The News: Customer success platform provider Gainsight announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Northpass. Northpass is a provider of digital customer education platforms in use by almost 350 B2B and B2C companies. The acquisition broadens Gainsight’s product offerings, creating an end-to-end customer success platform that includes not only the new education and training capabilities, but automated email journeys, in-app product engagements, and customer communities. See the full Gainsight Press Release on the acquisition here.
Gainsight Agrees to Acquire Customer Education Platform Northpass
Analyst Take: Gainsight’s announced acquisition of digital customer education platform Northpass promises to extend Gainsight’s platform into the important area of customer education and training. This addition joins other capabilities to round out the Gainsight platform to deliver value across all phases of the customer journey.
Customer education is a critical part of an overall customer experience, and is a way that a brand can extend and deepen its relationship with its current customer base. However, it can also be a time-consuming proposition for customer success managers and often, a less-than-stellar experience for end users who have higher expectations of learning experiences.
Northpass offers a digital platform that allows users to create, tailor, deliver, and measure learning experiences in a way that offers a seamless learning experience at scale. Learning can be accessed on-demand, 24/7. Additionally, the combined capabilities will allow learning to be embedded on websites and apps, allowing for heightened abilities to scale, and checks the CX box of meeting a customer where they are at.
This also means freeing up customer success staff, who are often heavily relied upon for 1:1 training and support, to take on other tasks. There could also be reduced costs as training expenses are potentially lowered.
In a blog post from Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta, Mehta outlines five reasons why customer succcess starts with customer education. I found two of these reasons particularly applicable to the the strategy of providing optimal CX:
- Onboarding is often the first customer experience
- Outcomes drive customer success and customer education
Onboarding, as Mehta points out, is one of the first post-sales steps in the customer jouney, and is of critical importance. No one, whether its B2B or B2C, wants to feel dropped or unsupported when the customer/brand relationship is just starting. Providing customers with a modern, easy, digital learning experience to get up to speed starts the relationship off on the right foot.
The other point – of outcomes being a driver of customer success and customer education – ties into the ability to turn data into action. Being able to track a customer’s journey as they learn about the product, and the outcomes that are achieved, can help provide both the user and customer success teams important insights and the ability to tease out potential relationships between training programs and customer retention, support ticket volume, and annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Gainsight’s current platform already offers many capabilities to build and deep customer relationships as well as provide efficiencies. As an example, its community-building capability has been successfully leveraged to to answer inquiries and build engagement. This addition of digital customer education provides a tool to lessen the burden of customer success managers and offers opportunity to raise the bar for customer education and training.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
