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Gainsight Inc.

Data Platform and Connectors Overview

Overview

Customer data is collected and stored in various data stores in any organization. It could reside in CRM / ERP systems or it might reside in internal IT systems. In some scenarios, there could be third party aggregators/tools that collect the information, based on customer usage of the product. Given the varied sources and mechanisms through which customer data is collected and stored, it becomes increasingly complex to view the related information in one single system, in a unified view.

The Gainsight Data Platform offers a mechanism through which you can manage all of this data in the matrix data model, and transform this data to derive business metrics through the tools offered by the Platform - Rules engine, Aggregation, CTA's, Reporting, etc.

Connectors support integrations to the source systems and some of them are offered out of the box for you to connect the varied data sources and sync up information into Gainsight.

If your system does not offer a direct integration, you can export your data as comma/tab separated files and export it to Amazon S3, which can be ingested into the Gainsight Data Platform. Alternatively, the Bulk API feature can be used to ingest data into the Gainsight Data Platform directly from a CSV file.

Connector information is categorized as follows:

  • File-Based Integrations
  • API Integrations
  • Usage Data Systems
  • CRM Systems
  • Support Systems
  • Billing and Subscription System
  • Survey System
  • Data System
  • Customer Conversation System

There are two Gainsight admin pages through which you can configure various integrations:

  • Connectors
  • Connectors 2.0

In the Connectors page, you can establish a connection with Amazon S3 using S3 Connector.

In the Connectors 2.0 Admin page, you can configure the following connections with external systems from Gainsight:

Configuration

While establishing a connection with an external system, each connector should be setup with the following configurations:

  1. Create a Connection with external system.
  2. Create a Job and prepare the Datasets as required.
  3. Add Destination to Gainsight Object.
  4. Schedule the Job or Job Chain as required.

Key terms

Following are the common terms used in the Connector documentation:

  • Connection: A connection is an integration between Gainsight and source system.
  • Authorization: The process of allowing Gainsight to access your external system org.
  • Open Authorization (OAuth): The authorization protocol used to authorize Gainsight to access the external system org.
  • Production org: An external system org which holds your real time data on which the Organization is working.
  • Sandbox org: An external system org which generally holds sample production data used for testing.
  • Custom Domain: Custom URL used to login to your external system org.
  • Data Sync: The process of fetching data from the external system database and ingesting it into the corresponding Gainsight objects.
  • Data sync jobs: A Data sync job is an activity which syncs data from the external system Objects to Gainsight Objects.
  • Out of the box jobs: Default data sync jobs which are created after authorizing an external system org are known as out of the box jobs. Gainsight creates out of the box data sync jobs in a few connectors.
  • Dataset Preparation: The process of preparing a Dataset using fields from the source object.
  • Job Configuration: The process of scheduling the Job execution.
  • Compound Mapping: The configuration of derived mappings between source and target which includes both the Self and Direct lookup.

Additional Resources

For more information about Connectors, refer to the following articles:

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