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Gainsight Inc.

Release Notes Version 6.9 December 2019

Note: For information about new functionality or fixes delivered as patch releases of version 6.9, refer to the CS Patch Release Notes: Version 6.9.X series article. 

Short on time? Watch this 5-min. video overview to see what's new in the 6.9 release!

Gainsight CS Release Notes Version 6.9 contains the following subsections:

  1. Notifications describes important changes to the application that are implemented now or will be in the near future.
  2. New Features in Gainsight which may require the Admin to setup new processes or re-think existing processes.
  3. Enhancements (per module) describe improvements made in the existing product capabilities.          
  4. New Components which are introduced and modified in every release.                           
  5. Permission Sets contains the list of the updated Gainsight and SFDC permission sets for several features in a release.
  6. Issues Addressed contains issues which were reported by customers and are fixed in this release.

Notification

Email Template 1.0 Feature Retirement Plan

We will be removing the ability to edit Journey Orchestrator email templates 1.0 with the January release. Gainsight recommends customers manually review their existing 1.0 email templates, and convert them to email templates 2.0, as well as create any new templates using email template 2.0.

IMPORTANT: Customers can continue to view and use 1.0 templates after the January release, but cannot edit them. For more information about this retirement, refer to the Email Template 1.0 Deprecation FAQs article.

New Features

Company Intelligence

IMPORTANT: With this release, Company Intelligence is available for all customers as a paid add-on feature to our Customer Success platform. For more information on how to license it, please contact your Gainsight account manager. 

Company Intelligence helps users to stay informed about their customers and competitors. It processes information through Slack by searching publicly available information on the companies and signals in which they are interested. For more information, refer to the Company Intelligence Overview article.

To use this feature, admins must first configure the list of companies for which they want to receive intelligence information, and also set the signals to track for the selected companies. For more information on how to configure this feature, refer to the Configure Company Intelligence article.

Business Use Cases:

  • As a CSM, get curated posts about your portfolio of customers from publicly available sources, including press releases, news articles delivered directly to your slack instance without spending hours each week doing research.
  • Admin can select from a list of signals like M&A, executive changes, expansion, funding and more, so you only receive news that is relevant to your organization.
  • Perform actions like Create CTA, and post to timeline if you think a particular post needs follow-up actions or deserve a mention in the company timeline from directly within slack with a few simple clicks.

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     Benefits of using Company Intelligence

      Following are some of the benefits of using Company Intelligence feature:

  • Stay up-to-date on your key customers, prospects, and competitors without any effort.
  • Seamlessly access and receive updates in Slack.
  • Take action on intelligence news that signals a risk or indicates an opportunity.

For more information on how to get the required information in Slack, refer to Use Company Intelligence in Slack

Enhancements

Cockpit

Cockpit is the day-to-day workspace for CSMs. As a turbo-charged “to-do list” that integrates with the rest of your system, it turns customer insights into tangible action items for your team. Calls-to-action, or CTAs, are tied to customers and are the backbone of Cockpit. CTAs can be created manually, but more often are triggered by business rules that analyze usage data. For each CTA that appears in the CSM's Cockpit, a prescribed playbook of best practice tasks can help guide the CSM through the right steps.

  1. pasted image 0.png Search for Dropdown List Type Fields

Admins can now search a value for the Dropdown List type fields on the following pages:

  • Admin > Workflow > CTA
  • Admin > Workflow > Task
  • Admin > Workflow > Success Plan

Business Use Case: If you have a lot of Reason Names for a CTA Type, for example, it can be time consuming to scroll and find the required Reason Name to be edited. To address this, Search for Dropdown List Type Fields is enhanced, so that when you search for a keyword from the required Reason Name, the system displays the filtered search results.

Note: Search Operation is allowed only on the String fields.

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Adoption Explorer

Adoption Explorer helps manage your customer’s usage data in the Gainsight environment, and quickly surface the most relevant view of usage data across your customer base. Adoption Explorer offers powerful segmentation capabilities to manage multiple product lines, more robust control of aggregations and calculations, and totally re-imagined visualizations to surface deep insights. Customer’s usage data at Company and/or Person level can be stored at both daily and weekly level along with their entitlements. Using the ingested data, admins can define new derived fields without the need of Rules Engine.

  1. Date Functions in Layouts

Date Functions in Adoption Explorer Layouts help you adjust date ranges as required to see the Usage trends, such as: Start of Week, Month, Quarter, Year, etc. For instance, CSMs might want to know how a Product is being adopted by their customers on a quarterly basis, to inform their priorities. Using Last Day of Calendar Quarter date function, you can create a usage section to see the number of Page Views for each quarter (that ends on the last day of every quarter). CSMs can then analyse the adoption rate, and accordingly send out Surveys to gather feedback, if the adoption is low, or trigger CTAs to work on increasing the adoption.

Note: You can apply Date Functions only on the Timeseries and Entitlement Objects.

For information on the other Date Functions supported by Adoption Explorer, refer to Adoption Explorer Functions article.

To use a Date function:

  1. Navigate to Adoption Explorer > Administration. Hover on the required project and click the Layouts icon.
  2. Select the layout in which you want to add a usage section.
  3. In the Layout Detail view, click + at the bottom right corner of the page.
  4. Click Add New Usage Section.
  5. From the Usage Section Type dropdown list, select Analytics.
  6. From the Data Sources dropdown list, select the required object.
  7. Add the required fields to Show Fields section.
  8. Click + and select Add Function
  9. From the Function Type dropdown list, select Date.
  10. From the Function dropdown list, select a Function. Here, to solve this use case, select Last Day of Calendar Quarter.
  11. From the Fields dropdown list, select the Date Field.
  12. In the Target Field Name textbox, enter the name of your choice.
  13. Click SAVE.

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Click Show Preview and select the Date Range as 365 days to see the report on Page Views data for each quarter, and click SAVE. If required, you can also add this report to the C360 and monitor usage adoption.

For information on how to configure an Adoption Explorer Section in C360, refer to Configure Adoption Explorer Section in C360 article.

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  1. Enhanced Permissions in AE Layouts and Usage Sections 

Gainsight now offers a permission control over the Layouts and Usage Sections created in an Adoption Explorer project. With this enhancement, Edit and Delete operations on the Layouts and Usage Sections can be performed only by the Super Admins and Owners (Created By). But, the other non-super admins/users can still create a new layout in any project and add usage sections to it.


The following image shows how the permissions (full access) work on Layouts/Usage Sections, for Super Admin/Owners (Created By)

4. Super Admin_Owner.gif

The following image shows the permission control on Layouts/Usage Sections, for non-super admins/users

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You can see the following information messages, when you try editing/deleting a Layout/Usage Section for which you are not the Owner or a Super Admin.

  • When you try deleting a Layout: ‘You cannot delete this layout because you are not the Super Admin or the creator of this layout!’
  • When you try editing a Usage Section: ‘You cannot edit this usage section because you are not the Super Admin or the creator of this usage section!’
  • When you try deleting a Usage Section: ‘You cannot delete this usage section because you are not the Super Admin or the creator of this usage section!’

Journey Orchestrator

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. 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.

  1. pasted image 0.pngSupport for Plain Text Email format

Gainsight now supports plain text format emails in JO. A plain text email is a simple email message that only includes text without any formatting, images, or graphics. 

Business Use Case: Most of the email clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird have the option of selecting only Plain Text format emails to be delivered, instead of rich formatted email. In order to better support our customers, Gainsight now offers both HTML and Plain Text format in Email Templates. Both the formats can be used simultaneously and the main idea behind using both formats is that when HTML emails are disabled for particular users/org, the Plain Text format email is delivered.

6. PT.png

Some of the benefits of using Plain Text feature in Email templates are:

  • Increase in email delivery.
  • Increase in customer touches (email open rates).
  • Increase in response (link/survey click rates).

The following are some of the features of the Plain Text format:

  • All rich text is converted, including attachments.
  • Tokens are converted and are highlighted in grey color in Plain text format along with token IDs. Users can click Ctrl + 4 to add or view the list of available tokens used in the existing template.
  • Links (including image links) are converted along with the link text.

    Notes:
    • Images without links are not converted to plain text format. But, images with links are converted to plain text with the name of the image and link.
    • Currently, the following are not supported in Plain Text format:
      • Inline Images
      • Inline Reports
      • Inline Surveys
      • Inline Tabular reports

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To assist users in easily filtering out email templates without Plain Text, a new ‘Templates without Plain Text’ filter is added under Type filter in the Email Templates page.

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Users can automatically migrate their existing templates to Plain Text format using the new Plain Text tab or the Plain Text icon adjacent to the version name. 

For more information about supporting Plain Text format in Email Templates, refer to the Support of Plain Text format in Email Templates article.

  1. Event Fields in JO Conditional Wait Step 

Previously, JO only supported Email events in the Conditional Wait step. With this release, Gainsight extended its support for Events in the Conditional Wait step of a Journey. You can use Event Fields to configure conditions as part of the conditional wait step. You can choose fields from any of your event objects, use the value on the fields, and use it in a conditional wait step within a Program​. This feature helps admins to immediately trigger an action in a program.

Business Use Cases:

Following are some of the Business Use Cases for the Event Fields in Conditional Wait feature:

  • Send an integration document when a new user creates an account in a non-Gainsight system.
  • An event can be the completion of a data load that could subsequently be used to trigger a program.

      Example: Consider the following scenario where Admins must inform CSMs about changes in activities:

  • A Zendesk ticket is created by a customer with High priority.
  • A CTA must be created and assigned to the respective CSM when the ticket priority is changed to Critical/Blocker.
  • The CTA must be closed once the Zendesk ticket is closed.

The above workflow can be easily configured in JO, but the actions required to identify a Zendesk ticket priority is not an easy or straightforward task. This process is now made easy by configuring a Zendesk event in the events framework, and also by adding a participant in JO, when a Zendesk ticket is created.

15. EVinCW1.gif

Some of the benefits of Event Fields in Conditional Wait feature are:

  • The decision of a customer’s path can be taken based on real-time events data.
  • Better personalization of emails.
  • Take action based on the customer’s current data.

Users can create Event Fields as part of a Program. The created Event fields can be used only as conditions within the Conditional Wait step to determine how the Program journey progresses. Event Fields can be added at the following places in the Program configuration:

  • Participant Configuration
  • Conditional Wait Configuration

Note: Currently, admins can add up to a maximum of 10 Event Fields. If they need to add more than 10 fields, raise a request to support@gainsight.com.

For more information on how to create new Event Fields and use them in Program, refer to the Programs: Using Event Fields article.

Renewal Center

Renewal Center helps quota carrying CSMs and Renewal Managers forecast and manage their book of business.  By enriching Salesforce Opportunities with Customer Success insights, as well as calculating a Likelihood to Renew score for each opportunity, Renewal Center enables your team to efficiently manage and predict renewals and related upsell, recognize risks in a timely fashion, and report on key metrics.

  1. Scorecard and Timeline Updates in Renewal Center 

Gainsight now supports modifying Scores for a Company’s Scorecard from the Scorecard tab in Renewal Center Detail view. Users can also create Timeline entries and comments from the Timeline tab. You can only edit those activities which were created by you. Timeline entries created from Renewal Center can be viewed and edited from global Timeline and other Timeline consumption areas. This enhancement simplifies the workflow for users since they do not need to navigate to C360 to edit scores or create Timeline entries. These tasks can now be completed from within Renewal Center.

To use this enhancement: 

  1. Navigate to Renewal Center
  2. Click the Forecast tab
  3. Click the detail view icon for the required company
  4. Click the Scorecard or Timeline tab
  5. Modify scores, create entries as needed 

Scorecard

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Timeline

21. timeline.GIF

  1. Configure Tabs in Detail View 

Gainsight has introduced a new section in the Renewal Center admin configuration called Tabs in Detail View. This section allows you to configure the tabs which must be displayed in the Renewal Center detail view section. By default, Renewal Center detail view displays three tabs: Details, Timeline, and Scorecard. You can choose to hide or display the Timeline and Scorecard tab(s) from the detail view. You can also change the order of the tabs. The Details tab will always show since it holds all the basic information about the opportunity. 

Business Use Case: Making Scorecard and Timeline optional enables customers to deploy Renewal Center without these dependencies. Customers can immediately start to get value out of Renewal Center while Scorecard and Timeline is being configured.

To use this enhancement: 

  1. Navigate to Administration > Renewal Center Configuration > Renewal Center.
  2. Click the Tabs in Detail View section. 

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  1. Toggle on or off for Timeline and Scorecard sections, as required. 
  2. (Optional) Hold the Drag Handle icon and drag the tabs to rearrange their  position on the detail view. 
  3.  Click Save.

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The detail view now displays only Timeline tab and the Details tab.

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  1. Standardized Churn Colors

Gainsight is standardizing the colors configured for various Churn reasons. Previously, you could configure the colors for each Churn reason from the Dashboards section in the Renewal Center administration page. This tab is now hidden and you cannot view it on the administration page. However, if you have already modified the default churn colors, the configured colors are honored.

People Maps

Capture your contacts in an organizational chart to understand the roles and relationships of the people you do business with across your customer base. Explore the org chart to understand who influences whom within a company and drill-into a person for deeper insights.

  1. Delete Influencer Relationships in People Maps 

CSMs can now delete Influencer relationships from any person in People Maps. You can delete all Influencer types (Positive, Negative, Neutral) from the org chart.

To delete an Influencer:

  1. Navigate to any customer’s C360 > Person section > Org Chart.
  2. Click the Influencers icon of the person widget to delete its associated influencers. Influencer widgets with their associated relationship arrows are displayed.
  3. Click the relationship arrow of the Influencer that you want to delete.
  4. Select Delete Influencer. The selected Influencer relationship is deleted from the People Map.

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To see the Influencer detail view, click the Influencer arrow and select Edit Influencer. Earlier, the Influencer detail view was displayed after clicking the Influencer arrow.

Components Introduced and Modified in 6.9 Release

Gainsight has not introduced any new components in this release. 

Permission Sets Added/Updated in 6.9 Release

With many releases, the Gainsight and SFDC permission sets are updated for several features to give access to new objects, fields, apex classes, and visualforce pages. 

Gainsight has not updated any of the permission sets in this release.

Issues Addressed

Journey Orchestrator 

  • Date Filter in Email Variant is not Saved in Programs: Previously, in JO Programs, Date filter in email variant is not sticking even after saving the program. This issue is now resolved by not displaying date fields in variant filters because JO do not support date type fields in variants filters.

C360

  • Customer Tab Displaying Incorrectly in Lightning Mode: Previously, there was an issue where the Customer Tab displayed extra space and concealed the scroll bar when viewed in Lightning mode. This issue has now been resolved, and the Customer Tab displays correctly regardless of mode.
  • R360 Layout Widgets not Rendering: R360 Layouts were previously not rendering widgets properly whenever scrolling was turned on. This issue has been resolved, and the R360 Layout is now rendering widgets as expected regardless of if scrolling is enabled.
  • R360 Displaying Inappropriate Results: Previously, there was an issue where the R360 page did not render as expected in Lightning Mode when scrolling was enabled. This issue only occurred when multiple fields had been inserted into the middle of the R360 Layout, which then hid the next available sections. The issue has now been resolved, and the R360 page is displaying correctly regardless of the fields added to its layout.
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