CommonLit Customer Case Study: Building a Scalable, High-Touch Customer Success Operation

Company Background

CommonLit is a nonprofit dedicated to providing a research-based literacy curriculum, assessments, implementation support and professional development for teachers across the country. As the organization scaled its school and district partnerships, it sought a more efficient way to centralize partner information and improve visibility across its full partner lifecycle.

Rachel Bhatia, Director of District Success with CommonLit, discusses working with nCloud Integrators to implement Gainsight as a centralized customer success platform capable of supporting its complex partnership structure, high-touch service model, and long-term lifecycle management needs. The goal was not simply to implement new software, but to create a scalable operational framework that would unify customer data, standardize workflows, improve visibility, and reduce the administrative burden on account managers. Ultimately, stronger partner management means stronger curriculum implementation, and that translates directly to better outcomes for the students and teachers CommonLit serves.

Challenges

Before Gainsight, the District Success team managed partner relationships across a fragmented set of systems with no single source of truth. Account managers manually tracked partner histories and data, communications, onboarding activities, and implementation details, creating inconsistency and operational drag across the team.

The organization’s partnership structure also introduced significant complexity. A single school district could contain district-wide implementations, a subset of participating schools, or partial adoption across campuses. The team needed a system capable of handling relationships that rolled information up and down across multiple organizational levels while preserving visibility into each unique partnership structure.

“Our partnerships are very service-based and high-touch,” Rachel states. “We’re supporting curriculum implementation and professional development, so it’s less about just monitoring product usage and more about managing the relationship itself.”

Renewal management created another major challenge. Because district relationships often extended over many years, the organization needed to preserve historical implementation data and relationship continuity while still resetting annual opportunities within Salesforce.

“We needed the relationship to stay continuous in Gainsight while Salesforce resets opportunities year over year,” Rachel explains. “It was important for us to preserve the full history of a partnership while still supporting the operational processes other teams depended on.”

nCloud Integrators’ Approach and Difference

From the beginning, nCloud Integrators approached the engagement as a collaborative partnership rather than a standard software implementation. The project started with a deep discovery process focused on understanding the organization’s business model, partnership structure, operational goals, and customer lifecycle requirements.

According to Rachel, the nCloud team played a critical role in translating the complexity of Gainsight into practical workflows that aligned with the organization’s real-world operations.

“Our nCloud consultant took the time to truly understand our business model, our structure, and what we were trying to accomplish,” Rachel states. “That foundational understanding allowed us to collaborate effectively on a very complex build.”

In addition, CommonLit’s internal team came from instructional backgrounds, many as former teachers, bringing deep expertise in curriculum implementation and partner relationships. While the team relied on Salesforce as its primary customer success tool, they had no prior experience with dedicated customer success platforms or Gainsight. Most team members were simultaneously learning new operational and technical concepts while managing a large-scale implementation project.

 “Rather than simply configuring features, nCloud Integrators helped our team understand how Gainsight worked and how it could support our specific goals and customer engagement model long term,” states Rachel. “The entire experience was highly educational and supportive throughout the implementation process. We always felt confident in the work we were doing, even while learning something completely new.”

As questions and challenges emerged throughout the implementation, nCloud adapted its sessions and troubleshooting approach in real time to keep the project moving forward. “It felt collaborative from start to finish,” Rachel says. “nCloud Integrators brought deep Gainsight expertise, while we brought expertise in our business and partner relationships. Throughout the consulting process, we were able to strike a really strong balance between the two.” 

Results

“Even with the complexity of our build and several moving pieces throughout the implementation, nCloud Integrators helped us successfully launch Gainsight within just a few months,” Rachel says. “The team guided us through onboarding workflows, success plans, lifecycle tracking, and customer health capabilities with incredible support and flexibility, making sure we felt confident every step of the way.” 

The organization quickly began seeing operational improvements. Account managers gained centralized visibility into partner onboarding progress, implementation status, and relationship history. Standardized workflows created greater consistency across the team while reducing the burden of manually tracking partner activities and follow-ups.

“The CTAs and success plans already reduce the mental load on account managers,” Rachel explained. “It’s much easier to see who needs attention, where customers are in the onboarding process, and what’s stalled.”

The organization is also preparing to leverage additional Gainsight capabilities, including automated customer communications and customer health scorecards, to further improve scalability and proactive customer engagement during the school year.

Outcomes

Beyond the operational improvements, the implementation created a significant shift in how the organization manages partner relationships. The team now has a centralized system capable of supporting the full customer lifecycle while preserving long-term relationship continuity and institutional knowledge.

“This implementation accelerated our team’s operational maturity, and we can now visualize the entire customer lifecycle in a way we couldn’t before,” Rachel says. “This process just didn’t just teach us how to use Gainsight — it changed how we think about managing partner relationships.” 

A Foundation for Future Growth

An unexpected outcome of the project was the team’s increased confidence and technical capability. Rachel described the process as “chunking the learning,” which helped the team gain confidence quickly despite the platform’s complexity.

“nCloud didn’t just configure the platform for us — they helped us truly understand how to use it,” Rachel says. “By breaking the learning into manageable pieces and grounding every feature in our real-world workflows, they helped our team build confidence quickly despite the complexity of the implementation.” 

Rachel also highlighted the value of having a consulting partner who balances technical expertise with adaptability. Rather than forcing a rigid implementation model, nCloud Integrators helped shape the platform around CommonLit’s specific vision, workflows, and partner needs.By the end of the project, CommonLit had not only launched Gainsight successfully, but had also built a stronger foundation for scaling customer success operations in the years ahead.