Annex Cloud is a global, enterprise technology solutions provider of advanced customer loyalty management solutions and experiential customer retention software.
Jake Madrigal, Head of Customer Success at Annex Cloud, discusses working with nCloud Integrators for the company’s Gainsight Essentials Plus implementation and how having a comprehensive view of each customer as well as the ability to easily pull aggregate customer trend reports has saved the company a significant amount of time.
What did you initially set out to accomplish with your Gainsight implementation?
We had customer data in three different places, Salesforce, Jira and a proprietary system, so our first priority was to get all of this customer data into one location. After our Gainsight implementation with nCloud Integrators and the integration of all of this data, we have a holistic picture of our customer portfolio and a single view of the customer where we can look at all of our key metrics including customer analytics around engagement, health, and support interactions.
We also have a much better way to track customer health. In the past, CSMs added sentiment status updates based on customer interactions. We still have this, but we added data points including customer participation, last customer interaction date, participant redemption rates, and NPS scores. These items are weighted into the health score to give us a better line of sight into risks, opportunities and overall client health.
And, all of this information can be viewed at the customer level, or we can pull aggregated reports to show trends and usage over time. Our dashboards allow different users to access this information in a way that is most relevant to their role
How have your processes become more efficient after your implementation of Gainsight?
Having access to the customer information has really saved us a significant amount of time. Before nCloud Integrators helped us implement Gainsight, if I wanted to look at 12 months of data for a specific customer, I would need to log into our reporting back-end systems, generate a report, wait for the report, pull additional client metrics to add to this report, and develop a combined excel spreadsheet. If I had 15 different customers, I would have to repeat this process 15 different times. Now, I can pull all of my accounts into one dashboard and have all of this same information at my fingertips. I can also aggregate this customer data if I wanted to analyze some metrics across all of my clients, such as member participation rates in the loyalty programs.
How much time do you think that automating these customer reports saves your organization?
If each CSM wanted to pull a year’s worth of data for each of their customers once a week, it would probably take five to six hours per week to do all that work. Multiply this by the number of weeks in a year, and that is a big chunk on time. Instead, our CSMs can log in and go to their profile to look at this data for each of their customers in a single dashboard.
How are CTAs and Success Plans helping streamline some of your processes?
We have a Success Plan built around new client onboarding. This plan helps the CSMs know exactly what they should be doing and looking for at each stage of the onboarding processes, which is about three or four months long. For example, if they are a month into the onboarding, phase one should be completed and agreed upon. If this step is not completed around this timeframe, then this is a red flag for our team.
We also have five or six CTAs built that help flag items for our awareness. Some of these include if the customer renewal is coming up in 90 days, a drop in a health score, or an upsell conversion. This helps us drive efficiency across the team and allows our CSMs to focus on the right customers at the right times.
What was the biggest advantage of using nCloud Integrators to help with your Gainsight implementation?
I don’t think the implementation would have happened without nCloud Integrators. We tried to implement Gainsight six or seven years ago on our own and spent a significant amount of time trying to get it up and running. This didn’t happen so we stepped away from it and went our own way. With nCloud Integrators’ help, we were able to “go live” in six weeks. Our experience with nCloud Integrators was an easy, seamless process, and we didn’t have any of the hiccups that we had before.
What advice would you give to others looking to implement Gainsight?
Know what you want to accomplish going into the project, even during the sales process. We had a six-page document that outlined our business objectives, and we handed this over to the salespeople during the process where we were selecting a software vendor. We said, “Are all of these items possible?” This also gave us a clear roadmap as we started down the path with nCloud Integrators.