Gainsight vs Planhat vs ???
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All these tools help capture objective data pretty well. You can create automated workflows, triggers for Churn, and upsell opportunities.
However, is predicting Churn completely objective?
For example, churn reasons can be - a competitor pitched, expecting a new feature ASAP, Point of Contact Changed, and the new POC has used a tool previously.
Similarly, a standard heuristic can be modeled after Product Usage and CSAT for Predicting Upsell. But, I have seen clients using a verticalized competitor tool for a specific use case. And although they are happy with us, they are also satisfied with them and want to stick to their product.
But I found this problematic. Is this an isolated observation, or do you feel the same way?
PS) I am also exploring a CS Tool for us at LimeChat - I would love to get in touch with anyone who can share their experience with CS Tools.
Gainsight is the most expensive customer success platform out there. And they are not prone to discounting in order to match any other solution in the bidding. Pricing discounting is not what Gainsight is prone to do. They are significantly more expensive than other solutions. I recently conducted an RFP considering Gainsight, Totango, and Churn Zero a few months ago. That said, Gainsight is bloody brilliant.
As for Planhat, I recall demoing their product about 5 years ago. I loved it. It's difficult to remember the details after all these years (we ended up choosing HubSpot), but I recall being very impressed by how easy it was to implement and it had a unique feel to it.
@vurveyandrew - Did you consider ChurnZero? I used to work for CZ and the product is so powerful - it has all the features you need and more. You won't need a full time admin like you would with Gainsight but you do need to plan. The thing is, no matter which CSP you choose you should make sure you are prepared to dedicate time to implement it, configure it, and maintain it. Happy to tell you more about my experience with CSPs if you want.
Naomi
If I were going to buy today I would choose vitally. Gainsight demos are questionable. The expense is obvious. The feature set is incredible, but could you use it this your or in the next 3 years?
There is a meaningful difference between CRM and CSP, and getting the right foundational CRM (e.g Salesforce) in place will inform your readiness and options for CSP. You can often make a lot of progress with the CRM by itself before you need to add the expense of a CSP.
Please feel free to reach out directly if you'd like to chat 1:1 or go deeper in the conversation. Congrats on your new leadership opportunity!
As per our experience, Gainsight is scalable and easy to integrate with numerous other systems. But apart from expensive licensing, It takes a lot of effort and expertise in Implementation, configuration, and customization.
On a more general basis I think the different CS softwares have a lot in common, and there's often small variances. But UI/UX is quite different.
Chris Hicken (follow him on LinkedIn, he's awesome) has done a fantastic job getting data from the major CS vendors and put it all in a nice table.
I would add that even though there's a checkmark doesn't mean that the functionality is great.
Like with integrations, there's some integrations that only pull the minimum amount of data and maybe even only one way.
We use Planhat, and would recommend it!
I'm late to the party here...but @vurveyandrew I'm in a similar boat as you. Our company has about 700 customers total, and our CS team is covering ~100 of them in a high-touch model. I have 3 CSMs on the team, and I am the head of CS/CX.
I looked at Gainsight briefly, but it's not a fit for us. Too expensive and, as someone else said, it pretty much requires a full-time administrator. I also looked at Planhat, ChurnZero and ClientSuccess. CZ and CS are both viable options for smaller shops. We ended up purchasing ClientSuccess...so if you'd like some insight into the good and the bad of their platform, just hit me up.