Overview

IMPORTANT: Journey Orchestrator is available as a paid add-on to our Customer Success platform. For more information on how to license this feature, please contact your Gainsight account manager.

Journey Orchestrator is your center for automated communications. It leverages the power of automation to make your job easier as you communicate with customers at scale.

The benefits of using Journey Orchestrator include:

  • Save time by sending communications to customers at scale without losing the personal touch
  • Leverage a wide range of options such as auto-populated tokens, multi-step outreaches, multiple versions, and more
  • Link your emails triggered by Programs, to other features in Gainsight (e.g. CTAs (Calls to Action), Surveys, etc.) to enhance your ability to manage your customers
  • Link your events to trigger a Program. For instance, whenever a customer is onboarded, he/she will be triggered with a Program that is already configured according to your business requirement. Here, the Event is: A customer is onboarded, and the Program is: a series of predefined actions which customer should undergo during onboarding.
  • Gain efficiency by automating repetitive communications via email.
  • Standardize key lifecycle emails (For example; Welcome, Request Business Review, Renewal).
  • Trigger success communications based on key behaviors in your data (For example; support, usage metrics).
  • Coordinate with marketing for branding & to avoid email fatigue.
  • Identify and Categorize Customer References and Use Cases.

Gainsight enables customer success teams to launch automated emails based on customer attributes such as health score, product usage, survey results and lifecycle stage. Through automation, you can scale customer touches and engage with a growing list of customers often and effectively. Typically, the Gainsight Admin or someone in an Operations role will manage your Journey Orchestrator automated outreaches, including email template design, scheduling, and so on. You can also learn more about configuring and using Journey Orchestrator in our free self-paced elearning courses on Customer Success University.

Some of the most common automated email use cases include:

IMPORTANT: We recommend using Programs for the majority of these use cases. The original Outreach feature should still be used for operational emails and emails that require the Time Identifier feature, which gives users the ability to send emails at different times to different recipients based on defined criteria. For more information on how Programs can be utilized for all other use cases, refer to Introduction to Programs.

These email campaigns (or outreaches) are defined and owned by the Customer Success or Account Management teams, rather than marketing teams that rely on marketing automation tools such as Marketo, Pardot or Eloqua. To learn more about this difference, see our blog post Journey Orchestrator vs. Marketing Automation.

The preferred option to send automated email in Gainsight is via Journey Orchestrator (which supports the above use cases).

  • Welcome emails for new customers.
  • Product release notification and overview.
  • Quarterly NPS® survey emails.
  • Send customers reports with key insights in a regularly scheduled email.
  • Reminders of upcoming Renewals or Quarterly Business Reviews.
  • Automate repetitive communications.
  • Send an email, and based on the response, open a CTA or update a health score.
  • CSM team needs to own the creation of content and schedule, without relying/waiting on the MA team to implement it.
  • High deliverability: Since JO recipients are paying customers, emails are less likely to bounce or get marked as spam.
  • Include customer surveys or reports only available in Gainsight.

Journey Orchestrator Features

 
Highlights of Journey Orchestrator include:
  • Power Lists: create a list of contacts based on customer and contact criteria. These lists are dynamic and can be refreshed daily, or right before the outreach is sent. 
  • Email Templates: Gainsight offers an intuitive WYSIWIG editor to create HTML emails from scratch, or edit existing templates. You can also paste in HTML. Key features of email templates include: 
    • Tokens: You can avoid the hassle of manually writing in first names and other details for each customer. Use tokens while creating an email to pick the required values dynamically. 
    • Survey and Reports: Easily drag and drop Gainsight surveys and reports into the email template. Survey links are tokenized, so you can automatically associate responses to Survey Recipients or Salesforce Contacts. Reports are automatically filtered by account to ensure recipients only receive data for their company. 
    • Versions: Easily create and send multiple variations of an email within one Outreach to scale personalized customer communications and simplify reporting. For more information, refer to the Create and Send Multi-Version Emails article.
  • Schedule Outreaches: You can schedule emails to contacts in a power list at a specific date and time, or on a recurring schedule. Currently, you cannot trigger outreaches; instead, you can add a date field as a filter in the Power List and schedule a daily outreach when that date = today. If your Outreach has versions, you can schedule these to be sent at separate times.
  • Programs: You can design multi-step outreaches that guide your customer through a responsive series of email interactions to reach an enhanced outcome. 
  • Analytics: Out-of-the-box, you get a graphical representation of the Outreach (emails) statistics sent to customers. The parameters for analyzing the emails sent are: Sent, Opened, Clicked, Bounced, Marked As Spam, and Unsubscribed.
    • NPS® Text Analytics: Using NPS® Surveys, you can gather information regarding customer pain points, parts of the product that are working, and suggestions that can drive action. The NPS® Text Analytics feature uses several analytical techniques to break down and classify the textual information contained in NPS® comments and makes it available for reporting purposes.

Email Templates

Gainsight provides dozens of Journey Orchestrator email templates that are ready to import into your org. Templates are aligned to common business processes, and are stored in Gainsight's Vault. Admins can import templates and further customize them as needed. To view a complete list of all the assets available in Gainsight's Vault, see the article Import Email Templates.

Survey Distribution

Surveys can be distributed as part of the Program feature. With Gainsight Program, you can design outreaches with multiple messages that guide your customer through a responsive series of email interactions as part of configurable models. For more information regarding this feature, refer to the Introduction to Program article.

Email Assist Tasks (semi-automated email)

Gainsight also offers a semi-automated email feature called Email Assist, which is accessible to CSMs using Calls to action in the Cockpit. We recommend using Email Assist tasks when your CSMs need more control over the scheduling and contents of the email. Email Assist tasks utilize Journey Orchestrator email templates, but your CSM selects individual contacts to send the email to, and the email contents can be customized as needed. See Configure Email Tasks to Send from Cockpit for more info.

Feature Comparison

For information on how Email Assist, standard Outreaches, Programs, and Gsnap compare to one another, and their available functionality, refer to this table. 

 

NPS, Net Promoter, and Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.