Exciting times! We are absolutely delighted to announce that Gainsight—world leaders in Customer Success (CS)—have migrated their buzzing customer community to the inSided platform.

We caught up with Lila Meyer, Director Product Education and Community at Gainsight, to celebrate the launch of their community, get some insights on how they are using it for CS, and find out why they chose inSided as their Customer Success Community platform. Here’s how our Q&A went:

Q: Lila, first of all thanks for doing this and congratulations on your new community! Happy?

A: Yes! We’ve already received a lot of compliments about how great the new community looks, as well as how the search is so much better, for instance.

Q: Briefly: what exactly is Gainsight’s mission, product, and what’s your role at the company?

A: Gainsight’s mission as a company is to win in business while being human first. Kind of unique, right? I feel lucky to work for an organization that truly values its employees and considers the impact of its business decisions on all of the stakeholders.

The Gainsight Customer Cloud provides all of the technology a company needs to ensure that their customers easily adopt their products and achieve their business outcomes with your company.

My role is to oversee our community and product documentation, and to support product release enablement. We currently have sizeable monthly product releases, so our teams are always busy!

Q: When did Gainsight first decide to start a community and why?

A: The Gainsight community will actually be 5 years old this December! It was initially started as a joint endeavor between our Support and Product teams, with the intention of providing a place for customers to share what they wanted to see in the product, to trade best practices about using Gainsight, as well as Customer Success best practices. It also grew into a product support channel, where customers shared questions and their specific use cases, and their peers as well as Gainsight employees helped address them.

This year, the goals have expanded to include discussion, best practices, and ideation around PX, our new product experience application.

Q: So you guys were at the forefront of using community in Customer Success. What happened after you first launched—how did you manage to get your customers and Gainsight’s employees involved?

A: I wasn’t closely involved with the Community in its first few years, but I know that we promoted the community everywhere (and still do)—in our product documentation, customer emails, across all of our web-based properties, in webinars and live events like Pulse, and through our Support, CSM, and onboarding teams. All of our customer-facing teams helped direct customers to the community to share their product feedback and vote for ideas, and we acknowledged them by prioritizing many of their requests.

Fortunately, our product management leadership has always been an advocate for community, and encouraged the team to be engaged. Customers saw this, appreciated it, and kept coming back!

Our employees also saw how providing answers to common questions in a one-to-many format helped reduce the burden on them. Community is also really good at revealing who your power users and advocates are, which is valuable intel for various teams at Gainsight!

Q: Moving on to the new platform: Why did you decide to upgrade to inSided? What specific features were you looking for and how is the project going so far?

A: At a high level, we needed to improve the user experience for all of our stakeholders. For product managers, we wanted to make it easier for them to see the posts that they care about, and take quick action such as commenting and updating idea statuses. For end users, we wanted to improve the search and forum navigation experience. And for admins, there were some basics we were missing such as managing member profiles when they have login issues, as well as pulling together actionable analytics. 

It’s only been a few days since our go live, but we’ve already heard how much easier search and navigation is, and how impressed people are with the overall look and feel of the community. And I really appreciate that the simple things—like getting users from the old community logged in to the new one—are just working.

But perhaps the best part for me is the feeling that I finally have a vendor who is a true partner in helping ensure the long term success and growth of our community. 

Q: That’s really great to hear! So, what would you say is the primary business goal of the Gainsight community?

A: We use community as a tool for gathering customer input on the product, as well as helping our Support and CSM teams to scale, by increasing our customer’s ability to self-serve. 

Q: What would you say are the main KPIs you’re tracking for the community?

A: We’ve been tracking various metrics on a monthly basis: for example,  number of new joinees, active users, session length, average # of replies per topic, and so on. These are helpful indicators of the community’s overall health and progress.

What we’re really excited about is the opportunity inSided gives us to integrate our community data with our CRM data, so we can look at customer engagement as part of our overall customer health scores, and analyze the relationships between NPS and community participation, etc. The Gainsight CS app also enables us to expose community activity and health scores on our Customer360 view, for CSMs to better understand their customers. 

Q: How do you make these KPIs actionable?

A: For the KPIs we have more experience measuring, we experiment with various levers to determine what will have the most impact. For example, we know a percentage of our accounts are not registered on the community. So, we’re working this quarter to reach those accounts and get them engaged. We’ve done internal contests, targeted in-app messaging, and emails to try to bring them in, but we’re always looking for creative solutions!

Q: Do you have any great tips on engagement strategies to share with CSMs who are looking into community options?

A: With our new product experience (PX) category, we’ve had a lot of success in partnering with our CSMs to introduce community to their customers. We’re also experimenting with different automated in-app communications to try to bring PX users to the community, but that personal touch and invitation has produced really positive results.

The CSMs are also sharing content from the community in their communications with customers, which is a great way to introduce new customers to this resource. For questions that the CSMs are hearing frequently from customers, we encourage them to write up quick FAQs or ‘tip of the week’ style posts for the community, to make it easier for customers to self-serve.

Q: Finally, if you had to describe the inSided migration project in one word what would it be?

A: Partnership. 

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer our questions, Lila! We’re extremely proud to have Gainsight as a customer, and we’re looking forward to a long, successful partnership.

Read the full story around Gainsight’s community migration here. 

Would you like more information on community and why it should be part of any effective Customer Success tech stack? inSided will be at Gainsight’s Pulse Europe in London, 5-6th November. We will be hosting two speaking sessions about the importance of community in Customer Success, one of which is co-hosted by Gainsight—if you want to plan a meeting at Pulse please send an email to marketing@insided.com!

Download 10 Steps to Community Success in B2B Software

Find out the 10 steps needed for a successful B2B customer community. 

{{cta(‘3edb7cf2-ba9c-4850-880b-5afca03e3589’)}}

By Remco de Vries