Gainsight, the former JBara Software, has created a big data platform that focuses on customer retention and reducing churn instead of customer acquisition. Gainsight integrates with Salesforce and it uses sales data, surveys, support tickets, usage logs and other sources of customer intelligence to turn customer retention into an automated, data-driven process.
The products that have been developed by Gainsight enable companies to better measure how their products are used or adopted in order to improve customer services by proactively identify up-sell opportunities, detect customers that are likely to leave and asses the impact of churn on the revenue and customer lifetime value.
Gainsight is one of the few companies that pro-actively focuses on customer retention, which is a strong move knowing that retaining a customer is a lot cheaper than acquiring a new customer. So, although there are a lot of companies that focus on customer acquisition, Gainsight takes a different turn and focuses on customer success instead. The platform centralizes all available data into one single environment. Using the massive amounts of data generally available about existing customers, future customer behaviour can be predicted. The Software-as-a-Service uses metrics like when a customer suddenly pays late and/or leaves a lot of negative comments to identify customers and warn managers via an alert about what is happening. On the other hand, customers that increase their usage or always pay on time can be identified as possible up-selling opportunities. The options available however, within the platform, are quite substantial, which could require quite some time before a user fully understands all possibilities.
The data in the platform is made available through all levels of an organisation, from the executive level to product managers. This helps any organisation to make a more informed decision. Streamlining all available data within an organisation, from different sources, generally can range from a few days to a few weeks. In that period, data from existing tools such as CRM programs, helpdesk programs and other marketing software are integrated in the Gainsight platform.
In April 2013, they received $9 million in funding from Battery ventures. Gainsight does not have any patents at this moment nor did they, yet, won any awards. Their customer base is not extremely large at the moment, but as they mentioned in the press release, Gainsight “will use the funds to accelerate product development and drive its aggressive go-to-market strategy”, so this could change in the future. We therefore give Gainsight a 5 bits rating.
