gainsight’s annual Pulse conference earlier this month. We’re making it available to the community for the first time in this blog post. In the past, we introduced the concept of Code Red as an approach to tackling risk in our customer base. In our original Code Red