Relationships are an object in Gainsight that provide you with the flexibility to accurately model and manage your complex customer structures by creating relationship types and relationships. Relationships takes Customer Success beyond managing Accounts. They help CS manage each connection point (Relationship) with your customer.
You can also learn more about configuring and using Relationships in our free self-paced elearning courses on Gainsight University.
Example Use Cases for Relationships
- Your organization sells a product multiple times to the same customer for different teams, business units, or use cases. And you want to track success for each team, business unit, or a use case. You can manage the success of each sale as a relationship within Gainsight.
- Your organization sells multiple products to the same customer, and each product is managed by a different CSM.
- Your organization typically manages specific projects or events for their customers, and each project or event is managed separately. You can manage success using relationships with each project or event.
- Your organization sells multiple products to multiple divisions. You need to deliver and track Success for each separately.
Relationships however, are not the same as Account Hierarchy. An Account Hierarchy shows you a parent child relationship that exists between two Accounts. An organization can have headquarters at a location and branch offices at multiple locations. All the branch offices can be considered as child to the headquarter office (parent). If an organization acquires another organization, the latter becomes a child of the former company. Admins can configure the parent child relationship up to five levels. An Account hierarchy can be viewed on the C360, Account ,and Opportunity widgets. To learn more about Account Hierarchy, view this article. To learn more about how Relationships differ from SFDC Account hierarchy, check out this 4-min video.
Professional Services Available
Relationships are a foundational element of your Gainsight instance. If you are interested in deploying Relationships for your company, you may want to consider working with Gainsight's Professional Services team to ensure a smooth and accurate implementation. Please reference your contract to determine if this Services Package has already been included, or contact your Gainsight Sales Representative or CSM for more detail.
How Relationships Work in Gainsight
The new Relationships capability enables customers to define success at a more granular level than customer. There are two components to using Relationships within Gainsight:
1. Admin sets up Relationships
Gainsight offers a flexible way to define what a relationship is based on a variety of criteria including products, business unit, opportunities (created in Salesforce), geography, or projects. Once the different type(s) of relationships are defined, Admins can also configure what details are available to CSMs when viewing a specific relationship.
2. CS team manages success via Relationships
Conceptually, whatever a CSM previously managed at the customer-level, can now be managed at the relationship-level. This includes managing CTAs per relationships, viewing relationship details such as attributes or usage on the Relationship 360 page, and managing health scores per relationship.
Note: You can also add fields from Relationship to the Cockpit list view.
Special Considerations
If your organization is considering using Relationships functionality, please note:
- Having a strong Gainsight Admin is necessary
- Relationships must be linked to an Account ID
- Persistent Relationship data, such as Scorecard data, must be stored in MDA
Admin Configuration Resources
See the article Enable Relationships to start the process of configuring Relationships in your org.