Challenge A7: We don't have a way to operationalize or track our customers' lifecycle
Prep Work & Vault Assets
Below is the prep-work for this tutorial, which includes best practice material and optional resources to download from Vault.
Gainsight Strategy Workbook
- You should have worked to define your customer lifecycle stages and the touchpoints associated with each stage.
- Learn more about customer segmentation here.
Suggested assets to download for this exercise:
Playbooks:
Rules that trigger Calls to Action:
- New Customer Kickoff CTA
Required Data Points – These data points will be used in each of the rules and should match data points you have in your own Gainsight instance.
- New Customer Kickoff: Customer start date to identify age of customer.
- Closed Calls to Action (CTAs) from previous lifecycle stages: e used to identify when a CTA closed
- Renewal Date(s): the date of a contract renewal, which could be at the account object or a child object with contract information.
Configuration Resources
In this section, we’ll guide you through implementing the business challenge process. It’s important to keep in mind that every customer instance is unique, while following these examples you may need to make customizations to suit your business processes.
The Gainsight features we will use: Milestones, CTAs (Rules Engine), Customer360.
Prep Steps
In this first step, you'll configure Gainsight to assist in your lifecycle management, including updating the Customer Stages to match your customers' journey. You'll also create a series of Milestones, that will allow you to capture major events in a customer’s journey, including when they first became a customer, when onboarding was completed and when they’ve renewed their contract.
Prep Step 1: Create/Update Customer Stages
- Benefit: Map Lifecycle Stages across segments and track customers through their customer journey.
- Action: Add stages for each segment
Prep Step 2: Create Milestones
- Benefit: Track major events at the customer level
- Action: Add new Milestones in Gainsight:
- New Customer Signed
- Onboarding
- Renewal
Configuration Instructions
The following tutorials walk you through the configuration required to trigger the relevant CTAs:
Next Steps
You’ve now built 3 processes in your Customer Lifecycle Journey, but we still have some work to do in completing the entire workflow. You can continue building rules that will change customer stages and trigger new CTAs when a previous CTA closes. Below are some additional next steps that we’d like to highlight.
- Continue to build out additional CTAs to complete the customer lifecycle journey. Here’s a few ideas to get your started:
- Playbook Sales to Services/CSM Handoff
- Playbook Onboarding to CSM Transition
- Playbook Annual Health Checkin
- Playbook Customer Go Live!
- Follow Gainsight’s other best practices, by implementing another V3D business challenge. Here are a few we suggest to get started:
- Are there customers you can’t touch with manually outreach that need proactive attention? Supplement your customer journey with Gainsight’s CoPilot and take your business processes to the next level! Review V3D challenge A1.
- What happens when a customer is at risk? Use Gainsight’s Risk Framework to build internal processes for managing customer risk. Review V3D challenge B1.
- Do you need to create more visibility to your management team on activities your CSMs are doing around the customer lifecycle? Review V3D challenge C4.
Additional Configuration Resources
If you need additional information to configure your Lifecycle Design, refer to:
- Use Milestones to operationalize and track your customers throughout their lifecycle
- Automate your Lifecycle CTAs to act accordingly
- Use the C360 view to understand the full scope of each customer