Stop Patching, Start Designing: Using the GAIN Framework to Transform Your CS Motions

All right, thank you Renee. I appreciate it very much. Hello everybody. We made it to the end of Pulse.

As she said, my name is Kate Neal. I made my way to Gainsight via their acquisition of Staircase AI. About two years ago at Staircase, I was employee number five. So wore many different hats, true to startup fashion.

Before that I've been a CS leader, you know, started as a CS... CSM worked my way up to CS leaders. So I've been a practitioner and now I've moved over into the advisory role to kind of take that practitioner knowledge and help everyone move through this lovely time of transformation in CS driven by AI. And that's what we're here to talk about today.

It's really meant... this workshop is meant to provide you with a framework that you can use to reassess and redesign your current CS motions into modern AI first workflows that can help you scale and achieve better outcomes. That is what we'll be doing. So we all know this well, right?

It's a traditional CSM playbook for account management. It's based on the constraints of what a human can manage and typically been built from a vendor point of view. And even before AI upended our industry, most of us would have said this way probably wasn't working very well. We'd still be in the dark about what customers are saying and doing and we'd still have green accounts churn, you know, out of the blue or red accounts renew.

We struggled to tie the value of what we do in CS to revenue outcomes and that led most organizations to view CS teams as cost centers rather than revenue protectors and revenue drivers. That cost us budget and a seat at the table and luckily for us AI is changing that and it isn't just changing that by making our old ways faster. We can't achieve new goals with the old ways. Just like the saying old behaviors equals the same results, new behavior equals different results.

And so that's why we have to pair new technology with new behaviors and new strategies, methods and workflows to truly capture new values and outcomes and that's what we're going to tackle. So as I said AI is fundamentally changing how we operate. Moving from linear or time or activity bound to dynamic and signal based. This includes improving things like customer segmentation by allowing us to pull in more dynamic factors like tenure, maturity and more over something static and basic like ARR.

And moving from point in time things like NPS, which at best is a lagging indicator with dismal response rates to an always on intelligence layer across all customer communication channels to look out for key signals to action at the right time with the right account. No more copy paste mass emails. AI can deliver timely and hyper personalized messages across all of the moments that matter in your customer journey. AI empowers us to be much more effective at our jobs, even while managing more accounts with limited human resources.

And this is the future of our industry. So even if you don't like it, buckle up. So let's take a look at how AI has evolved in just the past couple of years. So we kind of started back in 2021.

Obviously the technology has been around a lot more, but it kind of became in the industry in 2021 with machine learning, right? Helping us assess things like likelihood to churn or renew. And then we moved into the world of generative AI and that fueled a lot of cool features like cheat sheet and AI follow-up, account and meeting summarization and more. We were then able to use that context and generative AI layer to move into AI assistance.

So things like chat bots or our slack app for staircase or copilot for CS. Staircase then also helped us move into the insights agents. So building plans to address handoffs, expansion plays and risk mitigation and management. And now we're entering into the world and era of autonomous agents where agents are taking prescriptive actions on behalf of humans.

And this is moving fast, I'm sure you've noticed. In just a few short years, we've gone from very rudimentary AI use cases to fully agentic and automated possibilities. And really we're just getting started. That leads us to the opportunity at hand.

As I said, we can't achieve new goals with old ways. So whether or not your organization, your team are ready for the change, the time is now to start strengthening the muscle of divergent thinking. To unhook yourself from the current patterns of work and create something totally new. So today we'll go through a couple quick exercises that you can take back and use to reimagine your CS motions moving forward.

So before we get started, and this is where the poll comes in, let's decide together what CS motion in particular will focus on for today's exercise. So we've got renewal motion, expansion motion, risk identification and management, and onboarding and implementation. So which one of these do we think is really ripe for redesign? Okay, looks like risk identification and management is an early leader.

I'll give you guys maybe 10 more seconds, although at this point it's probably risk identification and management. Let's go with it. Everyone happy with that? Hell yeah.

All right. So if you open your worksheet, we'll start on the first page here. And we'll start by exploring your current state of this CS motion. So we want to explore what is the motion?

What are the challenges or pain points that we're facing in that current motion? And what measures of success are we using to determine the outcomes of this motion? So this is what your worksheet looks like. You'll start at the top circling the business metric or metrics that this motion is meant to impact.

Then you'll define the motion by articulating the purpose, what triggers it, what steps are involved in executing it. After that, we'll explore current challenges and pain points you face. So think through all the angles, right? The people, the process, the technology, the data.

How do these challenges impact your ability to deliver against the intended outcome of this motion? So I'll give you 10 minutes to work through this and discuss at your table. Make sure you put your thoughts on the worksheet as you go. And some of us from the Gainsight advisory team will be wandering around to help answer questions if you'd like.

All right. Is that fun? Talking about challenges. I am curious if we have a table or two or a person or two willing to raise their hand and share on the microphone a couple challenges or measures of success really anything from this first exercise that that you'd like to share with the class.

David, my guy. Hey everybody. I'm allowed apparently. I'm Dave.

I'm from Adobe. Part of our Gainsight team for the business systems management. We do a number of different functions inside of our little small but mighty team. One of the big things that we're interested in right now is early warning systems or we should say we're trying to redesign and transform the way that we think about early warning to be leading indicators and move those through.

So a lot of what we were doing kind of spanned all of the different measures of success so I won't even bother circling all of them. The motion that we defined really in terms of the primary purpose of the motion was we really are trying to get earlier up with the signals and figure out what we can identify. Obviously leveraging a lot of the signals that were that were pulling in from multiple different sources from conversational intelligence from anything that we were pulling into Gainsight from our CSMs any of those other pieces that we can get from anywhere including emails via staircase which we're in a POC with. And the real thing that we want to do is we want to get those signs so that our our team can move from that kind of proactive piece into the more or sorry from the reactive the proactive and basically what we want to look at is we want to look at we want to be able to intervene early we want to improve our outcomes and we want to reduce our churn as our primary outcomes for our motion and then in terms of the triggers that we're looking to do in terms of this.

We're pulling all this stuff constantly we want to look at those health indicators and as soon as they cross certain certain defined thresholds that we've kind of figured out from some of our historic data we're then trying to do the whole process of monitor, detect, alert, review, build, solutions, exchange or engage with our teams, escalate if where we need to to get more resources then look all the way to that closed loop piece of tracking the resolution and then measuring outcomes and I can go into current state but I don't know if you'd like me to just kind of stop there let other people. Yeah I think let's stop there. Anyone want to share some challenges before we move on? Bueller?

Yeah right here in the pink shirt thank you. My name is Sheila and I lead a customer success team and we were talking about the challenges that our teams face and for me specifically it's I'm not super technical and so I don't know the best way to work with my RevOps team because we don't have really a dedicated Gainsite admin today which is tough and so it's sort of like translating the need and figuring out like the technical next steps that we need to take because I sort of have the strategy in my mind of what we need to do but the actual getting there is what's a challenge for me right now and then our table is also talking about rolling out new processes to teams and making sure that you know you're getting your team's buy-in and sharing sort of like what's in it for them as a benefit to to kind of help with adoption of those new processes. Thank you so much yeah change management is always a fun challenge. Okay so now the fun part this is a part where we're releasing our minds from the constraints of how we've always done it and we want to create from a place of what I call infinite capacity where we imagine ourselves in a place with no limitations on head count on budget on technology on data right in a perfect world with all of the right things at your fingertips what should this motion look like knowing what AI can now do and own and what humans can do and are capable of what should this motion look like and I know this kind of divergent thinking is easier said than done so to help you out we've created a framework for you to use it's called the gain framework and this is what it looks like gain grasp adapt innovate and narrow so you'll kind of reassess this motion through the lens of each of those four angles grasp is what new data or signals are available to us now to give us a better understanding context or capability to inform this motion right so an example of that is maybe not related to this necessarily but we used to have nps for customer sentiment it was lagging lagging indicator pretty bad response rates and a point in time survey now we have this real time always on customer sentiment right so we want to think through what new things do we have that can help us do this motion better and then innovate oh excuse me adapt so what are the steps that are repeatable that are currently done by humans that can be moved over to that layer of AI or digital or agentic and and then innovate without constraints what does emotion look like in a perfect world and what would we deliver to customers as a part of it right we have this habit of oftentimes thinking about our emotions through our lens as the vendor through what are the actions that we're taking I think it's also very important to think through what is the customer experience in this what do we want them to feel what do we want them to experience and then finally we get to narrow which is what steps can we eliminate because maybe we've shifted work from human to that AI layer or maybe the new process makes an old step redundant or unnecessary so I'm going to give you probably about 10 minutes I know it says 15 but just in the sake of time we'll probably go for 10 to fill out the worksheet and talk about it at your table and if you have questions or I've got a list of questions here if you guys need some some help prompting ideas so give a shout All righty, how was that?

Was it fun? Hey, any volunteers willing to share an idea or two from any of the buckets that you discussed? Specifically I'd love to hear from the Innovate bucket if anyone has any fun ideas there? Buehler?

Oh good, we got some hand raisers. I'll come back to you, thank you. Yes, my name is Tanya, I'm from Samsara. And so one of the things we were talking about was resistance from product for in-product onboarding, which is a major predictor of future churn is if they fail to launch.

So some of the feedback we heard from product is unless customers are asking for it, it's not going to be prioritized. So we have to figure out how to onboard. For me, I work in scaled, it's 30,000 customers representing 500 million in revenue. So I care very much about helping them be successful.

So one of the things in Innovate that I actually want to work on with my implementation team is building an agent to actually, once the dashboard is created, go in and configure it based on the data we have in Gainsight and in Gong on what the customer needs. Because for vehicle telematics like we're working with, our customer base just wants the problem solved. They don't want to learn about our product and they're not technical customers. So yeah, building an agent to actually just do the work that customers struggle with that we don't have the resources to do would be really fun to start to work on.

Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much, Tanya. I love that idea. I think that's the kind of thinking that we want to be doing, right?

Is what can we dream up? What agents or different steps or processes can we introduce here that kind of get us quicker, right? Quicker to time to value or reducing that customer friction. So I really like that.

I think we had someone over here willing to share. Hi, I'm Mallory from FastSpring. We are a payments processing company, a merchant of record. And so all of our customers are selling vastly different things.

So with more access to their data and their needs and understanding their business propositions, we would be able to give them custom storefronts, customization into whether it's like subscription based or things like that. And right now it's kind of difficult because we are such a small company that we just don't have the bandwidth to build things out. So another really cool thing specifically with Gainsight is we'd love to be able to do use like spaces to let their CSMs build the custom reporting that works for them because right now, like our dev team is trying to just do the standardized reporting that doesn't work for anyone. Nice.

Thank you, Valerie. Appreciate that. All right. So last page or back of the book here, a little bit of homework for you to take away.

And this will help you complete the exercise. And what's important here is to really drill down into what are the specific steps in this newly designed motion, which ones will be handled by your humans, right? And to help answer that, you can ask yourself, what are the key high value activities that a human is leading in this motion? And it also helps to define what skill sets that you need those humans to have.

So you can answer this question, what skill sets would a teammate need to be successful in delivering those activities? And then what steps or actions in this motion can be handed over completely to that AI digital or agentic layer? And then finally, ensuring that you're clear on what are the measures of success for each step in the new motion. And this should give you a roadmap of what to build, how to get there, and how to help your people with the change management required to support the new motion.

So now you can just rinse and repeat this process to redesign your entire customer journey through that AI first lens. So I hope this is helpful. On the Gainsight Advisory Services team, sorry, you can tell it's the end of the day, right? We work all the time with customers who are looking to transform their CS organization.

We have a ton of different sessions and workshops to help you get there no matter where you fall on that maturity and readiness curve. We typically focus on four key service pillars. So gathering insights, setting strategy, driving optimization, and empowering innovation. So if any of that sounds like something that your team could benefit from, feel free to scan the QR code and we'll take it from there.

I really appreciate your time and attention. I hope that you've enjoyed polls this year. We appreciate you being here very, very much. And we do have a couple minutes.

So if there are any questions, I'm happy to answer. And if not, then get yourself to happy hour. Thank you.