Working Smarter: Customer Success with Gainsight and elvex
Jan 22, 2025
“Personalized software” is one of the most hyped outcomes of the recent AI boom. “Non-technical people creating their own software.” But what does that actually mean?
Here’s a short example.
Results:
Slack bot loaded with entire history of customer information, empowering anyone in the customer success team to instantly get all the context they need
New software workflow implemented without having to pay more, renegotiate contracts, or wait—all within 30 minutes from "I have an idea" to "I have a working solution"
“Can I interact with my customer data via AI?”
Alan Smodic from WordPress VIP has developed an innovative approach to managing customer data using Google Workspace, Gainsight, and elvex.
He sits on the Customer Success team, and they manage relationships with hundreds of customers. As a deep subject matter expert, Alan gets called into customer conversations—but if they’re not one of his regular customers, he has to spend an immense amount of time catching up on background context.
Alan thought that this was a perfect use case for AI: AI could read the entire history of interactions with the customer, which is stored in Gainsight, and give him the context he needed to be effective.
Gainsight recently introduced AI features designed to enhance interaction with customer data. But these features are gated behind a major contract upsell, and Alan has heard they're not very compelling. Alan needed solutions—today—and he’s on a big team. Getting the buy-in to renegotiate the large contract would take time he doesn’t have.
Instead of waiting for months, solving in minutes
So what did he do? Alan leveraged the existing capabilities of Google Workspace, Gainsight, and elvex to solve his problem today, without paying another cent.
Here’s how he did it:
1. Automated Email Notifications: Gainsight sends an email each time a new activity is logged for a customer, containing all the details of the interaction. This is the source of information for this workflow.
2. Google Apps Script for Data Extraction: Alan asked elvex to write a Google Apps Script that extracts the content of these emails, and organizes it into spreadsheets, updating every hour. This process is straightforward and does not require coding expertise. See here for a deeper dive.
3. Dedicated Spreadsheets for Each Customer: Each customer has a dedicated spreadsheet, ensuring organized and accessible data.
4. Integration with elvex Assistant: Alan connected these spreadsheets to an elvex assistant, named "Gainsight Info." This assistant can answer queries such as, “Summarize the last two months of interactions for this customer,” providing immediate access to relevant information without sifting through emails or navigating Gainsight.
5. Bringing it to Slack: Alan connected the elvex assistant to his team’s Slack channels, so they can quickly and intelligently access all the customer information they need to solve their enterprise customer’s problems.
What does this mean for the AI features of point solutions?
Every SaaS app in the industry has released AI features in the last year. That's fine and great if you're thinking about one solution at a time—but businesses have subscriptions to dozens if not hundreds of SaaS tools. Many of these new features are gated behind new contracts, like Gainsight's.
But many champions like Alan are realizing they don't need to add on the pricey subscriptions of dozens of new SaaS features. They can just use a horizontal platform like elvex to provide the AI for them, wherever they need it.
The entire process took only 30 minutes to set up, requiring no additional contracts or expenses. With tools like elvex, your employees can create solutions to your own problems, operating within the confines of your already-approved enterprise technology set. Alan could move quickly and confidently because he was operating behind the enterprise firewalls of Google Workspace, Gainsight, and elvex.
2025 is truly the year of the “Idea Guy,” as anyone and everyone can immediately create solutions to the problems they encounter.