Forecast, the Work Intelligence company that delivers an AI-native platform for Project & Resource Management, wanted a single source of truth for its Customer Success (CS) team to assist with collaboration across departments. Forecast purchased Gainsight with a focus on providing excellent service to customers by enabling CSMs to have increased visibility into customer health and the tools to be able to support customers more efficiently.
nCloud Integrators assisted Forecast with its Gainsight Essentials Plus implementation. Aldo
Chavez, Director of Customer Success with Forecast, discusses his approach to the Gainsight implementation and how new processes are making his team more efficient.
What were you looking to accomplish with your Gainsight implementation?
The decision to invest in Gainsight’s CS platform was made to bring customer information that resided in disparate systems into one location for increased visibility and an overall improved customer experience. Now each CS team member can view his/her specific accounts and have a clear picture of what Forecast platform is being used, implementation stage, recent interactions and customer health score all in one location. This information helps CSMs prioritize activities in a more efficient manner.
How are you using Customer Health Scores to make your organization more efficient?
Our customer health score is now consistent across the organization. Our CSMs no longer have to go to five different systems to pull data into a spreadsheet and sort various ways to
understand customer health. In addition, we have more defined measures that go into the health score including implementation timelines and durations, product health, support tickets and sentiment.
How did you approach your implementation?
We took a phased approach to rollout Gainsight. At each phase, we asked two questions: What are our priority goals to achieve during this phase, and what capabilities within Gainsight can we take advantage of to accomplish these goals? We came to an agreement internally that our Phase 1 would focus on tweaking some gaps in our current processes. We also wanted to bring in data from Salesforce and Zendesk in a clean way. nCloud Integrators helped us do all of this with an approach that was flexible but also kept us on track with our go-live timeline.
In your opinion, what was the biggest advantage of using nCloud to help with your
implementation?
At Forecast, we know first-hand how important a successful software implementation is because we help our customers with project delivery every day. nCloud’s implementation was successful because they had a very systematic approach and were able to triangulate our CS goals with Gainsight’s capabilities and the needs of our CSMs. They also helped us identify and include the key players for the implementation process including the sponsor, project manager, adoption champions and evangelists. We also identified early on the data we wanted to bring into the system, the internal data experts and a common Identifier that could help bring this information into Gainsight.
Do you have any helpful tips for other companies looking to implement Gainsight?
Keep it simple. There is going to be a lot that you'll want to do as you get in to your
implementation. You will have “aha” moments and ideas of what you can do or leverage with the new platform. Keep focused on only the top priority items you identified for your rollout. Also, it is important to communicate with team leads from each department as well as within your customer success team to make sure you incorporate what each team wants out of Gainsight so you can build it into your rollout plan.