Customer Success Story

Gainsight Cuts Response Time by 50% and Improves Manager Productivity Using Sentiment Analysis and Auto-Case Routing

Gainsight partners with SupportLogic to improve manager efficiency across its support and success organization, using sentiment analysis to break down data silos, automate case assignment, and enhance the productivity and profitability of its enterprise support services.

Gainsight also uses customer sentiment to streamline onboarding and product feature feedback, helping their product and management teams improve the customer experience.

Founded

2009

Company Size

1200+ employees

Website

gainsight.com

Industry

SaaS

Proven Results with SupportLogic

>50%

IMPROVEMENT IN CASE RESPONSE TIME SINCE USING SUPPORTLOGIC

1 hr/day

TIME SAVED PER MANAGER

>450

CASES AUTO-ASSIGNEDPER WEEK USING AI

About Gainsight

Gainsight is the world’s number one-rated customer success platform. Their innovative software helps companies of all sizes and industries drive durable growth through customer-, product-, and community-led strategies. Gainsight offers a powerful set of customer success, product experience, and community engagement solutions that enable businesses to scale efficiently, create alignment, and put the customer at the heart of innovation.

How Gainsight Transforms the Support Experience

At the start of 2023, Gainsight set a goal to improve the gross revenue retention (GRR) of their paid support plan, consolidate tool spend, and take advantage of the latest in AI. They knew they needed to leverage their support data and automate their internal support processes. With about 600 new cases a week, the team identified case assignment and time to resolution (TTR) as the two areas that could immediately benefit from automation.

“We’re responsible for one-touch close and TTR metrics, which are one-day, seven-day and 14-day closes. We also own cost-per-ticket and the ultimate support of GRR,” explains Steven Davis, Sr Director of Enterprise Support at Gainsight. “With enterprise support, GRR goes down if we sell a bunch of paid support packages that don’t end up renewing.”

Due to the high quality of their enterprise support, the team was wary of adding self-service solutions to their tech stack. “Chatbots and other self-service automation tools work great when you need to reset a password, or when you want to add five licenses to your account. But that’s not what we do at Gainsight. A lot of what we get is, ‘I have a 15-step workflow, and the twelfth step isn’t yielding the results that I need.’ Automated tools won’t work for those kinds of customer issues, which are upwards of 70 of the tickets we get every day. So that’s where we’ve been really careful, and instead deploying the AI behind the scenes.”

Davis and the team looked to leverage sentiment analysis, with their sights set on making support operations more efficient and shielding the customer experience from overexposure to AI.

“We didn’t have a tool that allowed us to read through the actual case and be able to gauge the sentiment of the customer. We already had this foundational knowledge of what we wanted the support department to be, we just had missing pieces. So we went out looking for those missing pieces.”

“We hadn’t been able to get truly accurate data, because there’s no support team in the world that’s able to go through every case and say, ‘this is a mad customer, this is a customer that’s upset, this is a frustrated customer.’ Having the tool be able to aggregate that for you, at that level, is huge.”

With every new case, the Gainsight team was spending time checking queues and bandwidth before making an assignment. “Being able to go in and get cases auto-assigned was where we saw the biggest benefit. Because of our different shifts, different products, and very strict support response targets—especially for our paid support customers—we had been manually assigning as many as 400 to 600 cases a week.”

“We estimate that cases take around two to three minutes each to assign manually. I have to look at the roster, the L2 schedule, and their SME queues. Then I have to look at the holiday schedule to make sure nobody’s on vacation or PTO. And then I have to look at their open case count. How many open cases do they have? What’s their backlog?”

To take on these challenges, Davis and the team needed a way to capture their assignment history and use it to make future assignments, while also making sure the changing skills of their agents were factored into each one.

Gainsight launched SupportLogic’s NLP-powered Core SX platform as a solution for improving the efficiency of its enterprise and standard support tiers. The platform analyzes the unstructured data and customer interactions in every case, tagging sentiment signals and customer impressions. This data is then used to automate case assignment, prioritize cases by attention signals, and predict potential escalations.

“When we got SupportLogic, the biggest use case was trying to identify cases with negative sentiment from our customers,” explains Davis. “We’ve got a lot of high-paying customers in our paid portfolio, and we have agents that are specifically assigned to help them manage their account and their relationship with Support. We brought SupportLogic in to be able to pinpoint key areas, and help support managers quickly see exactly where they can jump in and make the biggest impact—instead of having to open up account pages and look through every case that a customer has open.”

SupportLogic’s intelligent case assignment tool used Gainsight’s case history to predict the best available assignee for every case by automatically determining bandwidth, agent skills, customer history, schedule overlap, and complexity. After the AI model ingested the case history, the Gainsight team spent a couple of weeks verifying the tools’ suggested assignments.

“We removed the need to have someone sit there and say, ‘this is about problem X,’ and then manually categorize that issue, put it into a bucket, and triangulate which support person it should go to.”

With the team impressed by the tools’ suggested assignments, Gainsight turned them on ‘auto mode’ and saw immediate time savings for their support management team. “We saw the cases come through, and that the skills the tools were indicating were matching the skills that we thought should be on each case. It wasn’t scary because we didn’t start with auto-assign, we started with suggested-assign,” recalled Davis. “That was the big eye-opening moment for us: realizing how many agents we had that were finishing their workload with three, four, and five hours left to go in their shift, and then just sitting back and waiting for their next case to go from pending into open, and taking action.”

With automatic case assignment, the team uncovered even more efficiencies, finding opportunities to assign open cases to idle agents and speed up time to resolution. “So what we’re doing is saying, ‘okay, this team has zero open…let’s go ahead and give it to them and have them start working on it.’ That has absolutely lowered our response time, because it’s taking and giving a case to somebody who’s sitting idle as opposed to somebody that even has one open at that moment in time, and is currently tied up. That’s the biggest thing that we’ve seen—the initial response time continues to keep going down.”

The efficiency improvements didn’t end there. Gainsight took SupportLogic’s sentiment insights and analytics dashboards, and looped in the product and onboarding teams, spreading the voice of the customer throughout the organization.

“Getting our support health scores integrated with our customer success team has been huge. Our services team has been using it as well while they’re going through implementation and onboarding. So we’ve had a lot of project managers that have been able to go in and set up accounts, and they can actually favorite accounts, look at the ones that are going through onboarding, and take a look at tickets at a high level.”

“One of the most compelling things that we’ve shown the product team is that when you aggregate data, you remove the human component. I didn’t have a tool that was able to say, ‘this is the overall positive sentiment or negative sentiment about the product.’ And the way that I’m able to do that is to go into text analytics, type in ‘email configuration,’ search every single email ticket that we’ve mapped in our ontology, and then get an overall sentiment score. That was unheard of before. So they’ve been going in and looking at all their different products and seeing what the sentiment scores are. And then be able to drill into the cases that make up the sentiment score, and see what people are saying about their products via support.”

“Our team is using the text analytics with our product features, and combining that with pulling the data at certain times to gauge what the sentiment is for customers around release time. It adds that sentiment aspect that wasn’t achievable before, where we were only able to see the metadata. But now we’re able to tell which customers are angry, frustrated, or confused.”

The Challenge: Automate Key Areas of Enterprise Customer Support Operations

Gainsight targets automation goals.

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The Solution: Real-time Insights from a Centralized Platform

Gainsight uses customer sentiment signals to get more automated.

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The Result: Manager Productivity and Time to Resolution Beyond Expectations

Gainsight cut response time in half and automated nearly 100-percent of case assignments.

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Looking ahead, with the success they’ve experienced from streamlining case assignment and reducing time to resolution, the Gainsight team is planning to add Elevate SX, SupportLogic’s Auto QA solution.

“We have tried several times over the years to do QA within the organization, but it hasn’t been successful. There are two reasons. Number one, it’s super time consuming. It’s a full-time job. You could pay somebody 40 hours a week to just QA tickets, depending on the team size. Number two is that if you split it up and tell all your managers, ‘everybody take five cases and QA them,’ you end up with implicit bias. So I think that’s big for us, getting some level of automated QA on top of what SupportLogic already has today.”

With budget constraints across industries, the Gainsight team recognizes the importance of tech consolidation. “That’s the next chapter for us, especially because we need to justify the cost of every single tool we use. So I think if we have auto ticket assignments and auto QA going on, those are most important. Everything else is icing on the cake.”

“There’s no support team in the world that’s able to go through every case and say, ‘this is a mad customer, this is a customer that’s upset, this is a frustrated customer.’ Having the tool be able to aggregate that for you, at that level, is huge.”

Steven Davis, Sr Director, Enterprise Support, Gainsight

Why Gainsight Leadership Loves SupportLogic

Kellie Capote

Chief Customer Officer, Gainsight

Kartik Yegneshwar

VP Global Support & Technical Success, Gainsight

Steven Davis

Sr Director, Enterprise Support, Gainsight

Support health is a critical part of the overall customer health. SupportLogic brings in the most valuable support insights and alerts automatically into Gainsight to help CSMs improve customer outcomes.

SupportLogic opens up my team’s operational capacity, allowing my support managers to focus on education and enablement, which indirectly leads to improved CSAT and customer relationship metrics.

We brought SupportLogic in to be able to pinpoint key areas, and help support managers quickly see exactly where they can jump in and make the biggest impact—instead of having to open up account pages and look through every case that a customer has open.