TruSTAR Enables Proactive Account Retention With Gainsight PX
Founded in 2014, TruSTAR is an intelligence management platform that helps organizations organize and fuse their intelligence starting within. The company leverages multiple sources of threat intelligence and fuse it with historical event data to prioritize and enrich investigations. Built for security and fraud teams, TruSTAR uses machine learning and automation to operationalize data throughout an analyst’s workflow, freeing up time for higher-priority events.
TruSTAR is the technology infrastructure that powers many of the U.S.’s largest ISACs and ISAOs, and has enterprise customers that span across Finance, Retail, Healthcare, Aerospace, and IT. Like every SaaS business, TruSTAR focuses on ensuring its users have an optimal experience of the platform so it can continually boost retention.
Challenge
To calculate adoption and retention, TruSTAR measured logins by directly querying its Postgres database. Seeing the inefficiencies in this process, it adopted Tableau. Even then, a TruSTAR data analyst had to write SQL queries to Tableau to deliver metrics to the Customer Success, Product and Marketing teams, creating a bottleneck in workflow.
Knowing that long-term retention begins with product adoption and usage, TruSTAR wanted to make it easy for its teams to gain critical insights into product, feature and workflow usage. Just as important, it wanted to empower its teams to take action on those insights, such as by engaging users.
As Beatriz Datangel, Product Manager for TruSTAR, explains, the company had signed on an impressive list of enterprises and developed strong customer relationships. However, it needed to further develop its product-driven customer focus so it could proactively scale its tool for multiple use cases.
““We saw lots of feature usage but we couldn’t see the full user journey. We needed to facilitate user onboarding and messaging with our accounts so we could handle this at scale as a lean organization.”
Beatriz Datangel, Product Manager
Solution
TruSTAR evaluated several solutions to address its unique needs. Unlike some companies that correlate extended in-app sessions with user satisfaction and product adoption, TruSTAR understands its users may use other tools and values the user journey rather than session time or user satisfaction. As Datangel says, “The less time users spend in our product to get the information they need, the better for them so they can quickly address security threats.”
With a growing database of prospects and customers, TruSTAR needed to understand user behaviors at each stage of the customer lifecycle, so Salesforce integration was a must-have. According to Datangel, Gainsight PX (formerly Aptrinsic) was well suited to TruSTAR’s requirements, handles user engagement really well, and provides the analytics to measure that engagement. She joined TruSTAR as Gainsight PX was being implemented. While TruSTAR’s employees knew how to instrument Gainsight PX, Datangel encouraged a growth mindset when it came to setting up campaigns, dashboards, and onboarding.
Having worked with other user communication and analytics tools, Datangel appreciated the simplicity of Gainsight PX. “I was surprised how quickly I could learn, configure, and start using Gainsight PX,” she continues.
Using Gainsight PX’s Product Mapper and Path Analyzer, she mapped the top user journeys. She then took advantage of Product Analytics to set up weekly adoption reports for cohort analysis, and to gain insight into user activity across accounts.
Impact
The Product, Sales, Marketing and Customer Support teams use Gainsight PX regularly. In weekly metric meetings, Datangel shares insights gleaned from product usage data. Using the Account Explorer feature, she summarizes new account signups and correlates that to adoption with Cohort Analysis. In cases where adoption is lagging, she uses the Path Analyzer feature to conduct a product win/loss analysis.
These views help TruSTAR see what users did while in the product, empowering the teams to create a hypothesis and then try to re-engage users. Equally important, it positions TruSTAR to convert idle users to active users. Moreover, Gainsight PX enables the relevant, personalized messages that help resurrect inactive accounts.
“We monitor usage by reviewing user activity down to specific actions taken or not taken in our platform. The insights help our sales team drive meaningful conversations. Plus, they help ensure we’re not blind going into renewal and demo calls.”
Beatriz Datangel, Product Manager
As Datangel says, the insights mean her company is also more informed about what active accounts are doing throughout the sales funnel. This paves the way for the product team to explore ways to guide accounts more quickly through key milestones. Examples include using Gainsight PX to lead users through carefully orchestrated onboarding tours and using Gainsight PX messaging to make users aware of new or enhanced features.
TruSTAR’s goal is to increase adoption with accounts that sign up each quarter. “We aim to shorten the sales cycle, so we want to encourage adoption and retention within that window. Gainsight PX is an imperative tool for helping us achieve that goal, enabling us to prioritize accounts, meaningfully engage them, and guide them to see the full value of our platform,” concludes Datangel.
