Customer Communities (FKA Digital Hub) and Gainsight Integration - Admin Guide
This article provides step-by-step instructions for Admins to configure the Community Management in Gainsight for CSMs to access user/their activity specific data from the community into Gainsight.
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Overview
Community Data Integration in Gainsight enables Admins to connect their Customer Communities (fka inSided/Digital Hub) tenants to Gainsight to bring Community data. Admins can use this feature to sync community member data and their activities from Customer Communities to Gainsight NXT.
The important information between Customer Communities and Gainsight NXT can be used to drive customer success through Community drivers. Additionally, this integration helps Admins to automate several manual processes and enables them to create a more engaging community for their customers.
Prerequisites
Before proceeding with the integration, it is important to note that Admins need to create a support ticket with their Customer Communities tenant IDs for Gainsight to establish the connection from the back end. After the connection is established, the integration process is automated.
IMPORTANT: Customers must have both Customer Communities and Gainsight licenses and they should be customers of both to set the integration.
Note: Customers may have multiple Customer Communities tenant IDs for different community based on regions and languages. Admins need to provide these details in the support ticket to establish the connection with Gainsight.
Configure Community Management Page
After the connection is enabled, The Community Management page can be found in the left navigation menu, under Administration > General.
After clicking on the appropriate option, admins are navigated to the page where the list of connected Customer Communities users and their activity details are displayed in the form of cards. All of their multiple connections are also displayed in this list.
Schedule Sync
The data transfer schedule from Customer Communities to Gainsight is predefined by Gainsight and cannot be customized by administrators.
For instance, in the image above, a single Customer Communities user is connected, and data is regularly imported into Gainsight. The frequency of this transfer may occur once or twice a day, depending on the configuration. Multiple connections can be established, and administrators have the ability to monitor the status of each connection.
Administrators are not required to take any action, as the synchronization process for each connection is initiated automatically.
Deactivate Connection
Admins can deactivate any connection. If admins choose to deactivate any connection, data of the specific user will not be synced from Customer Communities into Gainsight.
View Activity Logs
For every connection, there IS a View Activity link, which navigates the admins to the Activity Logs tab. Activity logs are an essential part of any syncing process, as they provide valuable information on the status of the sync and any errors that may have occurred. This section provides details such as the time when a sync occurred, whether it was completed successfully or if it failed. These logs also show if the sync failed at any point in time, giving admins the ability to quickly identify and resolve any issues that may arise.
If you need to view more details, there is a Summary option available. The Summary section shows how many records are valid, how many records are found invalid.
IMPORTANT: If a sync is in progress, the logs will not be automatically updated when completed. Therefore, clicking on the refresh button will reload all the logs and update the status of the sync.
Type of Data Sync from Customer Communities to Gainsight
- Community User Data: The community User data includes information about all community members, Topics, Replies, Idea Status, and Categories which are synced into Gainsight automatically.
- Community Topic Data: The community Topic data includes topics created or updated by community members. This data is synced into Gainsight automatically.
- Community Category Data: The community Category data includes information about all type of Category such as Article, Discussion, Idea, Product Update, or Question. which are synced into Gainsight automatically.
- Community Idea Status Data: The community Idea Status activity data Indicates the latest status of the Idea Post. This data is synced into Gainsight automatically.
- Community Topic Reply Data: The community Topic Reply data includes information about the number of topic-replies viewed or created. This data is synced into Gainsight automatically.
- Community User Object: The community User object stores all the Community user details sync from the Community tenant.
- Community Content Object: The community Content Object stores and manages various types of content, including topics, replies, and posts, within the community platform.
- Community Activity Object: The community Activity object stores user activity/interactions (currently limited to only View) within the CS community.
- Community Trend Object: The community Trend object captures and presents trends related to user activity and content engagement within the community platform.
Note: For more information abut each community object and fields in it, refer to the Community Objects section in the Gainsight Object Glossary article.
IMPORTANT: The sync is mandatory and cannot be toggled by the Admin.
Limitation: The download and search options have been removed from the Activity Logs tab as there might be a lot of activities happening every day and it can be unclear what data to allow users to download. The All Activity Logs section has only a refresh option.
The purpose of these logs is mainly for reference purposes. Users can reach out to support if they see any failures or if they need to report on a large number of user activities being synced. This information can be used for monitoring purposes, such as tracking usage and user adoption of the system.
The sync process between Customer Communities and Gainsight is handled by Gainsight’s new feature called Unification. The configuration for this process is pre-configured out-of-the-box using Adoption Explorer.
Regarding the sync configuration, the Sync Users Data into Gainsight option is already embedded and by default it is toggled on. Users can be Gainsight customers or anyone who is part of the community. Community users are treated the same way, regardless of whether they are customers or not. Gainsight brings all these users into Gainsight and uses their email addresses to identify which company they belong to.
IMPORTANT: In case a user's data sync fails, admins can use Unification to set multiple rules. If admins do not find an exact match for email address, phone number, or name, they can modify the rule accordingly. They can also use error logs to identify possible reasons for failure and can reach out to Gainsight Support team. Admins can consolidate all users' statuses that have failed into a single ticket, the issue can be resolved in bulk.