Which Customer Success focused platform did you choose to invest in and why?

Shaun Porcar
Shaun Porcar Member, CS Leader Posts: 22 Thought Leader
Third Anniversary 5 Comments Name Dropper Photogenic
edited July 2020 in CS Technology

Comments

  • Kevin Mitchell Leonor
    Kevin Mitchell Leonor Member Posts: 248 Expert
    100 Comments Second Anniversary Name Dropper
    edited April 2020

    At RingCentral, we elected to develop our own housed into Salesforce. A lot of work, but we didn't find a solution that fit our needs. We have extra resources to be able to invest in the project. That isn't always the case for SaaS companies. Actually a rarity to be able to develop your own in-house tool.

    Personally, I tried using Totango Free Community version and Gainsight. I personally found Totango to be very confusing. I could not get admin privileges to import Salesforce data so that hindered my adoption. Gainsight takes awhile to stand up. A colleague of mine chose Strikedeck. Ironically, he was a former gainsight employee. I haven't seen Strikedeck personally.

  • Kristi Faltorusso
    Kristi Faltorusso Member Posts: 45 Expert
    Second Anniversary
    edited April 2020

    I've evaluated and am pretty familiar with majority of the large players in the space, but I have been a Gainsight customer since 2013 and have used it at 4 different companies. I prefer an all in one solution which is why I've used and selected Gainsight so many times. It does take a lot of work to get it stood up but I've been fortunate to have very strong teams or consultants to help with my build and deployment. Happy to answer any specific questions you may have.

  • Arit Nsemo
    Arit Nsemo Member Posts: 13 Contributor
    edited April 2020

    I used Gainsight at my previous organization for a bit, but we found that it was really better suited to a larger company and we had an absolutely terrible, months-long implementation from hell. We were under-resourced internally, so that's not a knock on them completely. We ended up cleaning up our data and then investing in ChurnZero, which worked beautifully for what we needed it for. We mainly used it to build health scores, running plays, tracking CSM activity, NPS, and customer adoption and usage.

    At my current organization, we also chose to invest in ChurnZero because of ease of use, churn score, NPS, and we just preferred the UI over competitors. Implementation has also been extremely easy. I'd say regardless of the tool you choose (they all have their benefits), you absolutely must have a CS program manager, or project manager to PM the implementation and ongoing admin on your side in order to increase internal adoption and to actually get use out of the tool. If you don't have someone who can own it (not a CSM, but someone in ops) then you may fight an uphill battle in terms of getting value.

  • Jeffrey Nadeau
    Jeffrey Nadeau Member Posts: 28 Thought Leader
    Second Anniversary
    edited May 2020

    I have used ClientSuccess and Gainsight and both tools worked well for where we were at the time in our company's growth. ClientSuccess we used early on when we were a team of 6-8 CSMs and needed more simple way to manage our customers and their health scores. Once we matured and understood our customer's journey we moved to Gainsight and the health scoring their was more sophisticated. Gainsight takes time to get up and running so also us having a bigger team to support this helped. I do recommend Gainsight as long as you know what you need to setup so you can leverage it's full capabilities. 

  • Jung Kim
    Jung Kim Member Posts: 20 Thought Leader
    edited May 2020

    Big big fan of Churnzero! Nicely suited for SMB + burgeoning enterprise healthcare clients as we try to expand the impact of each individual CSM. 

    Currently debating between Clientsuccess & Churnzero to implement at the cost now that we are comfortable with our metrics to then automate.