Mentor Collective is the leading provider of impact-driven mentoring programs. The company partners with more than 180 higher-education institutions to provide students with a relevant, trained peer, professional or alumni mentor.
Annemieke Rice, VP of Partner Success with Mentor Collective, discusses working with nCloud Integrators to implement Gainsight Essentials Plus with Business Modeler and Success Plans to evolve its customer experience.
What were you looking to accomplish with your Gainsight implementation?
We wanted to evolve our customer experience by engaging with them more throughout their
customer journey. This includes providing customers more oversight and visibility into the value they are receiving as well as improving our customer communications. To do this, we needed to consolidate our product, customer and CSM data, which would also allow us to tap into leading indicators around future intent so we could be proactive instead of reactive.
Did nCloud Integrators help you automate any manual processes?
Each of our customers has a project plan, so in the past we had to manually update these
plans. Now these plans are automatically updated, and we have Calls-to-Action (CTAs) to let us know if something is off course. The plan status updates are also integrated into the health score, because plan progress is a big indicator of customer health.
How is your onboarding team using Success Plans?
We plan to launch the Success Plans next month. Our Onboarding team will use these plans to have a more structured onboarding process, from pre-sales all the way through adoption. The hope is that this process is more visible to the customer, and that we will be able to track if something is off course with the customer’s progress.
What do you think the biggest advantage was in working with nCloud Integrators to help with your implementation?
Gainsight is a very powerful and flexible platform. I would say our use case is really
complicated, so nCloud Integrators was valuable throughout the process in helping us make the absolute right choices for the many options that are available during each stage of the implementation. Our consultant would say, “Ok, based on what you want to accomplish, you are going to want to do this.” Many times as you are implementing something like this, you don’t know what you don’t know. Using nCloud Integrators for the implementation was a no-brainer for me, because the implementation is such an important part of getting value out of Gainsight.
nCloud’s value is also in handling the really complex technical nature of how the data is captured, how it is stored, and how to make it available in the ways you need it. By using nCloud Integrators, we will end up with a solution that does what we need it to do. We also went from kickoff to initial-user launch in eight weeks, and this included launching Business Modeler, Success Plans and two really complicated Health Scorecards. nCloud has a process that keeps you on a schedule and accountable every step of the way with goals to achieve in specific timeframes. The process and structure were great for us.
Did nCloud Integrators help you overcome any difficult hurdles?
We had a lot of complicated data. We had to get two data sets from two different systems to
align. Our data mapping exercise was really walking through to make sure we had the right
architecture for that data. Also, we knew what data we wanted to use in our health scores, but nCloud Integrators wrote the formulas or the logic to capture the data we wanted to use. And our consultant was able to figure out the simplest, most elegant way to pull and use this data, so down the road it would not be a burden to maintain.
How does your company use Business Modeler to help manage your relationships?
Every program that an organization runs is its own relationship. For example, if a college runs a program for first-year students, a career program, and a program for graduate students, these are three separate relationships. Having Business Modeler helps us to see the health and plans for each of these three separate relationships, and we can roll these programs up individually or together for customer reporting.
Do you have any helpful tips for others looking to implement Gainsight?
One suggestion would be to have your strategy and priorities of what you want to accomplish mapped out before getting into the implementation. Gainsight is a powerful tool and there are so many things that you could do and ways you could go. Knowing the two or three outcomes that you really want to accomplish in the implementation is key. I also think you don’t want to go into this implementation without someone who has done it before. That might be an internal resource or someone like nCloud Integrators.
What should others know about nCloud Integrators?
I appreciated nCloud Integrators’ entire process and structure. The agendas, the flow, the
workbook…it is set up so you can’t really fail. It is like a safety net, ensuring that you have what you will need to launch. We knew from the first meeting what to expect and how long the process would take. This really allowed us to be prepared and do what we needed to do at each step. Our consultant was particularly skilled, and when we encountered an obstacle, she was very upfront about the impact it could have and the steps that she would recommend. She helped us work through these difficult pieces with the options available to us.
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