Feature
Customer success is complicated. Especially if your customers are enterprise companies.
Why? Because these types of organizations are responsible for managing a tangled web of different products, with different functions responsible for various customer segments.
“Business today is about engaging with existing customers – making them successful or helping them have a good experience,” said Karl Rumelhart, Gainsight’s VP of products.
“With these new offerings, we are helping large, complex organizations step up their customer success efforts so they can realize even higher levels of revenue growth through their existing customers.”
Customer Success or Customer Experience?
Before getting into the details of the new offerings, Rumelhart took a moment to clarify with CMSWire what is sometimes confusing terminology regarding the various ways in which companies interact with their customers – specifically the difference between customer experience and customer success.
“Customer experience tends to be a focus on making sure you have specific types of engagement coherent across all touch points,” he said. “Whereas customer success focuses on how to make customers successful after the sale.”
He added that the core success metrics of the two are also different.
“With customer experience, marketing is held accountable for the customer journey,” he said. “With customer success, product-oriented behavior is monitored and tracked, with that team responsible for driving adoption, and generating upsells and renewals.”
Managing Goals with Gainsight Success Plans
According to a company release, Gainsight Success Plans allows companies to not only define their customer success goals, but to document and manage the steps needed to execute those goals.
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Specifically, Gainsight claims that this release offers companies the ability to:
- Collaborate with customer stakeholders to develop goals and a strategic plan for how their products or services should best be used in order to help drive business outcomes
- Manage activity across various objectives and owners, while keeping tabs on task progress
- Incorporate reports and graphs into management dashboards in Gainsight to manage interaction with customers across services and onboarding projects, support tickets and upsell opportunities
“As you’re working with a large customer, you may want to identify and track objectives for that customer; however, each customer has its own definition of success,” said Rumelhart.
“With Success Plans, customer success managers can identify for each customer what success means to them, and define the specific actions that the team should take to ensure success for their individual customers.”
Modeling Complex Interactions with Gainsight Relationships
With Gainsight Relationships, continued Rumelhart, customer success managers can focus on relationships they are responsible for, rather than trudging through parent account level data.
According to the release, this offering allows customer success managers to:
- Better manage the success of complex sales, such as those in which a company sells multiple instances of a product or service to the same customer, but to different business units or locations
- More efficiently manage the success of either individual products or projects that are typically managed by different customer success managers
- Gain a 360 degree view of the customer by easily locating child relationships for a parent customer and navigating between views instantly
“Gainsight Relationships lets our customers separate out each of the different commercial connection points with their customers and determine what is or isn’t going well, the key stakeholders that are involved, as well as usage information broken out into relationships, and then aggregated back up to see as a whole how the customer doing,” said Rumelhart.
“We’re taking it to the next level to make sure that our enterprise customers are armed and ready to step it up in terms of getting value for their customers.”
