Gainsight - I'm having an awful onboarding experience. Looking for someone who has had a positive ex

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Effie Mansdorf
Effie Mansdorf Member Posts: 76 Expert
First Anniversary
edited January 2021 in CS Technology
*Update*

I have received such overwhelming responses from folks who have had a positive experience with GS, and have set up meetings to learn from them. In addition, Nick Mehta, the CCO, VP of PS have all approached me personally to see how we can improve the process and the experience. There has been a success plan put in place in order to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Gainsight is totally stepping up to the plate and demonstrating what to do with a less satisfied customer, and how to put forth a healthy and effective recovery plan. I am encouraged and looking forward to using Gainsight to it’s full potential to help me manage my team and customers effectively.

-----------------------------


Hi All,

I'm going now into month 6 of my onboarding with Gainsight. It's pretty ironic how It's been such a negative experience. Recently I added a paid TAM with gainsight just to get this going the way it needs to be. In parellel, I'm still working with my orginal PS team, who have not completed the original tasks.

I am looking to take a different approach now in order to fix this nightmare. I'm looking for someone who has lead a successful onboarding with gainsight, to get some advice. I want to see what I can do to help manage my gainsight team and help them help me.

TIA!

- Effie
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Comments

  • Nick Mehta
    Nick Mehta Member Posts: 10 Contributor
    edited January 2021
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    Effie - I'm so sorry to hear about the experience we've caused for you. I'm dropping you a note directly as well to help.

    Sorry again
    Nick
  • Effie Mansdorf
    Effie Mansdorf Member Posts: 76 Expert
    First Anniversary
    edited January 2021
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    Thanks Nick! I do appreciate it.

    - Effie
  • Janine Bilz
    Janine Bilz Member Posts: 1 Navigator
    edited January 2021
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    Hi Effie,

    I just came across your post. 
    My name is Janine, and the company I'm working for has just recently finished a quite complex onboarding of Gainsight. 
    When we started the journey last year, I had a blank page in front of me.
    I knew that from 
    •  a commercial perspective we wanted to get better with retention & churn management and from
    •  a technical perspective to integrate the CSM Tool on top of Salesforce and to connect it to all our volume-driven SaaS Products as well as 3rd Party             Tools (Learn & Management -, Ticketing -, and HR-Platform).
    We also hired external support to guide us through the Onboarding and we were facing ups and downs, we changed the direction several times, sometimes I felt super dizzy (Data Clean-Up, no unique identifier, Rule SetUp, People  Education, Defining and Building our GS Components...). Parallel to that, we all experienced the first lockdown across the globe.  However, we had great sparring partners with whom we always could have an open discussion, and now 8 months later we have successfully finished our Alpha Launch and are about to release our Beta Version of Gainsight.

    I experienced myself how bumpy the road can be. So if you want to jump on a quick call, just drop me a note.
    Happy to listen to your story and share mine - from CS to CS Enthusiast ;) 

    Best
    Janine
  • Kelly Hall
    Kelly Hall Member Posts: 2 Navigator
    edited January 2021
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    Hello Effie,
    We too just recently finished a complex Gainsight onboarding (in record time) and had the opposite experience.  Honestly, it was the best vendor rollout I've seen in my 20 career so I'm sorry to hear that it's been such a negative experience for you. 

    I have now implemented Gainsight at 3 different companies over the last 8 years and would happy to chat to share my failures/pitfalls and the success I have had as guidance.  It is a tedious task, rolling out a C360 as it's 100% dependent on accurate data from other systems, systems you likely don't control.  The struggle is real!   Drop me a note if you'd like to connect!  

    Have a great day!
  • Effie Mansdorf
    Effie Mansdorf Member Posts: 76 Expert
    First Anniversary
    edited January 2021
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    Hi Kelly,

     

    Thanks for replying. As we're in the same industry I would love to hear about your positive experience.

     

    Can you reach out to me privately with a Calendly link?

     

    Best,

     

    Effie

     

    ---------------------------------------------------------------

    Effie Mansdorf, Global Head of Customer Success

    PH : +44 (20) 80547482

     

    Click Here to set up a meeting with me!

     

     

     

     

     

  • Kelly Hall
    Kelly Hall Member Posts: 2 Navigator
    edited January 2021
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    Booked for Monday!
  • Matt Hinds
    Matt Hinds Member Posts: 1 Navigator
    edited January 2021
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    Hi Effie,

    We've just come off the back of a very successful (and dare I say enjoyable!) Gainsight install so really shocked to hear this. Found them a pleasure to work with.

    In our situation we managed to deliver the basic functionality (i.e. delivering against the Crawl stage of their methodology) in super quick time (signed the PO in August 2020 and delivered the initial rollout by end of October 2020). Indeed it even surpassed expectations of some longer standing members within our organisation who had been involved in other much longer rollouts.

    On reflection, I believe the key to our success was: 
    1. Restricting the initial scope - we all wanted the moon on a stick but to be fair there was no way we could get there in the aggressive timescales that we had set ourselves (vendor accreditation was our key milestone). Firstly our processes were, shall we say, in their infancy and had been written in the context of no system/automation. Secondly data from our internal systems was a bit challenging to deal with through inconsistencies and organic growth
    2. Working collaboratively with GS - our aligned GS PS team were absolutely great and kept us on track throughout the process. We started each design session with an overview of the function that we were looking at followed by discussion with the TA to explore it further. We never finished a design in the session, rather bottomed out the core considerations (or not as the case would be occasionally!) taking away "homework" to complete the design. This follow-up work led us back to point 1 above and we always approached it with the attitude of the minimum viable set of features which would work for us. This was a time consuming (myself and the team dedicated a couple of weeks to do this) but ultimately rewarding process as it gave us clear designs from which GS could work from
    3. Accepting that the initial install was not the finished product or would meet basic requirements perfectly - whilst we had a good start with the initial install we did get some decisions wrong. Whilst the design process was great for teasing out what we thought we wanted in the initial install, some of the decisions we thought were right then haven't quite followed through to work as we intended. Thankfully, GS is such a flexible environment that rectifying these mistakes was relatively simple. Having an understanding internal Customer Success team working for me who constructively work to identify solutions/improvements has also helped
    Have to say our GS PS team were absolutely top class throughout, gently steering us as required. 

    Now we're a further 3 months on our install is now starting to really take shape and be extra useful. Just yesterday I integrated a whole new data source (something we had to sacrifice during design/install due to our data issues) to start enriching our environment. This was undertaken without any GS support and is now pretty much fully working (albeit with a few expletives muttered at points through the day :-) ).

    Happy to have a chat if it helps?

    Cheers,
    Matt



  • Jorge Vernetta
    Jorge Vernetta Member Posts: 2 Navigator
    edited February 2021
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    Hi Effie,

    Sorry to hear about your initial experience and I'm glad it is now on track to become a positive one.

    We just recently completed our Gainsight implementation within a 4 months period with no major issues and excellent support during the onboarding process.

    In fact, the overall implementation resulted way less complicated than we had initially anticipated. We managed to get the most key features implemented according to the initial plan without any major delay and we really enjoyed the experience during the process.

    Now we're just starting to work with our COM and so far it's also been a pleasure and definitely promising. Luckily enough for us there seems to be a team at Gainsight who really cares about their customers' success leading by example.

    I hope this thread is useful to any customer who may encounter difficulties in the future.

    Best,
    Jorge

    I have received such overwhelming responses from folks who have had a positive experience with GS, and have set up meetings to learn from them. In addition, Nick Mehta, the CCO, VP of PS have all approached me personally to see how we can improve the process and the experience. There has been a success plan put in place in order to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Gainsight is totally stepping up to the plate and demonstrating what to do with a less satisfied customer, and how to put forth a healthy and effective recovery plan. I am encouraged and looking forward to using Gainsight to it's full potential to help me manage my team and customers effectively.

    -----------------------------


    Hi All,

    I'm going now into month 6 of my onboarding with Gainsight. It's pretty ironic how It's been such a negative experience. Recently I added a paid TAM with gainsight just to get this going the way it needs to be. In parellel, I'm still working with my orginal PS team, who have not completed the original tasks.

    I am looking to take a different approach now in order to fix this nightmare. I'm looking for someone who has lead a successful onboarding with gainsight, to get some advice. I want to see what I can do to help manage my gainsight team and help them help me.

    TIA!

    - Effie
  • Effie Mansdorf
    Effie Mansdorf Member Posts: 76 Expert
    First Anniversary
    edited February 2021
    Options

    Hi Jorge,

     

    Thanks for the feedback. Can you let me know if you are working with the team out of the US or ROW?

     

    Thanks,

     

    Effie

     

    Effie Mansdorf

    Global Head of Customer Success

    +44 20 80547482

    emansdorf@illusive.com

     www.illusive.com

    Click Here to set up a meeting with me!

     

    linkedin icon 

    image

     

     

     

     

     

    I have received such overwhelming responses from folks who have had a positive experience with GS, and have set up meetings to learn from them. In addition, Nick Mehta, the CCO, VP of PS have all approached me personally to see how we can improve the process and the experience. There has been a success plan put in place in order to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Gainsight is totally stepping up to the plate and demonstrating what to do with a less satisfied customer, and how to put forth a healthy and effective recovery plan. I am encouraged and looking forward to using Gainsight to it's full potential to help me manage my team and customers effectively.

    -----------------------------


    Hi All,

    I'm going now into month 6 of my onboarding with Gainsight. It's pretty ironic how It's been such a negative experience. Recently I added a paid TAM with gainsight just to get this going the way it needs to be. In parellel, I'm still working with my orginal PS team, who have not completed the original tasks.

    I am looking to take a different approach now in order to fix this nightmare. I'm looking for someone who has lead a successful onboarding with gainsight, to get some advice. I want to see what I can do to help manage my gainsight team and help them help me.

    TIA!

    - Effie
  • Jorge Vernetta
    Jorge Vernetta Member Posts: 2 Navigator
    edited February 2021
    Options
    Hi Effie,

    Sure. The team I am working with is based in London.

    Best,
    Jorge
  • Srikrishnan Ganesan
    Srikrishnan Ganesan Member Posts: 26 Expert
    edited February 2021
    Options

    @Matt Hinds, the points you listed sound like great inputs to onboard customers for any large product! So thanks for sharing!

    I'm working on a customer onboarding maturity model and some generic templates that can help the community. Any collaborators here?


    Thanks,

    Sri

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