Gainsight Customer Communities is a centralized destination that brings customers, resources, and products together. The hub helps users to engage, retain, and delight customers by unifying customer resources, leveraging dynamic search and AI capabilities, building an influential user community.
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Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
A great scenario that we use the community for is product adoption. That's one of the things we use it for. So sending our new customers as part of their onboarding flow to the community to learn from others and see the resources that are available and know that there's a place for them to ask questions and get their questions answered. That's probably one of our primary use cases and scenarios that it works straight in. I can't really think of something that it wouldn't work good for. That's a tough one to think of on the spot.
Vanilla Forums is well suited for growing communities that wish to expand without having to change software. Existing larger communities may find the user management part of the tool lacking, although this could be from my lack of experience.
They provide excellent customer service to us on a weekly basis. If we have questions or find something that we'd like improved or even something new we'd like to add to our program, we have a dedicated person we can reach out to who helps us facilitate that change.
We're fond of their add-ons. We use many of them in our community. Some keep our members engaged on a day to day basis. We really like reactions, the keyword blocker, the civil tongue filter, and a few customized add-ons that Vanilla added specifically for our community.
They send us notifications for all upcoming releases, and update their software frequently.
Creating visual themes can be difficult. Although there is an open source version of the software, some of the plugins (gamification, badges) are not available for download, so any visual theme that includes them will need to be at least partially developed on their servers, vs doing the whole thing offline and then uploading it all at once. This can be time consuming as each code change has to be checking in to Github and then imported into their server cluster.
I'd give it a nine because there are some aspects of it that we've had to, we've tried to find workarounds for, but there was no alternative but to involve engineering support and rely on custom development to make it work how we needed to
Gainsight was the best combination of features, service, and price. HL/Vanilla ultimately did not impress, and Khoros was more effort than our small team could manage
Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant users which was a limitation to many of the platforms we look at at the time. Since we are a software and cloud company, working with a product we could customize and automate via the API was another big factor. Today we have automated flows for reviewing and accepting improvement requests and then pulling them into our ticketing system and updating the deployment status of those requests one we push our updates to our users. Most importantly, Vanilla came forward with a reasonable cost to match our existing CSS and make a template that was easy for us to maintain as we grew.
We've had a ton of positive direct customer feedback with regards to the Communities; a lot of them are very happy with the implementation and features it provides.
We have lots of customer interactions with both our colleagues as well as other customers and that has shown to lower support outreach in cases where customers normally would have opened support tickets.
