RiskIQ Achieves Net Retention over 100% by Scaling Customer Success and Operational Excellence with Gainsight
"I really couldn't be happier with our selection. Gainsight has become a centerpiece of our Customer Success team and is integrated in an operational day-to-day level."
- Eric Foster, Head of Customer Success, RiskIQ
Company Overview
RiskIQ, the External Threat Management company, enables organizations to expand their security programs outside the firewall, enabling incident responders to protect the enterprise from external threats. RiskIQ's product continuously discovers, indexes, and monitors websites, mobile assets, and Internet systems from the outside in. Leading financial institutions, insurance providers, and consumer as well as B2B brands use RiskIQ to protect themselves and their users from external threats, malware, and fraud. RiskIQ is headquartered in San Francisco.
RiskIQ has a Customer Success department that services a growing client base that includes primarily Fortune 500 companies, including the top banks, consumer technology companies, and social networks. Customer Success covers the entire post-sale customer relationship, including implementation, onboarding, account management, professional services, support, and integrations.
RiskIQ's Challenge
When Eric Foster joined RiskIQ as the Head of Customer Success, his team was constantly in firefighting mode. At the time, the team was smaller and had fewer resources available to manage the company's customers. They were looking for a solution to help them generate customer health metrics and evaluate which customers were healthy and which customers needed immediate attention.
Foster looked for a solution that could answer a handful of questions – "How do we prioritize our resources? Who is healthy? Who is not? Who gets the attention? Who is at risk?" The Customer Success team needed a way to categorize their customers by health score to determine where to allocate resources.
The Solution
RiskIQ looked at a number of vendors when searching for a Customer Success solution. The team recognized Gainsight as the market leader with first-mover advantage in the space and wanted to develop a long-term partnership with the industry leader.
"It was clear to us that Gainsight was the market leader. We planned to literally build parts of our business around these guys, and we knew that they would continue to innovate and lead the way with their software solution."
The primary goal of RiskIQ's Customer Success team is to improve the company's net retention rate, which combines defending revenue through renewals with expansion through upsell in the customer base. The team at RiskIQ selected Gainsight to not only improve their net retention rate, but also to help the growing company efficiently scale its Customer Success function.
The Benefits
Scaling Customer Success
As RiskIQ continued to double its revenue and customer base, the Customer Success team needed to scale their efforts. Eric Foster shared his perspective on the company's growth: "We've built an excellent team, but you obviously can't double your team size to keep up with the growing customer base, so the big challenge is to find a way for your team to scale efficiently and do more with less."
RiskIQ is using Gainsight to further automate and service a growing client base. Ultimately, they have reduced the cost of customer-facing activities by segmenting their customers and deploying tech-touch techniques in their outreach.
"You have to have a solution in place that allows for a high level of automation and segmentation. The only way to make that happen is with some sort of Customer Success solution, and we believe that Gainsight is by far the best of breed."
Customer Success DNA
Gainsight is used daily by every person in Customer Success at RiskIQ and has become the centerpiece of the team. Gainsight gives the Customer Success Managers (CSMs) a clear and objective measure of customer health. Internally, they refer to this as the Customer Health Index, or CHI. There are Gainsight dashboards in each office that display CHI scores and additional team metrics, like retention rate. Those are the same dashboards that RiskIQ shares with its Board members.
"More than just dashboards, Gainsight is integrated in an operational day-to-day level." Foster shared, "we have a lot of automated calls to action (CTAs) that are generated out of Gainsight." The CTAs that RiskIQ has implemented help the Customer Success team spend their time wisely by prompting them to interact with the customers that need help the most. For example, CSMs are notified when a health score drops, an executive sponsor leaves, or a customer submits a support ticket.
Customer Success is a top-down priority at RiskIQ, and one of the three foundational components of their executive pitch highlights their world-class Customer Success organization. According to Foster: "There is no question that we owe our best-in-class status to being proactive and far along with Gainsight."
Timely and Strategic Customer Outreach
Since using Gainsight, the Customer Success team has been more proactive with customers and improved their operational excellence. They use Gainsight to schedule and prepare for quarterly business reviews based on automated inputs and easy data collection.
Dozens of times over the past two years using Gainsight, RiskIQ's CSMs received alerts when their customers' adoption numbers declined. In some cases, this was because the customer stopped performing the function, and other times it was caused by an adoption champion changing jobs.
"We use Gainsight a lot for proactivity, which has been a big shift overall in terms of operational excellence. We went from reactive to proactive in many areas, and Gainsight is a big part of that."
By tracking drops in usage and monitoring CHI, the Customer Success team can now proactively reach out to customers and remedy their problems. This allows them to address issues early, improve the customer experience, save at-risk accounts, and increase upsell potential during renewals.
Before Gainsight, if a CSM wasn't manually checking usage statistics, they would have had no idea at renewal time that the account was at risk. Foster explains how different their approach is now: "We discover issues very early on and are able to adjust things, work on our process, and even devote development cycles to improve the quality of our offering."
100%+ Net Retention Rate
RiskIQ has achieved a net retention greater than 100% each year since the Customer Success team started using Gainsight. Even a small percentage change in that metric can have an enormous impact on long-term value.
Having a net retention rate over 100% speaks volumes to what RiskIQ has been able to accomplish with their Customer Success team and improved customer operations. Gainsight is a critical component of RiskIQ's technology stack that empowers the CSM team to meet their business objectives.
