There's a lot to love about inSided as a product and as a company. Here are a few areas where I think inSided really shines:
Implementation & Administration
First and foremost, inSided is easy to set up and use. We were able to soft-launch only 6 weeks from our project kick-off, followed by a full launch almost exactly one month later. Throughout the project, inSided was incredibly responsive and there to help us every step of the way. The project was well-managed and well-organized, with a detailed project plan tracked in Asana that allowed our organizations to easily collaborate on tasks at hand and to share/access necessary resources. The system was easy to configure, and their OOTB integrations with Salesforce + Zendesk literally only took a matter of minutes for us to activate (if you ignore the additional custom work required on our end for the SFDC integration – more on that later).
Platform Functionality
Take a look at any community built on inSided, and you'll immediately recognize that the platform is built with the end-user in mind. The layout is clean and intuitive, and we hear from members all the time that our community is simply a joy to use. This is a community platform designed by individuals who understand the building blocks of successful communities and built to effectively support those building blocks. Discussion Categories, Knowledge Base Categories, Groups, Product Updates, Events, Ideas, Questions, Conversations, a feature-rich text editor for posts, User Profiles, Gamification, and a powerful WYSIWYG editor that controls page layout & phraseology are all features that allow the platform to scale incredibly efficiently. inSided's robust gamification structure allows you to custom-design your community to incentivize the right type of member behavior for your use case. They also have a lot of great OOTB widgets for their customizable pages that make it really easy to add value for your members and share dynamic content that keeps them coming back.
Reporting
I'd describe inSided's reporting functionality as simple yet effective. I'd like to see more options to filter and organize data, and for those options to be more consistent across different types of content (more to come on that later), but inSided makes it really easy to glean powerful insights from your members' engagement in your community, accompanied by some welcome visuals that are primed for quick screenshots to dump into reports for executives. They've definitely taken a "measure what matters" approach, not allowing you to report on EVERYTHING, but ensuring that what you can report on is what's most important. inSided has built a solid foundation for their reporting and I hope to see progress on this front moving forward.
Ongoing Support/Success Services
Our relationship with inSided can no doubt be described as a partnership. We feel heard and supported and have had no issues getting on the phone with the right people from inSided to help us with our problems. As a growing organization, it seems that their support resources/processes are catching up with the companies growth, but their support team is responsive and attentive to our needs. They drink their own champagne well, and their Inspired community is an awesome resource for me as a customer, though I wish they had more structured "formal" training on their product during onboarding. They set the standard for managing customer expectations when it comes to product ideas and innovation. They're incredibly active in their community and frequently communicate on issues/updates to the product in their community. They've been a huge help for us as we look to improve this same process for our own customers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Most of my dislikes about inSided come from the product itself, and most likely stem from them being a younger/smaller player in the space compared to their competition. There are a few areas of the product that I'd like to see improved sooner rather than later.
Search
While it's really helpful that they have an OOTB integration with Zendesk to surface Zendesk Guide content in our community search, I'd like to see inSided's search results add more value. The search algorithms seem to often leave out too many words or not focus on the right content within posts. It's not uncommon to search for an exact phrase that exists in the title or description of a post, only to have that post ranked 4th or 5th on the results page. Likewise, it's difficult for the user to understand why certain results populate over others. It'd be great for inSided to share what specifically matched in each recommended result compared to what was searched. This could help the learner more quickly find what they're looking for. The same feedback goes for the recommended content when users create a post or begin their search. Lastly, it's hard to tell when content is being recommended for it's title/description vs. text that is in the comments. It'd be great to see results segmenting by initial post vs. comments. inSided has thought of all of the right things in the design of their Search, they just need to improve the logic & algorithms used to populate the right results.
Salesforce Integration
Ahh SFDC integrations... They always bring about some serious headaches. The basic structure of inSided's integration makes a lot of sense, but I'm adding this one to the dislikes to again point out the room for improvement. They have a simple data model at the moment that consists of Community Members and Community Member Activities. While this data model supports much of the reporting organizations might need, it's fairly tedious to build exactly what you're looking for in Reports & Dashboards. Some fields are free text rather than picklists, which makes filtering/segmenting unintuitive. Additionally, some fields like Idea Status and tags aren't sent back to SFDC. Lastly, the integration is handled by scheduled batches, meaning records are created in batches and are never updated if/when info changes. This has created some obstacles when it comes to reporting on Ideas that may need to be addressed via custom builds (which, to inSided's credit, they fully support via Zapier). All-in-all, SFDC integrations are always tricky. I'm thankful that inSided has an integration, and there are a lot of basic insights like # of members, # of accounts, and # of specific activities per member & per account that we can easily and accurately report on. It's when you start to dig deeper that a few of the limitations start to become apparent. In my experience, that's almost always the case with these integrations, so it's something I'm happy to live with for now.
Groups
Groups are noticeably a newer feature in inSided. Private groups are difficult to manage since members have to request to join and there's no OOTB notification to notify admins of pending requests. Content in Public groups will display in the "recently active" feed for individuals who aren't a part of the group but won't let them reply until they join the group. There's no explanation of this limitation on the posts, which confuses members, leading to frequent reports of bugs in the platform. Lastly, there's a lack of custom permissions available to delegate to Community Managers/Moderators when it comes to Groups. With that said, Groups have enabled us to create multiple new-product beta groups, transforming the way we interact with our customers for new products and is opening the door for us to build "micro-communities" within our community.
User Profile Fields for Segmentation
inSided supports User Profile Fields, which I love. However, you can't easily use the values of these User Profile Fields to segment member experiences within the UI. Instead, you have to use technical workarounds to update Custom Roles based on certain User Profile Field values. This is a small issue since there's technically to accomplish what we need, but I'd love to see a native function within the UI that supports segmenting member experiences based on info they share with us (and/or that we bring over from Salesforce). Outside of this limitation, the User Profile Fields and Custom Roles are both super impactful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
230 out of 231 Total Reviews for Gainsight Customer Communities
Overall Review Sentiment for Gainsight Customer Communities
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The most helpful thing about Gainsight Customer Communities is being able to connect with customers and let them express their opinions on certain topics. This will let the customer know it's easy to use when reaching out to a customer representative about anything they want to ask. One of the best upsides would be to create brand loyalty with the customers for them to be using the platform itself frequently. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Least helpful thing would most likely be that most customers which are not Generation Z or Millenials would find a bit more difficult for them to enter these communities as of easy access and integration wise as other teenagers or people who are used to using technology. I believe that implementing a better resource and access for those who don't know about the website much will be something useful to use and have, with that Customer support is able to provide more information and help with that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The two strongest features of Gainsight CC are their ease of use (both for customers and team) and integrations. These features made picking Gainsight CC an easy choice for my team. We were able to implement the platform quickly and get to work supporting our customers much faster than anticipated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Permissions and architecture could use a lot of work in Gainsight CC. Permissions tend to be all or nothing and architecture is predominantly single level. For example, we'd like to be able to have an ideation area for employees and another ideation area for customers. Due to both permissioning and architecture, we can't. It's either-or, and can't be both. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It is super easy to set up also in your company CI and the best of all you don't need coding skills.
My favourite tools are:
- Highlighting different topics in different styles.
- Topics shown automatically on the homepage according to preselected criteria.
- Group Management is very simple
- Sending an E-Mail Campaign to a specific member segment who fulfill certain criteria is so easy and the KPIs are immediately visible and great Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The events area, we'd like to do community led events and event management with sending messages to participants, followups etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Onboarding new customers became more efficient as they could find answers from existing customer discussions. This reduced repetitive questions to our support team by about 30% Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The search functionality is basic and often misses relevant content. Users have to try multiple keyword variations to find what they need, which defeats the purpose of self-service Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Easy to customize and set up. Administration controls are easy to use and you can customize with little to no complex code. Analytics and exports are excellent. Feature-rich with moderation tools, custom pages, email campaigns, and FederatedSearch, unifying multiple information silos into a single search box. Customer Support and Customer Success has been excellent as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It's a growing platform in active developement, there isn't much to dislike that won't be addressed soon. Particularly with more analytics on the way! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Gainsight Customer Communities is a robust, dynamic platform that brings customers, Product, and Support/CS closer together.The interface is intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy for both customers and administrators to navigate.
The platform is highly customizable and the great variety of integrations to other tools is crucial for us in making sure data flows smoothly across systems and helps us maintain a unified view of the customer journey.
Thourough onboarding and ongoing support with a dedicated CSM leaves you with a sense of security for both daily operations and long-term success Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I would love to see analytics expanded to be able to drill down into more elements of the platform. E.g. the ability to track activity for specific groups.
Although significant progress has recently been made in localization, there is still room for improvement - which should be on the way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like having everything in just one platform.Everything is more organized and makes my work easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It needs more analytics but i am sure they will be implemented very soon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
As a telco company in Luxembourg, we need to work in 3 languages. The FAQ feature of Gainsight CC has been really good for that. Whether it’s for tutorials, product information, or general updates, we have been able to wirte about all the topics we need to.
Furthemore, the support team and our customer success manager have been super helpful whenever we needed assistance. Their response time and expertise have made a huge difference in our experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While the tool is easy to use, the text editor could have some upgrades, particularly in how it handles embedding content. Finishing a full article can sometimes be difficult, especially when embedding pictures, icons, and videos. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It supports my company's goals - Gainsight CC is sympathetic to a SAAS community's objectives and goals: their list of SAAS customers using their product illustrates this.
From the beginning, they were able to easily shape the success plan for my new community and immediately understood the priorities and mission that we were aiming to achieve.
The integration with Salesforce has also made life easier for us so we can maintain our knowledge base there.
I've had an excellent CSM, Vishwas Katti, working with me too, and Hugo in Support are both a credit to the team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Visibility of who is who in the community. It doesn't include a public directory. One of our aims is for our customes to build contacts, network with each other in order to share best practice and support each other. We have numerous customer segments and connecting people to people easily would make our community more effective.
Multi-lingual functionality was a highly anticipated recent development but sadly doesn't quite deliver the minimum requirement from a UX perspective. Something that is still in dev though so I will keep my eye out for that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We needed a platform that was flexible and looked good without custom coding. Gainsight Digital Hub has proven to be a great option for our 1st gen community and has scaled seamlessly with us as we enter the next era of our 2nd gen community. Integration to Salesforce was a breeze. Implementation was phenomenal and very well supported on the Gainsight side.
I have been really pleased that we've been able to scale on the platform - particuarly the ease with which we've been able to roll out a moderation infrastructure in partnership with our CX team. We have over 10 users across the business leveraging the platform on a daily basis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Permissioning for fully-private communities isn't straightforward but not a dealbreaker. If you are building a hybrid or fully public community, this is a non-issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
