
The flexibility to tailor the software to your needs, especially in Scorecards, Dashboards and Playbooks. The powerful Rules Engine to calculate basically everything you want on your data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Flexibility seems to come with complexity. You definitely need a dedicated and skilled Gainsight administrator to set the system up and maintain it. Journey Orchestrator could use an upgrade in user-friendliness. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The timeline feature is a fantastic way to create visibility and track customer interactions with CSM's. The ability to "Tag" relevant people in your organization has been a game change for us. I also like the various dashboards we can create, and the ability to use scorecards to measure customer health and focus our CS efforts towards better client outcomes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It can be a beast to administer. There are so many areas you can customize and create "rules engines" that it can be daunting. Some things like CTAs and Success Plans are difficult to understand and know when to use one over another, when they are essentially the same thing. This can be confusing for CSM's as their client list grows. We've also had to invest extra money into having a part-time consultant help with admin upkeep and changes. Running reports also requires a few too many steps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
First off, I am writing this review as an admin and data-nerd and IT person. That being said, when it comes to merging data and bringing data "to life" this is a great tool, especially when supported by a well thought out mission statement with cross-org buy in. My favorite aspect of Gainsight is making never-seen-before data-sets become Actionable via CTA's and how everything is trackable via reports. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There are some growing pains as all companies have. As we have pushed the envelope of the product we have discovered some limitations that have caused some delays in user story delivery. The good news is they have a very responsive support and product team that pays attention to their user Community (Gamechangers FTW!) and gives customers a voice and role in shaping future features and enhancements Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The ability to customise the system to our own usage data is very helpful. I know this is the main point of the system, but as our tool has a slightly non-standard usage output, doing it manually was a nightmare, so we were unsure if it was going to be difficult even when done through a programme like Gainsight. However, it has reduced some key business process from having to have 4 or 5 different people across 3 different teams doing various tasks over the course of 8 days to it happening automatically, with no manual intervention overnight.
The support from all the different teams at Gainsight is also superb. Depending on what is needed, i.e. best practice guidance, technical support, etc, the relevant teams are kind, responsive, and efficient. I think the most helpful aspects of RentSense have been the guidance that accompanies the tool to ensure we are getting the most out of it. We meet with our Customer Outcomes Manager regularly to ensure we are using Gainsight in the best way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The implementation process was much more time consuming that anticipated, and looking back we feel the implementation partner didn't fully understand our needs and there are things we wish we had stood our ground on, rather than bowing to the advice of the implementation manger.
We also struggle occasionally with the reporting function. It is excellent for basic and intermediate reporting needs, however for more complex analysis, we still have to download the excel document and do it in excel. It is easy to export when needed though, and the majority of our reporting needs are met. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The support! Gainsight provides multiple places for an admin to get help for product implementation.
The product itself is also fairly intuitive. Often times SFDC can get cluttered for customer success folks. Gainsight provides a clean place that the sales team has to keep their grubby little hands out of. This allows for customer success managers a better place to stay organized. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The color formatting could use some improvement. It would be nice to have the ability to change and adjust the colors across individual reports instead of a one size fits all.
There are also times when calls to action can get out of hand and become busy work for the customer success managers. Luckily there is an option for an admin to go in and mass edit/delete these to start fresh. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Gainsight is easy to configure once you understand the logic of the software.
- The Salesforce connector has a real positive impact for us : we can have access to the Salesforce data, but also feed Salesforce with Gainsight's data. I know that a Service Now connector is about to be released; which is also great news. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- I am a skilled user of Salesforce and I thought the logic would be the same, as Gainsight is a Salesforce plugin. But it is not. However, the logic can be learned very quickly thanks to a thoughtful team, responsive Support and complete online documentation.
- The Dashboard capacities are quite poor, but I know that the next release will offer much more flexibility. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Really useful system to help my CSM team do more with their time, Simple to use and great support from them. Online support is excellent along with the admin hours should I need the extra help.
Automation around emails to my customers means that they get high touch comms with low effort for the team Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Would be amazing if there was a way to do over time comparisons showing data from last year and this year as a comparison rather than as one long line.
Not being able to send out a weekly reminder to look at the healthscore Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Timeline, Health Score, Integrations, Workflow. In general, the tool is great for customer management and monitoring.
The tool really helps to get your everyday work with the customers done. You have a clear overview of every customer-related task within your cockpit which can be clustered/sorted by the due date, health score, priority, and so on.
Reports really help to have a clear overview of your customers, their segmentation, lifecycle, contract situation, and way more.
Within Dashboards, you then can group your reports to answer certain questions. You might have a dashboard that displays current NPS responses, health scores, life cycle, and renewal date. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The complexity in the backend while creating CTAs and reports. Sometimes, it's quite confusing. The backend is just not easily understandable and easy to handle. But Gainsight seems to constantly improve this.
One example is the creation of a survey via the Journey Orchestrator. You need to jump around between the email template creator, the journey itself, and the linkage between both. Also, there is no possibility to easily select a set of users who should receive a survey. This is quite complex and could be handled way easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Simple user interface (end-users)
- Fantastic reporting capabilities (much easier to manipulate than Salesforce.com & with better charts!)
- Outlook plugin allows CSMs to leverage team templates for better customer responses without changing tools
- Timeline emails & activity logging keeps customer history easy to enter, search and review
- Sleek survey tool is simple to set up and use Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Most of my concerns are related to the effort to set up and run it.
Sometimes, I feel like we're idling along in our Customer Success Ferrari. No doubt, it looks cool and it can do some amazing things. It's just got so much power, my development wish list is longer than my admin could tackle in months so I haven't been able to really get it out on the Autobahn yet.
Naturally, a machine like this also requires a lot of maintenance. Experienced administrators who have run Salesforce instances might be fine, but I'd caution against self-guided learning on the fly for less savvy (or experienced) types. Gainsight created a number of self-diagnostic tools but those are pretty sophisticated, too, so you'll need someone who knows how to read the gauges. Lately, I've noticed that some new releases have been buggy, which further taxes our limited admin time.
It's also been tough to be sure we're 'doing it right' so we can avoid having to rebuild later. We're early in our Customer Success evolution so each of these decisions will be magnified as time goes on so there's an ongoing time investment to analyze and (in some cases) course correct. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Gainsight is a critical tool for all CS Organizations. If you have the right admin, and tools you will succeed. Without Gainsight and its functionality we are literally navigating in the dark. This speaks volumes to the capabilities and criticality of the tool. The simple view for Customers is incredibly impactful. We can see all the activity at a moments notice as well as the integrations with tools like Gmail to track and limit manual entries. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It is very dependent on admin vs self-service so it requires a lot of knowledge about the configuration and opportunities. Needs to be more self-service for leaders not just technical admins. There needs to be more specific leaders can tailor to their organization, and make it incredibly easy for data in and reporting. Reports are a little tricky. The integrations also need to be more self-service for lean organizations. Build out of the box reports that show us what we should be doing vs making it so customized. If we want X data, we use this report, this allows us to know what we as an organization need to do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
CTAs are the "Secret Sauce" for focusing our CSMs on critical issues and/or opportunities, especially for those with a large book of business where it would be impossible otherwise. Also, the ability to build out Tech-Touch automations directly to customers, making them aware of issues or situations and guiding them in "Self-Service" to resolve the issues themselves. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
In a few rare cases, some fail-safe things have been built into aspects of Gainsight, that prevent me as an admin from doing some things that I need to do from a business perspective, such as create CTAs scheduled in the past to replace CTAs that had to be fixed for some reason. Warn me, but still let me do what I need to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The most useful areas of gainsight for us are:
- Visibility - gainsight allows us to see everything about our accounts in one place with extremely rich information. It also lets us report out to the business, which helps to prove the value of the CS team.
- Flexibility - its great that we can self-serve and improve gainsight as we go, adding new fields and exploring additional functionalities.
- Scale - with gainsight we need fewer people to do the same job as it helps us take away the mundane time consuming tasks from CSMs and automate them
Gainsight enables us to be more strategic and focus on bringing value to the customers by reducing the admin time and improving access to valuable information. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Bugs - gainsight occasionally has various bugs that can make it a bit annoying as they can mess with what features you can view, or the UI.
- Support desk - the first line of support can be unhelpful and you need to get them to escalate your issue to ensure you get to someone who is capable (providing you are an admin so you know what you are dealing with isn't trivial)
- Maintenance - gainsight requires a lot of maintenance. You won't be able to just run with it after implementation. You need to continuously monitor data integrity and accuracy, status of the rules, etc. It is also the kind of platform where development never ends - you will always need to improve and add things to it as you function/business/product grows and matures. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just something that shouldn't be overlooked or underestimated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The platform has a lot of standard features which allow you to rapidly setup onboarding, CS and customer lifecycle scenarios and CTA's. The native integration with Salesforce was a real quick win for us. Most important advantage is the open archtecture and the number of standard connectors with other platforms we use.
Also Gainsight shares a wealth of knowledge with their customers. Both on their platform but also on general CS and CX aspects. Really useful! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
You really have to follow the Gainsight methodology if you want to deliver value to your users within a decent delay. I have done 3 Gainsight implementations so far and one really suffered a very long implementation track. But when you stick to their methodology and take advantage of their CSM's and consultants onboarding/impelentation is done in a matter of weeks, not months. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Gainsight CS keeps me organized, helps me prioritize client engagement and renewal tasks, and makes sure no customer falls through the gaps. Supporting a large customer book of business would be nearly impossible without this tool!
I use the Customer 360/Timeline and Cockpit on a daily basis to quickly prioritize and task through follow-up and proactive outreach. Renewal Center helps me keep renewals and upsell opportunities top of mind and updated. Journey Orchestrator has been invaluable in our one-to-many outreaches, onboarding sequences, and communication campaigns.
As a company, Gainsight is also a thought-leader in the SaaS Customer Success field, providing invaluable insights and best practices to customer success professionals and leaders. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There is not a way (that I am aware of) to store or easily link to attachments/documents, such as contracts, in the SFDC version. To view these documents, we have to navigate through Salesforce rather than staying within the Gainsight application.
The mobile app has a lot of potential, but is not as useful as it could be as there is limited functionality available today. I would love to filter the timeline feed by account owner or task owner rather than simply seeing a list of all timeline activities for all coworkers' accounts. Adding a Cockpit view would be ideal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Our strategy CSM is tremendously helpful. He does a great job of identifying and prioritizing our problem areas.
Journey Orchestrator has been truly transformational in automating our work. As a product-led company, it's hard to ask our Product and Engineering teams to prioritize work that automates our Services. Gainsight and Journey Orchestrator have helped us to improve efficiency (reduce COGS) while they're working on product and go to market changes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Our implementation required too many decisions, and we went down some bad paths. I would love for Gainsight to work out of the box, and make adjustments from there.
In general, Gainsight has said that their tools are good for many different roles and types of work, but that is yet to be seen. We are a two sided network. While Gainsight is a great use for one side of our network, it's not great for the other. It's simply far too clunky. We're working to optimize our configuration to allow for ease of use, but I am not convinced the tool or the pricing model matches well with our business. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
As its name implies, we have insight into customers we didn't have before. The tool surfaces issues we might have otherwise overlooked in our relationships with customers. If dashboarding is setup correctly, we can maintain consistent customer outreach and transfer accounts among CSMs if there's an organizational change. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It's an in-depth tool and with any robust tool it can be administratively heavy. The initial deployment was challenging and after deployment its not a small investment from a (wo)man-hours perspective to maintain your knowledge of existing features nevermind getting up to speed with new ones. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The interface is easy, complete and can be customized.
The reporting options are very good. The score/measurement system is such a valuable way to have a quick overview of the customer base, and then digging in the result details is also very quick.
The support service is very fast and cares for the customer needs. The project management/CSM Services are also good, they take accountability for any question, concern and feedback I have.
The community is so alive and helpful. Gainsight employees monitor it, so they take care of any comment or report I make there. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some customizations are too tightly related to the DB, meaning that if you start with a wrong or not proper configuration, you may have troubles in changing them.
Be sure to have the ideas very clear at the beginning on the implementation project. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
In the last 9 months, we've been able to make more data available, operationalize that data, and drive efficiencies across a rapidly growing CS Team.
Gainsight has enabled the CS team to find more expansion opportunities , proactively manage risk, and manage 20% more ARR per CSM.
Gainsight is highly customisable. We're only just getting started, so I'm sure there are a lot more great things to come. It's been a huge value add for our team.
The team are responsive and always there to help when you get stuck. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some of the user flows are not very intuitive. From an admin perspective, the logic needs some adjusting to and some features are not as customizable as they should be for such a product.
The learning curve is steep in the beginning but once you get the basics it's easy to quickly build up to doing some very complex things with Gainsight.
There are some limitations in functionality that we've run into already, that said the team is great at finding alternative ways to achieve the business outcome we're looking for.
These are small things in the big picture and the benefits massively outweigh the downsides. Considering Gainsight is the market leader and more expensive than its competitors you'd expect some of these things to be sorted out.
That said, with the team being responsive and regular releases and improvements that are happening these are very small dislikes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Gainsight has all of the features we need for our business. We have been able to scale from pooled accounts to Enterprise. The detail, calls to action and journey orchestrated flows allow for a tremendous amount of flexibility. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We have been on for around 12 months. There isn't anything that we dislike. Any pain has primarily come from us working through proper internal adoption as there is a lot to learn and teach. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What we like best is the flexibility and innovation of the Gainsight platform that allows us to aggregate customer data that lives in multiple places / data sources, make it easily available on-demand to those interested (e.g., account management), and then hook up triggers (calls to action) that inform us if something bad happens (risk event) or something good happens (opportunity event). We have recently implemented CSAT surveys in a fully-automated way that ensure not only visibility at any level of the company, but maybe more importantly processes to ensure timeline follow-up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There were some data sources that were difficult to bring into the platform, such as SalesForce Community data. This was very difficult and we could only bring in limited information. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.