Gainsight Customer Communities Reviews & Product Details - Page 17

When I have a question I get helpful answers from all around- product managers, support, customer success. Everyone seems willing to help and stick with me even on tricky issues.

They have a great knowledge base that covers many questions, and are very responsive to other questions.

They've made many major improvements in the platform since we've been with them, most of which we can directly benefit from. They also give access to beta features one-by-one if you ask.

The customer peer group is extremely helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CSMs have a lot of turnover, which leaves us hanging sometimes while they hire/train new ones. We've had 3 (or 4?) in less than 2 years.

With a very technical product and super-specialized user base, I have trouble to find advice and sometimes wonder if CSMs understand our business.

Reporting and integrations has room for improvement. The only integration we use is SalesForce, and it is a bit unreliable, so that we still do a lot of manual input.

Also, some of the new features are work-in-progress for a long time, making their usefulness minimal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best part of Insided is being able to feature different content pieces and top-level articles for our users. It helps us elevate the important stuff in a really easy and simple way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't like that you need to have an account to post and comment. It would be nice to have an easier access point for guests to be able to drop in and give questions or feedback. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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.

[Just to be clear, I come from a previous company that delivered Online Communities for non-profits and associations. I am probably going to be more critical than most.]

I really enjoyed the onboarding process. There were good materials and I especially like the Asana board that was set up for us to visualize the tasks in front of us. I am now leveraging that same onboarding process in my current company. The Admin controls and Admin panel are very intuitive and modern-feeling IMO. It was easy to configure the product and get it set up quickly and deploy quickly. Of course, you have the added bonus of in-app contextual search into the InSided Community to get anwers quickly. Something you can leverage on your own SaaS platform as well. Great feature!

The flexibility to add HTML widgets on certain pages is an important feature and we utilize it often. If you haven't used the InSided data object to target content to specific pages or categories then you haven't lived. It has opened up even more flexibility for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Just a couple of things. One hyper critical and one not so much.

- Driving engagement in your community is paramount as your work people up from registrants to active participants to super users who will often answer questions on your behalf. In order to do so, you have to find ways to prompt early adopters to participate more often. As it stands, you have to rely on users to opt into notifications or hope they start a conversation or reply to one in order to get notifications. There is also no way to send out daily or weekly digests. This is a huge failure, IMO, and I may have made a different decision on which platform I selected if I had known this was a gap. InSided should let Admins auto-subscribe users to notifications and then let people opt-out. For instance, everyone should be auto-subscribed to Product Updates. Based on user attributes, maybe I auto-subscribe them to a specific discussion category. Then allow users determine the frequency and let us style a digest that goes out once a week or daily.

- The analytics seem a little buggy for now but I do appreciate it. Can I get a graph of registrant / user growth. Right now I have to download the data and do some Excel magic to visualize growth. Small thing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Their team. As a whole. From Product to Customer Success, from their HQ's office manager to their Marketing Department, from the CEO to their amazing support team. The people who are part of InSided makes the platform the best around. Everyone is dedicated to making your experience with them the best you can have. Everyone is committed to working with a smile and do their best.

As for the platform itself, the best thing I guess is the reliability, the simplicity in which it works, smoothly and seamless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some features could offer a higher level of customisation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The way the partnership is working, and the focus on delivering specific products for my company.

Implementation with zendesk is nice, and I like the focus on helpcenter right now. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The community page could sometimes be a little to boxed in, its hard to configure it in a way that you really want it.

I have some issues with the implementations with our webpages aswell. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to access software, lovely staff! Simply great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

That sometimes I have to wait before awesome new featured are implemented. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Insided has all the features you would expect from a product knowledge hub and community building perspective. Their ideation module and product updates features, in particular, have been very valuable to connect product owners and users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's not much to dislike. Only the analytics and integrations capabilities could be more powerful. Their team is quite receptive to feedback and ideas, so I expect this will improve soon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being able to view peer community chats on related and even unrelated topics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not as easily navigatable as it could be. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the communication between us and Insided. During the last couple of years, we built a great trustful relationship! The platform is very easy to manage and it has a great design! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We already got the best of customer support, but I feel that we could also get the best of social media making easier to upload videos, play games, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.