Alfresco and Gainsight Partner to Improve Efficiency and Bring Consistency to Customer Journey
We needed to promote a culture of ‘customer first.’ Gainsight helped us on our
journey from operating in silos to becoming a customer-focused organization.
– Dan Malavich, Global Director of Customer Relations
Alfresco’s Customer Success leadership team got together to do a scavenger hunt. Their intention was to pressure-test their Gainsight investment. Every member of the team had to find three key pieces of information about a customer within 5 minutes, and not use Gainsight.
Nobody was able to do it. The most fundamental information to a CSM’s day-to-day workflow was taking more than five minutes to access per customer. Using Gainsight, the time to access that information was slashed by over 95% to just 15 seconds.
Alfresco is an enterprise open-source software company focused on driving the convergence of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) to advance the flow of digital business. Its Customer Success organization encompasses all of post-sales functions, from CSM and Operations to Support and Professional Services. There are numerous employees in post-sales, including teams of CSMs operating out of Atlanta and the UK. CSMs are each responsible for anywhere from 80 to 100 accounts, so you can imagine how that five-minute time spend adds up every day.
“Before we had Gainsight, we had high-priority events happening and the CSM didn’t ever know. We were able to put those events in front of the CSM in Cockpit that they never even knew were going on.”
- Tom Wix, Director of Customer Success Operations; Gainsight Admin
CHALLENGE: Bring consistency to the customer journey and reduce prep time for customer interactions
Being a global organization that’s further divided into three segments, Alfresco needed to deliver consistent value and customer experience regardless of a CSM’s location, segment or tenure. A consolidation of data sources with a high degree of data accuracy was also critical to saving CSMs time and creating visibility into customer health and attributes across the organization.
SOLUTION: Centralize data using Gainsight’s C360 and Dashboards. Provide guidance and next steps with Playbooks
Alfresco implemented Gainsight across the CSM organization and made reliable customer data visible to the entire Customer Success team. The C360 view centralized all salient data in one easy-to-access, visual location. CTAs began surfacing risk events and triggering effective, consistent Playbooks to respond to those risks. Custom dashboards visible across functions now help Alfresco monitor data accuracy and cleanliness, ensuring that all eyes are seeing reliable data and helping them uncover and resolve issues they weren’t aware of before.
RESULTS: C360 and Playbooks drive a 15% improvement in CSM efficiency
“Getting the right information in one place has been a huge time saver for the team. People were either spending a ton of time getting that data together before a call or worse, going in unprepared. Gainsight has automated that information flow to our team in a big way.”
- Dan Malavich, Global Director of Customer Relations
C360 saved each CSM almost an hour per day, a 10% lift in efficiency
For an Alfresco CSM, an ordinary day contains 5-10 customer interactions. And prior to having Gainsight’s C360, it took 5-10 minutes to gather basic customer information before each one of those calls. The C360 made those key data points instantly available, saving Alfresco’s CSMs nearly an hour per day. This is time that can now be allocated elsewhere, like managing additional accounts or developing expansion opportunities.
Alfresco’s customer Scorecards bring customer health into the C360, ensuring the CSM and managers are aware of all risks before going into a customer call. There are two subjective Scorecard measures based on CSM input and five objective measures:
- Finance score: Is payment in process or on hold?
- Support score: driven by support cases, missed SLAs and support CSAT
- Version score: drivenn by the product version the customer uses (key indicator or risk)
- In-production score: a time-to-value metric
- Product management score: driven by pending product enhancement requests
“We’ve been able to put together CTAs and Playbooks that help us approach onboarding around the world in a more consistent manner. It was a huge win having Playbooks that let us treat customers the same in Maine as we do in Germany.”
- Tom Wix, Director of Customer Success Operations; Gainsight Admin
Playbooks lead to a 5% lift in CSM efficiency and created consistency
Prior to implementing Gainsight, Alfresco did not have a consistent approach to both onboarding and customer touch points. The company operates around the globe with different post-sales functions running 24/7. Playbooks have empowered everyone in post-sales to follow the same best practices no matter where they are based. Having workflows ready before each customer touch point or onboarding call has driven a significant improvement in day-to-day efficiency since implementing Gainsight. Alfresco attributes a 5% lift in CSM efficiency to its use of Playbooks.
“Gainsight’s dashboards have made us very aware of our data quality. We have Rules and automation in place to keep the data clean and keep people from manually manipulating it. Our entire organization depends on that data to be there and to be right.”
- Tom Wix, Director of Customer Success Operations; Gainsight Admin
Gainsight helps drive cross-functional collaboration
Dashboards have made customer data much more visible throughout the Customer Success team. Support (especially Premier-level Support) are heavy users of Gainsight, and are very invested in resolving at-risk customer support scores. There are 12 separate factors to the support score alone.
Sales now has a rock-solid understanding of the ARR that is due to renew and the risks they need to navigate to secure that renewal. CSMs can see all upsell opportunities being nurtured. Gainsight is helping Alfresco shift the conversation around customer health into a Customer Success conversation rather than simply a renewals conversation. It’s transforming the company’s DNA around client outcomes.
