You just purchased Gainsight because you want to improve customer interactions, reduce manual CSM processes, gain better visibility into customer health and reduce churn. Before your Gainsight implementation begins, you need to consider three important components that are vital to the success of your project: a focus on data, training consumption and resource dedication. Typically, if your project is delayed, it is caused by a problem or lack of commitment in one of these three areas.
Data Focus
At nCloud Integrators, we want to create a 360-degree view of the customer for your business. To accomplish this, it is important to understand that data is king and quality data is the foundation of any successful implementation. Our quickest implementations happen when we can get good, clean data into Gainsight as soon as possible during implementation. So what is the best way to accomplish this goal?
If data is coming from multiple sources, it is vital to get all data owners and system administrators together to determine a unique identifier that will be used to tie all of this data together. This unique identifier allows us to link usage, CRM, support or any other customer data so all of this information can be loaded into Gainsight.
Within our initial Discovery meetings, we explore source systems and owners, your level of experience with data integration, the quality of the data, and potential restrictions with data movement. At this point, we also establish a deadline for when the data must be ready to ensure your project go-live is not delayed.
Many times my customers ask, “What data do we bring in?” The answer to this question is that you should bring in what is pertinent today to get the needle moving right now. It is always easier to scale up than scale back down after you load data into Gainsight.
Sometimes, this unique identifier does not exist because applications are put in place and used in different areas of the organization without any forethought to the long-term use of this data, or how it might work with other systems. If this is the case, we would provide guidance on setting up a table to map your various customer identifiers to a single unique identifier. This would then be pulled into Gainsight to match the various instances of customer information.
Training Consumption
Gaining an overall foundation of Gainsight capabilities can start even before the project kicks off. Gainsight has a number of great training resources online for new administrators as well as end users. These courses cover the basic foundations of the application as well as key terms and general product functionality. We encourage anyone who will be involved in the project to take these courses for a basic understanding of Gainsight.
In addition to Gainsight’s training courses, nCloud takes you through a series of workshops that provide a deeper dive into the key components within Gainsight such as automated Calls-to-Action (CTAs), Health Scores and Timeline. After each session, it is important that you and the project participants take the steps to continue your learning journey by completing homework assignments, which may include watching training videos, reviewing best-practices documents or completing hands-on exercises specific to your unique instance. You and your team should expect to invest about five to six hours per week during our 8-week implementation timeframe.
Don’t worry about being overwhelmed - we guide you every step of the way on what sessions to take and when.
Resource Dedication
The final area of focus for project success is getting the right people engaged and involved from the beginning of your project. We are dependent on your collaborative participation and business direction for a successful go-live that meets your custom requirements.
Your Customer Success leadership, Gainsight Administrator/s, data experts or owners, and pilot CSMs should all be involved to help define user requirements. nCloud Integrators takes a methodical approach to walk you through each of our planned workshops and suggests the proper attendees for each workshop with detailed agendas on what we hope to accomplish.
Your Go-Live of Gainsight is just the beginning, not the end. You will continue to work on refining your Gainsight instance and planning what is next to improve your customer interactions. Our goal is to get you and your team started, and then ensure you have the resources and know-how to continue to be successful.
The author, Travis Peterson, is a Senior Customer Success Consultant at nCloud Integrators, an industry leader in customer success strategy and implementation, with a track record of improving customer journeys at hundreds of organizations every year.
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