How Autodesk Uses Guru to Drive Adoption of Gainsight and Slack
Eraj Siddiqui, Director of Customer Success Practice at Autodesk, shares how his team used Guru to create a virtuous adoption cycle among internal tools by connecting their usage and success. Read how Autodesk achieved a 64% increase in Gainsight adoptio
Eraj is director of customer success practice at Autodesk and a guest blogger for Guru. He first shared this Guru success story on Medium.
My team at Autodesk recently implemented Guru in an effort to streamline our knowledge processes and drive adoption of three internal systems. By interconnecting their usage and success, we successfully created a virtuous adoption cycle between Guru, Gainsight, and Slack. Here’s how we did it:
Identifying an adoption problem
Like many large organizations, we at Autodesk have a proliferation of communication and collaboration tools that our revenue team uses to deliver positive customer experiences, but fragmentation between those tools had led to low adoption of each.
Most customer success leaders are familiar with the difficulties of implementing a new system: not necessarily the technical implementation itself, but in gaining adoption. According to a study by MIT Sloan, 63% of respondents said the pace of technological change in their workplaces is too slow, primarily due to a “lack of urgency” and poor communication about the strategic benefits of new tools.
To tackle our adoption challenge, we approached the situation in the same way we as customer success practitioners encourage customer adoption: by showing them where the product easily integrates into their existing workflows. We applied that same customer success principle to our internal users and demonstrated how Gainsight, Slack, and Guru could be used in conjunction within reps’ day-to-day processes.
Uniting a fragmented tech stack
Autodesk had implemented Gainsight for our customer success teams to deliver productivity gains: our customer success managers (CSMs), customer support, and consulting teams were all given access to Gainsight. Our CSMs and support staff also had access to Slack, which is where they primarily tend to collaborate. We use these communication and collaboration tools to contribute to our end user experience.
However, because our internal knowledge and processes lived across Gainsight and Slack – and because we didn’t have well-defined integrations or links to connect and govern those tools – we had trouble driving adoption of either solution. To fix that, we implemented Guru and created a knowledge network to promote the adoption of Gainsight, Slack, and Guru itself by interconnecting their usage and success.
The first step was to create a collection of new training and enablement knowledge in Guru, followed by migrating and linking through to other relevant content from our distributed systems. Guru's intelligent content editor and easy migration features allowed us to connect knowledge from several different sources, making the entire body of knowledge easy to search and deliver.
After building a critical knowledge mass in Guru within a few weeks, we created a virtuous adoption cycle. The cycle looks like this:
Gainsight is a required system for Autodesk customer success practitioners, whether they are in customer success management, support, or consulting.
For Gainsight support, users are directed to a dedicated Slack channel that our team monitors and updates consistently.
This helps create a community in Slack dedicated to Gainsight, and Slack thereby directly supports Gainsight adoption.
As end users are posing questions or raising issues in Slack, our team uses the Guru Slack bot to respond with Guru Cards to answer frequently asked questions, proliferating re-usable content, training, and instructions.
Guru Cards thereby support Slack adoption in distributing information about Gainsight.
Another way to think about this is that the knowledge lives in Guru and we use Slack to propagate it to the right people at the right time, which in turn supports Gainsight usage. End users can also easily search Guru directly for knowledge.
Finding success with Guru, Slack, and Gainsight
As users have become accustomed to these three connected systems, the level of self-service at Autodesk has allowed our small team to scale system rollout to hundreds of end users, and has enabled power users and champions to step forward and help further in driving adoption and enablement.
We are seeing higher adoption rates, week on week, for Guru, Slack, and Gainsight: 86% of first wave users are active in Guru, 4X increase in Slack channel members, and 64% increase in Gainsight weekly active users.
The three interconnected systems are in tandem propagating adoption across the others, creating content and value in a technology stack that we prefer and are invested in.
To develop virtuous adoption cycles in your organization, I recommend integrating key systems and centering around best practices for each. Through these shared best practices, you can develop an internal culture of success where innovation and collaboration can thrive and grow, resulting in success for your end customers.
See Eraj and other CX leaders share great stories like this at Guru’s upcoming conference, Empower 2019!
Eraj is director of customer success practice at Autodesk and a guest blogger for Guru. He first shared this Guru success story on Medium.
My team at Autodesk recently implemented Guru in an effort to streamline our knowledge processes and drive adoption of three internal systems. By interconnecting their usage and success, we successfully created a virtuous adoption cycle between Guru, Gainsight, and Slack. Here’s how we did it:
Identifying an adoption problem
Like many large organizations, we at Autodesk have a proliferation of communication and collaboration tools that our revenue team uses to deliver positive customer experiences, but fragmentation between those tools had led to low adoption of each.
Most customer success leaders are familiar with the difficulties of implementing a new system: not necessarily the technical implementation itself, but in gaining adoption. According to a study by MIT Sloan, 63% of respondents said the pace of technological change in their workplaces is too slow, primarily due to a “lack of urgency” and poor communication about the strategic benefits of new tools.
To tackle our adoption challenge, we approached the situation in the same way we as customer success practitioners encourage customer adoption: by showing them where the product easily integrates into their existing workflows. We applied that same customer success principle to our internal users and demonstrated how Gainsight, Slack, and Guru could be used in conjunction within reps’ day-to-day processes.
Uniting a fragmented tech stack
Autodesk had implemented Gainsight for our customer success teams to deliver productivity gains: our customer success managers (CSMs), customer support, and consulting teams were all given access to Gainsight. Our CSMs and support staff also had access to Slack, which is where they primarily tend to collaborate. We use these communication and collaboration tools to contribute to our end user experience.
However, because our internal knowledge and processes lived across Gainsight and Slack – and because we didn’t have well-defined integrations or links to connect and govern those tools – we had trouble driving adoption of either solution. To fix that, we implemented Guru and created a knowledge network to promote the adoption of Gainsight, Slack, and Guru itself by interconnecting their usage and success.
The first step was to create a collection of new training and enablement knowledge in Guru, followed by migrating and linking through to other relevant content from our distributed systems. Guru's intelligent content editor and easy migration features allowed us to connect knowledge from several different sources, making the entire body of knowledge easy to search and deliver.
After building a critical knowledge mass in Guru within a few weeks, we created a virtuous adoption cycle. The cycle looks like this:
Gainsight is a required system for Autodesk customer success practitioners, whether they are in customer success management, support, or consulting.
For Gainsight support, users are directed to a dedicated Slack channel that our team monitors and updates consistently.
This helps create a community in Slack dedicated to Gainsight, and Slack thereby directly supports Gainsight adoption.
As end users are posing questions or raising issues in Slack, our team uses the Guru Slack bot to respond with Guru Cards to answer frequently asked questions, proliferating re-usable content, training, and instructions.
Guru Cards thereby support Slack adoption in distributing information about Gainsight.
Another way to think about this is that the knowledge lives in Guru and we use Slack to propagate it to the right people at the right time, which in turn supports Gainsight usage. End users can also easily search Guru directly for knowledge.
Finding success with Guru, Slack, and Gainsight
As users have become accustomed to these three connected systems, the level of self-service at Autodesk has allowed our small team to scale system rollout to hundreds of end users, and has enabled power users and champions to step forward and help further in driving adoption and enablement.
We are seeing higher adoption rates, week on week, for Guru, Slack, and Gainsight: 86% of first wave users are active in Guru, 4X increase in Slack channel members, and 64% increase in Gainsight weekly active users.
The three interconnected systems are in tandem propagating adoption across the others, creating content and value in a technology stack that we prefer and are invested in.
To develop virtuous adoption cycles in your organization, I recommend integrating key systems and centering around best practices for each. Through these shared best practices, you can develop an internal culture of success where innovation and collaboration can thrive and grow, resulting in success for your end customers.
See Eraj and other CX leaders share great stories like this at Guru’s upcoming conference, Empower 2019!
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