If you didn’t know, Gainsight, throughout its history, has always been a Community company. In fact, we’ve had one since 2015. Initially, it was dubbed the Pulse Community as a way to continue the dialogue between like-minded Customer Success individuals far beyond our annual conference. 

(Are you attending Pulse London? Make sure to attendees make sure to attend the session by Anirban Dutta and Alistair Field as they share real-world takeaways to build your own Community.)

Having led online Community business while at Jive Software, Karl Rumelhart, Chief Product Officer at Gainsight, was the principal exec sponsor to head up Gainsight’s community. 

Rumelhart also partnered with Lila Krutel Meyer, Director of Global Education Services at Gainsight, and Emily McDaniel, SVP of Global Support at Gainsight, to build the foundation of the community. Meyer went on to become the first Community Manager of the GameChanger Community.

When first launched, the mission was clear: expand support and provide product feedback to influence the roadmap. However, a lot has changed since 2015, like the importance of community beyond these use cases. Now, connecting your knowledge base, online events and groups, Product Updates, Product feedback and ideation, and Q&A is possible in one centralized hub. The ability to track all of these interactions inevitably meant the growth of the community’s purpose. 

👂Listen to some of the history being told by Meyer on the inSide Scoop podcast

A growing mission

Seeing how the community’s mission was expanding beyond Product initiatives into a much larger part of the organization that impacted NRR and GRR, it only made sense to move community under Customer Success. 

“When your customers engage in your community, it may be your most genuine viewpoint into what they care about and what they’re struggling with…I feel like community is one of the most honest perspectives, besides usage data, into what your customers are actually doing and what they actually care about,” says Seth Wylie, Director of CS Ops and Admin Community at Gainsight.

Wylie’s first experience with the GameChanger Community started before his time working for Gainsight as a customer and superuser. When he joined the company in 2018 as a part of CS Ops, his goal was to create spaces for individuals to have “A-ha” moments, whether in the community platform, IRL, Slack, or other channels.

To do this, Wylie enlisted the help of Anirban Dutta and Revathi Menon to expand this mission. Currently, Dutta and Menon take on the day-to-day management of the community and have spearheaded the evolution into GameChanger 3.0.

Meet GameChanger Community 3.0

On the final day of Pulse, Kellie Capote, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight, revealed a revamped GameChanger Community to thousands of audience members. If you weren’t there, here’s a look at some new features.

1. Honing in on the ‘Needs’ of a new visitor 

When it came to design, the team took a step back and decided that more isn’t always more. “Sometimes you just want more things happening as opposed to actually thinking about who are the people here and what journey are they on and what do they need?” says Wylie. 

Kenneth Refsgaard, Community Strategy Director at inSided, suggested focusing on simplifying the Community. The team decided to reduce the number of landing areas on the home page from six to three high-level needs. We define a ‘landing area’ as the first navigational items that meet the eye and should act as the main navigation to get a visitor where they need to be.

For a newcomer to the GameChanger Community, the team identified three basic needs:

• They have a question (product or Industry related or anything)
• They are looking for Customer Success content from thought leaders in Customer Success or peers in the Community
• They want to submit a Product request or feature idea – which for the GameChanger Community has always been one of the most used features

2. Encouraging knowledge sharing

The second update was to encourage more industry knowledge or best-practice sharing. Although the GameChanger Community always had an ‘Industry knowledge’ set of categories, there was no easy way to get to the non-product sections, and there were some categories that saw low traffic due to these difficulties in navigation.

“We took this opportunity to consolidate the ‘Industry Knowledge’ section nav options to carve out our renewed ‘Customer Success’ alignment of the design,” says Dutta.

3. Segregating global navigation to retain more on-site traffic

The final adjustment was to help declutter the mega menu. InSided’s Silviu Pop proposed to group two types of navigation links and divide them out based on the use case.

This now allows the team to have enough runway on the mega menu to enable inSided out-of-the-box modules like ‘Product Updates’ in the future.

What’s next for the GameChanger Community?

For Wylie and Dutta, the goal is to continue educating, onboarding, and increasing career opportunities for Gainsight Admins worldwide. 

The team is specifically focused on achieving the following:

• Decrease first response time down by 50%
• Activate newer teams to be skin in the game for supporting daily engagement
• Increase the richness of conversation around our products
• Increase the comprehensiveness of community-led content for CS Ops in general, and especially for Gainsight Admins
• Continuing to build on our Community-led conference engagement experience, All About Pulse
• Most importantly, bringing together all Customer Content, product feedback/ideation, thought leadership efforts in a centralized customer-facing hub providing a seamless customer journey. 

💡 Learn More About Gainsight Nucleus here!

According to Dutta, this is the secret of ‘Durable Growth’ for the Community.

Looking a little further down the road, Wylie says the team is working towards connecting the Community data back to the overarching company-wide goals, which include: getting a 360 overview of customers, having a deeper understanding of every customer interaction, driving deeper product adoption, and more.

“I think one thing we have discovered recently is how much more power you have in measurement and metrics when you’re able to connect the data across multiple systems. When we can see this person who is active in Community is this persona for this customer, and this is their health score, and this is what they’ve been doing in the product recently. The more we can connect all of those data points, the more powerful metrics we can get,” says Wylie.

Check out the GameChanger Community