Using Sales/Call Insights Tools (Chorus, Gong, Etc) for Customer Success

William Buckingham

Hi All, 

Looking to possibly implement a tool like Chorus.ai (or Gong, ExecVision, Jiminny, Etc.) for our Customer Success team. Ideally, if we do indeed implement, we would ideally get other teams using it too since that would increase net benefit to the company and the CS team.  Curious does anyone have experience using Chorus.ai or a competing tool for a CS team? 

If so, I would love to know:

1. What tool did you use? (and what made you choose that tool over the competitors)
2. What were your use cases for it? (I.e. just Customer Success calls, or did CS use it to listen to sales and onboarding calls for smoother hand offs, etc. etc.)
3.  What were the key benefits your company received? 
4.  How was rollout and adoption by your CS team?

Any and all insights appreciated.  Thanks. 

#CustomerSuccessOperations #customeroperations #tools #CSOps

Matt Myszkowski

Our sales team at Cision in the UK use Jiminy while the North American teams (sales & support) use Chorus.

I am reviewing now whether we introduce it in the UK/Europe as part of our VOC program, plus to supplement our hand off process from NB sales to Onboarding.

Don't have much insight yet but keen to monitor the thead.

William Buckingham

Thanks @Matt Myszkowski,

I too, am curious to see what other responses come in regarding this. 

Was there is a specific reason your North America team chose Chorus instead of Jiminy? 

Thanks,

Jordan Silverman

@William Buckingham we rolled out Wingman in Q1 for the customer success team. It went so well that we are adding the sales team on in Q2.

Why did we choose Wingman?
We looked at Chorus and Gong and they were just a bit too expensive for us. Wingman we found has 90% of the features at 50% of the cost.

What do we use Wingman for?
1) Feedback to CSMs and trainers
- Team leaders listen to multiple calls per day to help team members improve
- Team members can also tag team leaders on specific calls they need help with (even tag specific times in a call to listen to)

2) "Gametapes"
- Building out a content library for internal learning and improvement
- Successful dealing of questions and troubleshooting
- Successful training sessions across specific topics
- Common mistakes and how we recommend changing

Feel free to DM or ask questions here as I am happy to give more information. We have been loving Wingman so far!

William Buckingham

@Jordan Silverman Thanks so much for the detailed insights here.

This is really great information, and I really appreciate it.  

If you happen to remember, I would love to know what features made up that 10% difference between Wingman vs. Chorus and Gong.  No worries if you do not recall, but I think it would be interesting to know the trade off for that 50% cost savings(which is very attractive).  

"Gametapes" is a huge focus of mine as we do large, technical enterprise deals so shadow opportunities are not happening every 5 minutes say they would for a smaller ASP.  Also looking to really scale the team, and I think this approach to enablement will be the way forward for us.

Sounds like overall great experience which is great to hear.  Thanks for the insights.

Alex Pukos

1. What tool did you use? (and what made you choose that tool over the competitors)
   • Our CS team uses Gong. Can't speak to competitors since we didn't do any eval.. Sales was already using Gong, so we jumped on the bandwagon. Glad we did!
2. What were your use cases for it? (I.e. just Customer Success calls, or did CS use it to listen to sales and onboarding calls for smoother hand offs, etc. etc.)
   • Sales uses it to record every email interaction and every call/Zoom. CS does the same, and we also rely on those recordings from sales.
3.  What were the key benefits your company received? 
   • Every sales call and every sales email is logged in Gong. Accounts are synced in from Salesforce, so you can select an Account and then review every interaction from SDR to AE to signed contract. But chances are you don't have the bandwidth to review everything. So I use Gong's search bar, which allows you to search both emails and call transcripts for certain words mentioned by that client or by your sales colleagues. If you want to know exactly how sales positioned a feature, or exactly how the client described a pain point, you've got it.
   • I run our Support team and I'm a huge fan of Gong for providing offline technical support to our CSMs and Setup team. Many times a client will bring up some technicality on a live call with their dedicated Setup person or CSM. It's something they don't know or can't resolve in real-time, so they need to escalate to Support. Without Gong, we'd probably have an internal powwow and then schedule another live call with the client, ask them to share their screen with Support, troubleshoot live again, etc. But with a tool like Gong, that first screen share was captured. The SME from Support can review that offline, diagnose and make a suggestion, and then someone from CS can communicate back to the client. Asynchronous resolution to save everyone's calendars!
   • You can gather tons of data about the number of calls and types of calls that your CS team is on if everything is recorded. If CS management is looking for this kind of analytical data about your team, any of these tools will be useful. I bet you'll see some trends emerge between number/type of calls and productivity in certain areas. Are your CSMs hosting reactive calls doing support stuff, or proactive calls where new features and cross-sell opps are mentioned? Takes awhile to gather enough data to spot any correlations, much less confidently identify them as causal. But there are insights to be had in the call data.
   • Especially from a Support perspective, but really for all teams, the call recordings can be used for quality assurance. Employees can be grouped so that a daily digest gets sent to their Manager. I get a daily "Here's a summary of yesterday's calls" email with links to all recordings from my team yesterday. I certainly can't review them all. But it's useful to spot ones you are intrigued by, then listen to pick out praise-worthy moments and/or opportunities for improvement. A simple thing, but I also look at the duration of calls. If a Support call lasts 50 minutes, that might not have been an efficient use of the client's time. I might check that one out.
   • A random anecdote, but this happened just yesterday. I needed to confirm a detail with a client before helping them, and I was inches from sending them an email to ask. Last second, I decided to check to see if that info was ever captured on Gong. I found it way, way back in a recording from May 2019. Took me 2 minutes to find that and get the exact info I was going to ask for. Saved me an email, and more importantly, saved the client an email. We skipped that interaction and jumped right to providing value. Customer effort and time-to-value both trending in the right direction there!
4.  How was rollout and adoption by your CS team?
   • I feel like rollout and adoption was fairly painless, but we were blessed to have Sales Ops folks that had already mastered Gong. We were a phase 2 and probably avoided some heavy lifting for that reason. Everyone that I interact with on CS (managers and ICs alike) seems to really love the added visibility from the Gong recordings. It's a little weird the first few times that your calls are recorded, but I think people quickly get over that because there are so many benefits.

Jordan Silverman

Few things that Wingman does not have or is not as strong with:
- In depth revenue intel
- Integrated partners
- Multi language tracking

The multi language tracking was the biggest thing that we sacrificed in our decision

William Buckingham

@Alex Pukos Thanks for this incredibly thorough and insightful detail of Gong and your experience with it.  This is really helpful.  It is great to know the specific features that make big impact when used well.  So many use cases there which really are so important for our desired use.  Thanks for all the information Alex, this definitely will contribute some new requirements, use cases, and questions for our conversations with vendors.

Much appreciated.

Laura Lakhwara

At my former company, we used Gong across sales and cs. It is expensive, but we liked it for capturing calls/transcripts and the analysis of the calls.

Use Cases: 

1. Listen to Sales calls. Helped with handoff. 
2. Listen to CS calls. Helped with coaching and feedback for continuous improvement. Analytics tools highlight ways to improve response time, listening, etc. on call. 
3. Information capture especially if poor note-taking/CRM documentation.
4. The keyword lookup tool is also key for sharing bits to marketing [quotes/case studies] and product teams [product requests/issues].
5. Used it to speak to the Sales Leader on any sales language that is inaccurate or needs updating. 

Our CS team loved it and found it very useful when everyone went remote.

Bob London

This is great info, thanks for sharing, Jordan.

I'm trying to benchmark or at least get a sense for CS talk vs. listen time. Any chance you're tracking that?

Thanks,
 - Bob

Bob London

Alex, thanks so much for sharing this -- and William for asking the initial question!

I mentioned this above also, but I'll ask you as well: I'm trying to benchmark or at least get a sense for CS talk vs. listen time. Any chance you're tracking that?

Thanks,
 - Bob

Bob London

Hi, Laura. Thanks!

Curious: Any chance you're tracking CS talk vs. listen time? I'm trying to get some benchmarks for that metric.

Thanks,
 - Bob

Jordan Silverman

@Bob London we are definitely measuring it but still a bit too early to give benchmarks.

What I can say is it depends on CS role.

Trainers - their talk time is currently between 75 and 80%
CSMS - their talk time is currently between 45 and 65%

Big ranges but in general our goals will be based on role and potentially based on segments (client size, region, language differences, etc.)

Bob London

Excellent, thanks so much, Jordan.

William Buckingham

@Laura Lakhwara Thanks so much for these insights.  I especially love #5.  So key to not just correct the customer expectations when off base, but to also find and clear the sales language leading to those inaccurate expectations.

The note-taking aspect is huge too.  So much time is consumed on the post-call note taking for our team currently.   Are you importing those notes into Gainsight or another CRM?

Thanks a ton for the information

Adam Bambrough

One nice use case from CS past experience (with Gong).

Throughout each week, CSMs would tag some 'golden moments' from customer calls (usually a <30 second snippet>  that captures a great insight, exchange, value or experience. 

We'd then play a couple in a regular section each weekly team meeting, to 'literally' bring the customer's voice into these sessions, discuss takeaways, and share and learn.

William Buckingham

Hi @Adam Bambrough Great use case and way to expand on the benefit of the tool.  I really like that idea.  We have a really technical product which is generally very different depending on what applications it is plugged into.  I could see using a Conversational Intelligence tool for  grabbing quick 1-3 minute descriptions of how to pitch certain setups and explain those setups.  Similar to your "golden moments" but more like "best way to explain"  moments.

Thanks all for the amazing insights you provided to this thread.  Much appreciated.

William

1. What tool did you use? (and what made you choose that tool over the competitors)
   • We use Gong. It was originally brought on as a Sales tool and had a bit of a cloud around it as it was perceived as a "big brother" tool and was poorly rolled out, no WHY behind it.
2. What were (is) your use cases for it?
   • I originally started using it as a memory tool. Knowing that all my meetings were recorded allowed me to go back and review prior meetings and really helps with prep for upcoming meetings.
     • This evolved into:
       • reviewing recordings of sales calls to make onboarding easier and more streamlined
       • sharing any training videos with clients as well as bug or issues with our support team.
   • Then I started using the activities metrics to benchmark myself against the other team member, calls, talk time, etc. and reviewing where I am at vs. Gong's suggested benchmarks.
   • Now I am digging into leveraging  2 sections: 
     • The talking points, to see what topics are trending to the top, and how can I leverage that to inform the Product team 
     • Deals section, to get a better understanding of how strong my opps are.
3.  What were the key benefits your company received? 
   1. Day to day the ability to get everyone on the same page with minimal work
   2. Training, onboarding new CSM's by providing them with a slew of sales meetings, pulse meetings, and desired outcomes meetings, allows them to safely listen and learn and get a feel for how things go.
   3. Insights (intelligence) into the client and prospect landscape and into our sales and CSM's conversations. Are we hitting the right points do we even know what they are? We can start to answer these questions now by using solid data, not speculation. 
4.  How was rollout and adoption by your CS team?
   1. Roll out / adoption has been spotty, but this is not a fault of Gong's. I mentioned prior that we had no "why" concerning getting Gong, it just showed up one day with no real explanation. So it has not been adopted very well. At this point I think most of the CSM team are at a minimum using it as a back up memory, which is a shame as it is an amazing tool and has greatly enhanced my effectiveness.

Srikrishnan Ganesan

I am right now trying out a friend's product called "Exemplary.ai" - it calls itself a meetings intelligence platform. I can introduce you if you want to check it out.

Why I use it?

- If I want to quickly share some highlights from the meeting with my colleagues, it has a way for me to see the transcript, identify which section I want to share, etc
- It can automatically create a shareable highlights / summary from the meeting that I can send to the customer as well
- Very easy to navigate to see the parts where the customer is talking only, etc or just look at the questions or just look at positives / negatives, etc
- It has some custom learning it can do based on your domain, content, competitors, etc and recognise those mentions in your meetings

I haven't used Gong, but this is much cheaper than Gong for sure and aims at going after use cases beyond sales.

Thanks,

Sri
-------------------------------
Srikrishnan Ganesan
Co-Founder, Rocketlane

------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 04-22-2021 20:04
From: William Lauffer
Subject: Using Sales/Call Insights Tools (Chorus, Gong, Etc) for Customer Success

1. What tool did you use? (and what made you choose that tool over the competitors)
   • We use Gong. It was originally brought on as a Sales tool and had a bit of a cloud around it as it was perceived as a "big brother" tool and was poorly rolled out, no WHY behind it.
2. What were (is) your use cases for it?
   • I originally started using it as a memory tool. Knowing that all my meetings were recorded allowed me to go back and review prior meetings and really helps with prep for upcoming meetings.
     • This evolved into:
       • reviewing recordings of sales calls to make onboarding easier and more streamlined
       • sharing any training videos with clients as well as bug or issues with our support team.
   • Then I started using the activities metrics to benchmark myself against the other team member, calls, talk time, etc. and reviewing where I am at vs. Gong's suggested benchmarks.
   • Now I am digging into leveraging  2 sections: 
     • The talking points, to see what topics are trending to the top, and how can I leverage that to inform the Product team 
     • Deals section, to get a better understanding of how strong my opps are.
3.  What were the key benefits your company received? 
   1. Day to day the ability to get everyone on the same page with minimal work
   2. Training, onboarding new CSM's by providing them with a slew of sales meetings, pulse meetings, and desired outcomes meetings, allows them to safely listen and learn and get a feel for how things go.
   3. Insights (intelligence) into the client and prospect landscape and into our sales and CSM's conversations. Are we hitting the right points do we even know what they are? We can start to answer these questions now by using solid data, not speculation. 
4.  How was rollout and adoption by your CS team?
   1. Roll out / adoption has been spotty, but this is not a fault of Gong's. I mentioned prior that we had no "why" concerning getting Gong, it just showed up one day with no real explanation. So it has not been adopted very well. At this point I think most of the CSM team are at a minimum using it as a back up memory, which is a shame as it is an amazing tool and has greatly enhanced my effectiveness.

1. What tool did you use? (and what made you choose that tool over the competitors)
2. What were your use cases for it? (I.e. just Customer Success calls, or did CS use it to listen to sales and onboarding calls for smoother hand offs, etc. etc.)
3.  What were the key benefits your company received? 
4.  How was rollout and adoption by your CS team?

Any and all insights appreciated.  Thanks. 

#CustomerSuccessOperations #customeroperations #tools #CSOps

Bob London

Sounds very cool. I'm going to check it out.

Why I use it?

- If I want to quickly share some highlights from the meeting with my colleagues, it has a way for me to see the transcript, identify which section I want to share, etc
- It can automatically create a shareable highlights / summary from the meeting that I can send to the customer as well
- Very easy to navigate to see the parts where the customer is talking only, etc or just look at the questions or just look at positives / negatives, etc
- It has some custom learning it can do based on your domain, content, competitors, etc and recognise those mentions in your meetings

I haven't used Gong, but this is much cheaper than Gong for sure and aims at going after use cases beyond sales.

Thanks,

Sri
-------------------------------
Srikrishnan Ganesan
Co-Founder, Rocketlane

------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 04-22-2021 20:04
From: William Lauffer
Subject: Using Sales/Call Insights Tools (Chorus, Gong, Etc) for Customer Success

1. What tool did you use? (and what made you choose that tool over the competitors)
   • We use Gong. It was originally brought on as a Sales tool and had a bit of a cloud around it as it was perceived as a "big brother" tool and was poorly rolled out, no WHY behind it.
2. What were (is) your use cases for it?
   • I originally started using it as a memory tool. Knowing that all my meetings were recorded allowed me to go back and review prior meetings and really helps with prep for upcoming meetings.
     • This evolved into:
       • reviewing recordings of sales calls to make onboarding easier and more streamlined
       • sharing any training videos with clients as well as bug or issues with our support team.
   • Then I started using the activities metrics to benchmark myself against the other team member, calls, talk time, etc. and reviewing where I am at vs. Gong's suggested benchmarks.
   • Now I am digging into leveraging  2 sections: 
     • The talking points, to see what topics are trending to the top, and how can I leverage that to inform the Product team 
     • Deals section, to get a better understanding of how strong my opps are.
3.  What were the key benefits your company received? 
   1. Day to day the ability to get everyone on the same page with minimal work
   2. Training, onboarding new CSM's by providing them with a slew of sales meetings, pulse meetings, and desired outcomes meetings, allows them to safely listen and learn and get a feel for how things go.
   3. Insights (intelligence) into the client and prospect landscape and into our sales and CSM's conversations. Are we hitting the right points do we even know what they are? We can start to answer these questions now by using solid data, not speculation. 
4.  How was rollout and adoption by your CS team?
   1. Roll out / adoption has been spotty, but this is not a fault of Gong's. I mentioned prior that we had no "why" concerning getting Gong, it just showed up one day with no real explanation. So it has not been adopted very well. At this point I think most of the CSM team are at a minimum using it as a back up memory, which is a shame as it is an amazing tool and has greatly enhanced my effectiveness.

1. What tool did you use? (and what made you choose that tool over the competitors)
2. What were your use cases for it? (I.e. just Customer Success calls, or did CS use it to listen to sales and onboarding calls for smoother hand offs, etc. etc.)
3.  What were the key benefits your company received? 
4.  How was rollout and adoption by your CS team?

Any and all insights appreciated.  Thanks. 

#customersuccessoperations #customeroperations #tools #CSOps