ClientSuccess vs. Gainsight CS

ClientSuccess is perfect for the growing small-to-medium business like ours. It's simple and easy enough to quickly implement as a starter solution, but also robust enough to support multiple Customer Success teams. It may fall a bit short in terms of an enterprise organization in scale, customization, and flexibility. However, I can see enterprise organizations using different instances of ClientSuccess, perhaps for different departments or sections, if those organizations didn't need overarching analytics

Incentivized

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

• Pulse - It is so nice to collect the pulses of my client to know if they are healthy or not. I base a lot of my interactions with clients off of pulse. It shows me how many days it's been since I last had a pulse check on someone and from there I can see if I need to reach out or not.
• Automated Emails - It's so comforting to know that my clients are being communicated to when I haven't thought to reach out to them. I have set up a lot of automated emails and rules for when they should go out and I've had a lot of clients get in touch with me from it that need.
• Success Cycles - It has allowed me to set up success cycles for the clients. Because of this, I know exactly how to train them and exactly where they're at in the training process.

• 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.

• The support view takes a few steps to get to the meat and potatoes.
• The success score model can be improved to include smaller one-off campaigns. Success score is good for a campaign that has existed for a while but not for the one-off projects.

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

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

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

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

They are SUPER responsive...even for late night inquiries.

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 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 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

Our team had previously been using HubSpot CRM as a way to manage client contracts in combination with Trello for simple client progress mapping, and Client Success has eliminated the need to use either of them for client management. HubSpot is designed more for sales processes and was missing a way for our team to get an accurate view of our clients and their details. In a similar manner, Trello is designed more for task and project management and didn't provide the detail orientation we needed.

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

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

• Within the first week, leadership was able to have more visibility into the lifestage and health score of each client
• We needed to become more proactive as an organization and this platform has allowed us to do so with real-time metrics and reporting.
• We needed to find a way to scale our approach, especially as our Client Success organization continues to grow, and this is already helping.

• 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