ChurnZero vs. Gainsight CS

If you are a SaaS business with a high volume of customers, having ChurnZero is a must. If you have a subscription based business and a customer success or account management function in your company, I would highly recommend ChurnZero.

It's great for being able to capture all information in Gainsight CS. The only challenge is some of the task management and visibility into workload that is very clunky. After watching the roadmap for 2025, I'm feeling more hopefully that some of my pain points will be handled. However, it's still challenging that the task-management basics will still be clunky. I'm excited for the AI scheduling of tasks, but this would be better if the improvements to task /workload visibility is updated.

Incentivized

• Plays: Allows you to bulk send emails out to clients based on easy to make segments. Also, allows us to track success of a play. Previously, we had to work with our marketing team to send out any emails and it was an extremely bulky process that took far too long for the payout.
• Segments: Better than any other CRM reporting functionality. Allows us to more accurately look at portions of our clients based on different factors that are extremely easy to use.
• Health Scores: The customization allows us to really play around with different health scores as we figure out what good health across clients and services really look like.
• Transparency: Allows me as a manager to see a much better comprehensive look at my team's performance.

Incentivized

• Logging customer activity is incredibly intuitive and easy for team to do and reference.
• Using the rules engine to generate CTAs for our team to intervene where needed has been helpful in automating relevant activities in bulk. We have a churn prevention program run through CTAs where Gainsight CS will notice risk criteria we've built in, then alert CSMs and their managers of potential risk concerns, like low product adoption or negative survey response, with clear next steps and actions laid out for what to do.
• More broadly, it has inspired a new mindset on our team for how to work with customers. Through working with Gainsight CS, they have become less transactional and look at accounts more holistically. Success Plans allow for this, as they create plans with customized customer goals and the tasks it will take to achieve those goals.

• More clarity around our usage (event) data - it can be difficult to understand all the terminology ChurnZero uses
• Add more functionality for use cases of Operations teams - currently focused mainly on CSM usage
• Ability to set defaults when viewing dashboards and command center - currently all choices reset

Incentivized

• Would love to see a Gainsight OPs/Admin checklist that guides CS Ops team through specific pieces of information needed to execute specific playbooks (best practices)
• When creating reports, sometimes it's difficult to find the correct variable that you are looking for as it's nested under various categories
• Would love ability to "heatmap" specific individual customer engagement based on CSM inputted customer contacts at meetings
• Would love to see more analysis on engagements - how often, how frequent - built into the product

Incentivized

Our team is very happy with the product after evaluating multiple vendors, including Gainsight, Totango and Planhat. We like the additional functionality that CZ offers on its enterprise version. We were strongly considering other products if the price was right and functionality worked, but the change management would have been too heavy and taken too long. The ChurnZero team has been a good partner to rely on and allowed us to free up our time and resources to focus on more pressing matters

Incentivized

Great tool and we've spent a lot of time getting it up and running. Unless something else comes a long that does a similar function for less money we will consider jumping cause we are always looking to save budget where we can. Till then I think we are satisfied with Gainsight at the moment.

Incentivized

ChurnZero makes my work life a complete game changer. I say it all the time ChurnZero is a one stop shop for data! I don't fumble through numerous different programs, try to remember different passwords, I literally login to CZ and it is right there in front of me

Incentivized

I give it this score based on the implementation at my current employer. I don't know if it could be higher based on if the implementation went better, or if there is something on the vendor side that could help. If this were asked at my previous employer, I would have given it a score of 9 or 10.

Incentivized

Quick response by the CZ team.

Incentivized

Rarely any issues with availability or outages. When they do occur, there is excellent communication and consistent updates. Bugs are usually addressed in a timely manner, and communication around those issues is also extremely good

Incentivized

There are some times when it can take almost a minute to load some of our reports or the rules engine. Within a rule it can also take time to load the actions as they each load one at a time when scrolling. The ability to scroll without waiting would be ideal

I recently had the opportunity to interact with ChurnZero's customer support team, and I must say, I am thoroughly impressed. Their responsiveness and willingness to solve problems are exemplary. From the moment I reached out, their team displayed a level of professionalism and dedication that truly stood out.

Incentivized

The CSMs are very hands-on and helpful, both Elaine and Lane have provided a lot of guidance and value over the years. Support is responsive and will jump on things as needed. The thought leadership and community is probably the most valuable part of our support from Gainsight.

Incentivized

The training and onboarding have been very helpful. Since I was not a part of the team when ChurnZero was implemented, it was important to get brought up to speed as quickly as possible and our CSM has been incredibly receptive in that regard.

Incentivized

The online videos are very good for basic tasks in the platform, but it isn't very descriptive or helpful trying to make your own specific variables fit the simple example that is typically used. Typically, I'll watch a video, try on my own and still have to get help from support or Customer Success team

I implemented CZ in 4 months. When I look back, this is not a long time where I needed to get to know CZ by myself (as I did not have knowledge of it at all..) study the Academy, playing around in the test environment and setting up in live environment.

Incentivized

I was not part of the implantation (I took over later). However, based on what was passed to me, the tool was not well implemented at our org. I think this had to do with complexity, wrong person assigned in our org, and org buy-in. I think it would have been very successful if we had a better assignment process internally.

Incentivized

We've used several products such as HubSpot, Asana, and Chameleon. ChurnZero gave us all of the features we were looking for including product usage, health scores, automations, journeys, in app walk-throughs and in app announcements. We were able to replace several platforms with ChurnZero and ended up with more functionality.

Incentivized

Gainsight CS simply had a broader set of functionality that we wanted. That said, if Vitally or ChurnZero were to close a few of the functionality gaps that mattered to us, we would prefer to use either of those competitor products.

Incentivized

Easy to escalate.

Incentivized

It can lean a little heavily toward Customer Success, but the ability to customize many areas based on specific user or account characteristics allows you to make it work across many different roles. This also makes collaboration within the tool across teams possible. It a flexible tool if you have a skilled admin to help guide your process building.

Incentivized

• Already allowing us to do some data-clean up and better identify struggling accounts
• Gives us the tools to re-teach our team on being proactive, not reactive
• We can more easily identify accounts that are positioned well for cross sell
• Over time, we hope to see higher renewal retention

Incentivized

• No metrics yet, but we have improved our at-risk customers by identifying risks earlier via our automated health score and with our Gainsight approved mitigation workflow, CSMs and leaders have better discipline with mitigation efforts and sharing at-risk customers across the org so other teams can step in and assist

Incentivized