Overview

This article explains admins about how to create a basic report, for your business needs, using the Report Builder. The report builder allows you to create reports on  Salesforce objects and Matrix Data Architecture (MDA) objects. You can visualize the data in the reports in tables and charts. Before you get started, Gainsight recommends you take the short report building training course on Gainsight University.

Create New Report

To create a new report:

  1. Navigate to Administration > Report Builder. You will be landed on the Report Repository or the Report List View page. For more information about Report Builder Repository, refer to Report Repository.

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  1. Click on the existing report name to edit a report (or) Click + REPORT to create a new report.
  2. Select a data source from the dropdown list.

Data Sources are divided into: Dataspaces, Gainsight Subject Areas, MDA Objects and Salesforce Objects.

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  • Most Commonly used objects:

    • Company: general customer information, including onboarding stage, number of employees, owner, current score, industry, renewal date, original contract date etc.
    • Activity Timeline: Subject, Activity Type Name, Count of Activities, Activity Date etc.
    • Health Score: Health Score, NPS® Score, Sum of ARR, etc.
    • NPS® Survey Response: Response Date, Region, NPS® Score, etc.
    • Calls to Action: for customized CTA reason/status/type reporting (Call to Action ID is a unique identifier for each CTA)
  • Gainsight Object Glossary: Refer to this article to understand the main MDA and SFDC objects used in Gainsight. The article also contains the information about the standard fields in objects along with few sample use cases.

Show Me

Once you select an Object from the data sources, you can now add the required fields in the object to Show Me, to include in the report.

To add fields to Show Me:

  1. Click the + button.
  2. Enter the field name in the Search bar or you may scroll down and select the required field.

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Notes:

  • Based on the selection of your object, you will see all of the fields and lookup fields associated with that object.
  • Fields added to Show Me can be reordered by dragging and dropping, if required.
  • You can add a maximum of 10 fields to 'Show Me', if there is a 'By' field.

Lookup Fields: A lookup relationship is used to combine the fields from multiple objects based on a common field. For instance, if you want to build a report on Activity Timeline object to contain the author's email, clicking + on Author Id and selecting his email will bring author’s email.

 Here, the objects Activity timeline and User are joined via the Author Id field which looks up to User.

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Details of Self-look up fields: You can also add the details of the Self-look up fields, while building reports. For instance, when you build a report on User object, you will be able to add the Manager details by using the expandable fields (by clicking +). Similarly, when you build a report on Company object, you will be able to add the Parent Company details to the report.

Company and User objects have the standard self-lookup to Parent Company and Manager respectively. But, you can also create custom self-look up fields. For information on how to create lookup fields, refer to Gainsight Data Management article.

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Note: Under expanded Self-look up,  you cannot see additional lookups. Currently, only 1 level of self lookup is supported.

Click the Settings/Gear icon next to the field label to update Field Display Name, Aggregation, Decimal places and Column calculations. For more information on Aggregation and Column calculations, refer Report Settings and Advanced Options.

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For the dimension type fields added to Show Me, you will see an additional option called Enable Row Grouping. Row Grouping in Reporting allows you to visually group the rows/records in a report by a dimension type field without aggregating all the other fields. For more information on how to configure Row Grouping, refer Row Grouping.

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You can view the description of the Gainsight Custom Objects and Custom Fields when hovered.
Note: To view the descriptions, ensure that you have already described the Objects and Fields in the Data Management page.

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Formula Fields

Using Formula Fields in reporting, you can instantly create a formula field on MDA objects, based on your business needs. The Formula Fields created in a report can be consumed in other functionalities of Gainsight, including, Dashboards, C360/R360, Success Snapshots, etc. 

Currently, in Gainsight, you can also create Formula Fields from Rules Engine and Data Management, and can use them in reports.

Note: You can create a Formula Field from Show me and By. You can also apply Filters using the newly created Formula Fields.

For more information on how to create a formula field, refer Formula Fields in Reporting.

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By

To slice and dice or segment the data in a report, a field is added to By. A maximum of 5 fields can be added to By. A field will have to be considered Groupable by Salesforce in order to use in the By section. If you do not add a field to the By section, you can only view the data in a table.

To add fields to By:

  1. Click the + button.
  2. Enter the field name in the Search bar or you may scroll down and select the required field.

6. Add Fields to By.gif

Notes:

  1. Once you add a field to By section, all the fields in Show Me will become aggregated fields as shown in the above image.
  2. SFDC Formula fields cannot be used in the By section.
  3. You cannot add the following data types to the By section:
  • Long Text Area
  • Rich Text Area (MDA)
  • Multipicklist
  • Measures (Number, Currency, and Percentage, etc.)
  • Address
  • URL

Once you add a field to the By section, click the Settings/Gear icon next to the field label, you will see the below options:

  1. Update Field Display Name: The Field Display Name is the label that appears on your report. You can change the display name as per your choice.
  2. Apply Pivot
  3. Summarized by
  4. Aliases

Apply Pivot

You can see the pivot option only when you have a minimum of two fields in the By section. And you can apply pivot only on one field at a time. For more information on how to apply pivot, refer Apply Pivot.

Summarize by

In the By section, when you group by time, you can summarize by Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year and Fiscal Year/Fiscal Quarter. Summarize By is applicable only to the date-related fields.

Apart from the below listed objects, you can summarize the date fields by Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year and Fiscal Year/Fiscal Quarter across all of the Gainsight application areas.

  • Email Logs
  • Email Raw Events
  • Unsubscribed Emails

Fiscal Year: Gainsight supports honoring of Fiscal Year settings in all the reports created on both Salesforce and Gainsight Objects. You can Filter the date field/timeseries data by Fiscal Year/Fiscal Quarter and can also summarize this data by Fiscal Year/Fiscal Quarter. The Fiscal Year label on the report displays either the Starting Year or Ending Year, based on the settings defined by your admin in Salesforce. For more information on Salesforce Fiscal Year Settings, refer to the Salesforce Fiscal Year Settings article.

Important:

  • While building reports on Salesforce objects, Gainsight honors both the Standard and Custom Fiscal Year Settings defined in Salesforce.
  • While building reports on Gainsight objects, Gainsight honors the Standard Fiscal Year Settings defined in Salesforce.
  • When a user changes the Fiscal Year Settings in Salesforce, it may take 24 hours to reflect the changes in Gainsight.
  • Reporting on Gainsight Objects do not honor the Custom Fiscal Year Settings defined in Salesforce.

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Aliases

Aliases allow you to rename or customize your labels in the chart visualizations, to make them more contextual to the target audience. For example, when you are sharing a report to your director, and your director may not be aware of the jargon used in the report, to make charts/reports more contextual, you can rename labels in the reports. For more information on how to Configure Aliases, refer Configure Aliases in Reports

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Run

Click RUN to see a visualization of the data. By default, your data will be displayed in a table.

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Visualization Types

Click the Select Visualization Type icon and select the visualization type from the following options (visualization types are dependent on fields selected in Show Me and By):

  1. Table
  2. Pie
  3. Bar
  4. Column
  5. Line
  6. Area
  7. Stacked Bar
  8. Stacked Column
  9. Scatter
  10. Bubble
  11. Column Line
  12. Heat Map
  13. Packed Bubble
  14. Widget (KPI)

10. Visualizations.png

The following image describes the combination of Show Me and By fields required to generate each of the above-mentioned visualizations.

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Note: Graphical reports created will honor scorecard colors as well as colors configured on Gainsight picklist items.

Filters

To filter the data that is being displayed on the graph, click the Filter icon. Two types of filters are allowed:

  • Locked Filters: Filter value remains fixed and cannot be changed in the consumption area such as Gainsight Home. Click the lock icon to lock this filter.
  • Unlocked Filter: The value can be changed in the consumption area such as Gainsight Home. Leave filter unlocked to allow end users to change the value.

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To apply filters:

  1. Select the field you want to filter on.
  2. Choose the operator and then input the data and click APPLY.
  3. Filter by Current User or Other Users or All Users: In the Report Builder, when you filter on user fields, you can now select current user or other users (SFDC) or all users. Current user is the logged in user and other users refers to the rest of the users in your organization. You will be able to see these options in objects related to users. For example, Created by ID(Salesforce), ID, Name, Email(MDA), etc.

In reports created from MDA, the 'not equals(!=)' filter used to exclude a CSM or user will not only exclude CSM, but it will also exclude the null values, so you will need to apply an additional filter to include null values. For example, if you want to exclude XYZ (CSM Title), apply filters as, Filter A:  CSM Title != XYZ and Filter B: CSM Title = null.

13. Notequals_FIlter.png

Notes:

  • By default all filters are unlocked.
  • If you are using dates in the filters, put them first to optimize the query.
  • If you are using the operators 'contains' or 'equals' make it the last filter.
  • "Includes" Operator can be applied only on the following data types: String, Email and GSID.
  • If you want to apply Includes operator on a String data type, type/add the required value, and then press Tab to add next value to the filter. You can add a maximum of 10 values per filter.
  • All filters added on normal fields will be automatically added to the upper section of the filter bar in the report builder.
  • All filters added on aggregated fields will be automatically added to the lower section of the filter bar in the report builder.
  • By default, the operator between multiple filters is AND. You can change it to an OR statement by typing in the text field in the top right.
  • Normal fields are numbered from A, B…. Z and aggregated fields are numbered from 1, 2, 3…… If you want to apply an OR between the filter conditions, or if you want to add advanced filters such as (A OR B) AND C, type in your desired expression in the text box adjacent to the settings and visualization icon.

Save options and other settings

In Report Builder, you have multiple Save options and other settings which you can make use of. The below image displays all the Save Options and other settings.

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Save: You can save the newly created report, if you wish to. Clicking the Save button will save the report to the reports repository.

To save a new report:

  1. Click Save.
  2. Enter the Name of the report. This will be the name that appears in the Repository, as well as in any menus or screens where the report is displayed.
    Limitation: For MDA objects, you cannot create multiple reports with the same report name. Alternatively, you can prefix or suffix some additional text and then save the report.
  3. Enter the Description of the report, if required.

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Save as: will create a copy of the current report. You may change the Name and Description of the report, if required.

New: Click New to to create a new report.

Reset: Click Reset to restore the settings. For instance, you made some changes to the existing report, and you wish to restore the original report as it is, click Reset and then click No in the confirm dialog.

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 Refresh: will refresh or reload the page.

Add Reports to Home Page Layouts and Customer 360

At this point, your report is only visible here in the report builder. However, reports can be added to Gainsight Home Dashboards and to the Customer 360 page. For information on how to create and edit Dashboards, click Configure Gainsight Home Dashboards.

Reports from the Report Builder will have the following options at run time:

  • Add a new Filter or Modify unlocked Filter
  • Modify visualization
  • Change chart options
  • Exports

You can only change the operator and value of Unlocked filters while accessing these reports on Gainsight Home page or C360. All the above changes made in Gainsight Home are saved for individual user. For more information, refer How User State Preservation works with Dashboards.

Report Gainsight Data in Tableau

Quite a lot of the Gainsight customers use Tableau as their company wide BI tool. With Gainsight’s Tableau integration, you can quickly connect Tableau to your Gainsight instance and build reports on your customer success data in Tableau for fast discovery and analysis. This integration not only provides you an opportunity to leverage Tableau’s functionalities such as Advanced Visualizations, Collaboration and Ask Data but also allows you to join Gainsight data with other data sources in Tableau.

Once the connection between Gainsight and Tableau is established, users can access all of the Gainsight objects and some important Salesforce objects like, Account, User, Case, etc. in Tableau.

For detailed information on how to integrate Gainsight with Tableau, refer to Gainsight Integration with Tableau article. For information on how to explore data, build basic Visualizations and Dashboards in Tableau, refer Tableau article.

Additional Resources:

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