Gainsight’s innovative platform helps companies of all sizes and industries drive durable growth through customer-led, product-led, and community-led strategies. It offers a powerful set of customer success, product experience, and community engagement solutions that together enable businesses to scale efficiently, create alignment, and put the customer at the heart of innovation—all of which help drive acquisition, increase product adoption, prevent churn, and grow with renewals and expansion.
Challenge:
Prior to BetterCloud, Gainsight’s IT department was a team of three and nearly all of their work, from managing SaaS applications to managing the user lifecycle, was manual. Brandon Wolf, Senior SaaSOps Engineer, craved consistency and long term stability as the company continued to evolve. “The biggest thing is flexibility and staying nimble to grow with the organization,” he said.
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Even if you have a detailed offboarding spreadsheet, if it’s done manually and by a handful of people, corners get cut or things get missed. By nature, you’re going to get distracted by other things that are going on, especially when it’s a small team. It’s really about consistency. To take that off of the human and instead automate it and it just gets done is huge. Not only does it save time, but it also makes you a lot more secure.”
Wolf saw a demo of BetterCloud’s capabilities and thought, “This is what we need to remove a lot of the manual labor.”
The IT department, now a team of 10, supports Gainsight’s 1,400 end users globally. Centralizing the control of several core applications in BetterCloud instead of managing each app in their own individual admin console was a big win. “Having a way to glue those pieces together in ways that they can’t easily do on their own has helped us out significantly,” said Wolf.
Solution:
Offboarding
Gainsight’s IT team saw immediate impact in automating the offboarding process. “Each exit was very time consuming. You have to be methodical. You have to make sure you’re doing everything right and completing certain steps. There is great value in being able to not just cut access to apps, but to automate the migration of data from a departed employee to their manager,” said Wolf.
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BetterCloud has saved us tons and tons of time.”
Before BetterCloud, it would typically take IT about 20 minutes to offboard an employee once the team member had the process down. However, Wolf explained, “A lot of times someone would take shortcuts. For example, if you cut access to an IDaaS platform you think you’re okay because the departed employee can’t get into any apps. But it’s the other apps down the line that you put off, or moving data to a manager, that have an impact on end users who remain with the company.”
Creating an offboarding workflow in BetterCloud surfaced areas of improvement within Gainsight’s process. “There were BetterCloud best practices we weren’t doing. There were certain steps that you miss sometimes because it wasn’t part of your main checklist, like transferring group ownership or secondary calendars. There’s tons of details that BetterCloud recommends because they help other companies set up automations so frequently. There are a lot of things they could streamline for us that we had overlooked,” said Wolf.
With Wolf located in Central time and many employees departing in Pacific time, and typically on a Friday, he would have to wait until after 8:00 PM to start deactivating accounts. “Automation really frees you up in a lot of different ways that are appreciated. You sleep a little better at night knowing that when the offboarding workflow is kicked off, all the things that need to happen have happened,” said Wolf. “I used to spend a lot of time going back through our spreadsheet and double checking to make sure that things that were checked off as completed actually happened. Sometimes you’d find they didn’t because someone wasn’t really paying attention to what they were doing.”
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BetterCloud eliminates a lot of the errors that are bound to happen with humans doing the work.”
Onboarding
IT needed a way to ensure new employees were ready to go on day one. With office locations around the world, it was important to add employees to location specific Slack channels and distribution lists. “BetterCloud automatically puts employees in the correct channels. It keeps tabs on these things,” said Wolf.
Like many organizations, Gainsight still has dedicated offices, but is now remote-first. “We’ve had to figure out how to break things up. How do we reconfigure and refocus? BetterCloud is helping us do that,” Wolf said.
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BetterCloud allows us to be nimble. It helps us in keeping things organized.”
Security
Gainsight values that beyond user lifecycle management, BetterCloud helps IT teams maintain security postures for their organizations. “One of the nice things with BetterCloud is the visibility to see how many files are shared publicly and who owns these files. What we discovered was that a lot of people who had left the company had their files transferred to employees who had no idea they were shared publicly. Being able to recognize the risk, communicate what’s happening, and remediate the issue provides security.”
Wolf recommends IT teaming up with the security department to educate them on BetterCloud’s capability to proactively protect company data so that security teams can also use BetterCloud. Wolf did this with Gainsight’s security team and they immediately recognized the value.
Results:
Centralized management of numerous SaaS applications in one console
Saved 20 minutes per offboard by automating the process
Improved the offboarding process and ensured it was done properly and in its entirety
Eliminated human-error by reducing manual work
Increased security posture by remediating publicly shared files
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Look at your IT stack and if you are using SaaS apps, then BetterCloud is a no-brainer.”
Brandon Wolf, Senior SaaSOps Engineer, Gainsight
Use Cases
Integrations
