Gainsight

What do you get when you put 16 #CustomerSuccess executives in a room with a dictionary 📕? We hosted our next “AI in Customer Success” lunch in the lovely city of Boston yesterday. I opened up with my favorite / nerdiest icebreaker: “What’s your favorite word?” You can tease me, but I relish the beauty of language ❤️, unless it’s churn-related… The answers offered a lens into the mindset of leaders managing clients: “outcome-oriented,” “femininomenon” (not a real word but an epic Chappell Roan song), “minutiae,” “collaboration,” “change creates opportunity” (again, not a word, but a powerful phrase to live by), “meaning,” “consistency,” “opportunity,” “empathy,” “preparation,” “accountability,” “tangibility,” “community,” “fearless” (apparently not the Taylor Swift album), “flibbertigibbet” (ask our own Seth Wylie to define that one!) and “sonder" (not a real word but my favorite from the “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”). On a more serious note, the lunch allowed me to compile what I’d say are the 5 “must do” activities are for CS executives with respect to AI: 1. Get Your Head Out of the Sand: “But what about security?” Security is an important question. But don’t let months go by, imagining you’ve blocked AI, as 50% of your teammates use ChatGPT every day! 2. Enable Your Team On Using AI: Entrepreneur Mark Cuban put it perfectly: “If you don’t learn AI, you’re going to become a dinosaur within 3 years.” We need to help our teams continuously learn AI. I say “continuously” since AI is evolving so rapidly. At Gainsight, Seth Wylie and Brady Bluhm from our own Customer Success team created a program called “AI for All” to foster this learning. 3. Increase Meeting Effectiveness: Generative AI can help executives, new CSMs and high volume CSMs prepare for accounts without someone writing a “prep note.” This isn’t about efficiency - it’s about not walking into meetings cold. 4. Improve CSM Productivity: The CSM role (along with other customer-facing roles) is maddening for many reasons. One of them is due to the amount of manual “grunt” work involved. CSMs love clients. And they hate data entry. Whether it’s note taking or contact updates, AI can help CSMs do more of what they love and less of what they loathe. 5. Extract Intelligence: Given the omnipresence of recorded meetings, there is treasure trove of information in those calls. This knowledge is silo-ed and often lost. From customer goals to value delivered to use cases to client personas to advocacy moments, AI can help auto-intuit this data and expose it to all CSMs. Big props to Eva Klein Josh Buckley Beth Shea Erin Parker James Lemonias Juan Del Rio Joanna Vinick Kate Robertson Kristina Holbrook Melissa DiTucci Marc P. Shahar Layani Stephanie Bourdage-Braun Jonathan Corbin Mark Friedman Michael Larkin for brining their thinking and thesauri to the dialog! How about you? Where are you starting with Generative AI? And what’s your favorite word? 😎

Happy 3-year anniversary, Visioneers Community! 🎉 Gong

⏰ The clock is ticking..don’t miss out on our Super Early Bird pricing! Secure your pass before July 31st to join 1,100 #CS, #Community and #CustomerEducation Professionals in Amsterdam for Pulse Europe 2024, 13-14 November. Get access to an incredible two days of 45 sessions, 60 speakers, unrivalled networking and plenty of child-like joy. We can't wait to see you there! 🌍 🚀 Grab your tickets here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dzQq2s3r

Meet the game changers at commercetools 🚀 See how their switch to Gainsight Essentials revolutionized their Customer Success management, providing automation, customization and robust reporting. Check out this video where our Hauke Rahm & Nina Batlak discuss their growth strategies 🌱 and why Gainsight supports their dynamic needs. 🔗 👉 https://bit.ly/3SgVNJj #customersuccess #GainsightEssentials

Join the 2024 Customer Success Index Survey, the definitive source of insights into the State of Customer Success. ✨ Adaptability has been a key theme for Customer Success programs over the past few years. Amidst constant change, informed CS pros find ways to adjust strategies to drive retention and new revenue, supporting profitable growth. 🌱 As you consider strategies to elevate your organization, let Gainsight and Benchmarkit provide insights on what’s working for your peers throughout the CS industry. Take just 10 minutes to respond to our survey, and we’ll share the findings to help you navigate current market challenges, leverage AI, and make crucial decisions for the future. Why Participate? 📈 Understand Industry Trends: Learn how other Customer Success leaders are responding to today’s market dynamics. 🔎 Benchmark Your Strategies: See where your organization stands and identify areas for improvement. 📝 Exclusive Report: Receive a complimentary copy of the final executive report with in-depth findings and actionable insights. Join your peers in providing a clear picture of our industry. Fill out the survey now and get valuable insights to help guide your strategies for the coming year. Start the survey here 👉 https://bit.ly/3WhVeAh

Customer communities aren’t new. There have been local user groups just about as long as there’s been software to use. 💻 What is new, though, is how software is making them easier to set up, launch, and manage. 🚀 That also means it’s easier to make mistakes. We created an essential guide to customer communities here which discusses what you need to be thinking about when launching a community of your own, including which software platform your community should be built upon. 🌐 But here’s the TL;DR: • Customer communities are the third piece in the customer empowerment puzzle, 🧩 working with customer education 📚 and customer success teams 🏆 to create loyal users who become your advocates and champions. Getting those communities right when you’re first creating them is critical. 🎯 All successful customer communities have three things in common: • 🛠️ Self-service Customers prefer self-service by a wide margin versus relying on contacting Customer Service or Customer Success directly. Communities allow them to access content at their own pace and receive information faster, in most cases. • 📚 Content Engine One of Community’s primary functions is to generate robust, high-quality content. Whether that content is user- or company-generated, it all drives engagement, facilitates self-service, and helps users and customers achieve value with your product. • 💬 Multiway Communication Communities harness the power of multiway communication. Communications sent to the user base via community reach a large number of people in an effective, efficient manner, becoming a truly one-to-many channel that is arguably more impactful than what a single Customer Success Manager, Account Manager, or email campaign could achieve. There is even more to dig into here. We hope you’ll give it a read linked here: https://bit.ly/4cYXDXa. 📖

Are you looking to turn your CS team into a proactive, scalable, revenue-generating machine? Then don’t sleep on the new This is Growth! Podcast, hosted by Daphne Costa Lopes! The most recent episode explores the art of defining and measuring customer value, featuring our own expert on the subject, Tori Jeffcoat, Senior Manager, Marketing Strategy, CS and AI, Gainsight, where they discussed tips and strategies for defining customer value, measuring customer value and scaling up while improving team performance. A summary of the episode along with key takeaways is here on our blog: https://bit.ly/4faZkmo Check the link to the podcast in comments and tell us what you think! 🔗

Empowering customers is the key to business success, regardless of the industry. This is especially true in the world of SaaS, which is why we’ve prioritized building customer education and customer success teams. 🏆 This is why we should all be focusing on the emerging frontier of customer communities. Customer communities are integral to the customer journey and customer success, and they are more versatile than you might think in helping to achieve company goals. 🎯 We’ve created an ultimate guide to building customer communities, which delves deeper into this topic. Here are some key insights: • Scaling Customer Support 📈🤝 A community platform is the perfect place for users to go when they have questions about a product or need to troubleshoot. In most communities, the majority of support content is posted by other users in a peer-to-peer (P2P) motion. • Building a Knowledge Base 📚💡 Troubleshooting content is a great beginning, but for companies that want to be more proactive about educating and informing customers, communities can easily grow to become a central hub for all customer-facing resources. • Optimizing the Customer Journey 🚀🛤️ Specific sections of the community can be tailored to guide new customers from the initial onboarding and implementation phase, through training and product adoption, all the way to becoming advocates. • Strengthening Customer Relationships 🤝💬 Community builds dialogue between you and your customers, giving you a more complete view of what they are talking about and thinking about in a candid, transparent environment. This opens up a range of strategies you can use to strengthen those relationships. • Product Communication, Feedback, and Ideation 💬📢💡 Customers in a community feel comfortable providing candid feedback and insights on product features and experiences, helping drive product innovation and optimization. • Brand-Building, Marketing, and Conversion 🏗️📈🎯 When customer communities are well-integrated across a website, they help companies generate additional leads, drive higher conversion rates, and accelerate the online buying cycle. Customer communities are no longer nice-to-haves that you build once everything else is running smoothly. They are rapidly becoming essential to any growth strategy. 📈 We go deeper into how to build and manage your own in the guide linked in the comments, and how Gainsight can help support you and your community efforts. 📘🤝 🔗 Check out the full Essential Guide to Customer Communities, linked here: https://bit.ly/4cYXDXa

Who is ready to revolutionize your customer retention and growth strategy? Dive into our latest e-book on how to leverage online community platforms to engage and expand your customer base. This comprehensive guide is packed with actionable insights and proven strategies to help you build a thriving online community that drives customer success. In this e-book, you’ll explore: ⭐ How to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction through a well-structured online community. ⭐ Key performance indicators for measuring the success of your community initiatives. ⭐ Practical advice on integrating your online community with essential tools like your CRM and ticketing systems. ⭐ The benefits of offering self-service options to reduce support tickets and improve customer satisfaction. Are you ready to build a customer community that exudes satisfaction and loyalty? Check it out here: https://bit.ly/3xREQ0X 💡 #CustomerSuccess #CustomerRetention #CustomerCommunity

We believe Customer Education is foundational for Customer Success. This year's #Pulse2024 really highlighted that, and we want everyone to benefit from it, whether you attended or not. We've compiled a TL;DR of the key insights from Pulse 2024's dedicated Customer Education track. Dive into our summary to discover how these strategies can elevate customer engagement, product adoption, and overall success in your organization – check out our link to the full blog in the comments. In the post, you’ll see highlights from sessions led by: • Courtney Sembler, Director of the HubSpot Academy, and the session, Human-Centered Education—HubSpot’s Winning Formula for Customer Success 🗝️ Key Takeaway: Today’s customer education programs are driven by technology, but they must maintain a human touch. • ★ Rupal Nishar ★, Head of Customer Success at Updater, and the session, Updater’s Crawl, Walk, Run Approach to Customer Training and Product Adoption 🗝️ Key Takeaway: While it’s understandable to want to emulate the best custom education programs from the launch of yours, embracing a crawl-walk-run methodology lays a sturdy foundation and builds based on feedback. • Karla Kannan, SVP of Customer Experience at BirchStreet Systems, and the session, Harmonizing Digital and Human Touch in Customer Education 🗝️ Key Takeaway: We must understand what our customers need—and how they want to learn—and give them that. • Robin Raye, Director of Customer Education at Iodine Software, and the session, Making Every Interaction Count with Blended Digital Learning 🗝️ Key Takeaway: By centering customer education programs around practical application, your customers can better integrate new knowledge and skills into their daily workflows. Click through and explore these and other sessions in the Customer Education track. Each session is available on-demand, because, even if you couldn’t attend Pulse with us, you deserve to be empowered too. 🔗 Link below!