Case Study: Automate Internal Success Reporting from Gainsight

Reporting can get pretty tedious, right? In this example, we will look at how Henry, the Director of Customer Success at a 400-person SaaS company, uses Slideform to automate his reporting.

Each quarter, Henry gives a presentation to the executive committee about the state of customer success at their company. The deck includes KPIs on revenue retention, renewals, customer satisfaction, and other metrics.

Henry's Pain Point

Henry explained that creating this deck each quarter takes a lot of time and manual work. Even though many of the KPIs and charts are available in Gainsight, he cannot export it in the format he needs to share with execs. As many Gainsight users have noted, there is no way to export Gainsight data to a customized PPT template. So Henry finds himself taking screenshots of the Gainsight dashboard and copying metrics into the executive report each quarter. This is a slow and often error-prone task.

"I really need to automate my routine reporting so that I can focus on our customer success strategy." - Henry G., Director of Customer Success

The Slideform Solution

Working with Slideform, Henry was able to automate his quarterly success report. He used a three-step process.  

1. Henry exported all the KPIs and metrics from Gainsight to an Excel file. He added some charts and additional calculations in the file and linked the spreadsheet to Slideform as a Data Source.

2. He created a template for his report with placeholder fields for the metrics and charts and entered it to Slideform. Placeholders can be created for data fields, text, images, data tables, and charts.

3. He set up lookups to pull the correct data into each placeholder in the deck.

Here's an example of one slide in his report. Notice that all the placeholders (shown in green) are filled in by the appropriate metrics from the spreadsheet.

 

 Placeholder text is replaced by charts and data in a ppt slide

Reaping the Benefits of Slide Automation

Now, each quarter Henry exports the latest data from Gainsight and Salesforce, enters it to the spreadsheet, and generates a new presentation in Slideform. He is able to download the Powerpoint file to preview it, and add any key takeaways and insights for the quarter.  

Now, instead of spending a full day creating the report, he can complete it in about an hour. This gives him back valuable to strategize about the actions his org can take to improve upsells, minimize churn, and delight their customers.