The idea that subscription businesses should have a 360-degree view of customers is not new, but a fresh way to achieve this goal has hit the scenes, according to customer-success startup Gainsight Inc. The company is using its Customer Cloud platform to bring different teams together across an organization to allow businesses to drive sustainable growth by strengthening long-term customer relationships over time.

“One thing we’ve learned leading the customer-success movement is that to be customer-centric is more than a given function or a given team,” said Ganesh Subramanian (pictured), senior director of product marketing at Gainsight. “Customer success managers kind of took the mantle in B2B and started leading the way towards being more customer-centric, but that team on their own cannot do everything.”

Subramanian spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Comcast CX Innovation Day event at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, California. They discussed the new way of looking at building a 360-degree view and the changes coming out in the customer experience market (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Breaking down walls to enable collaboration

Because customer-success managers cannot be solely responsible for leading the customer-centric concept, the solution is to involve different teams in this mission, according to Subramanian. That requires breaking down the walls across teams and making it easier to collaborate to improve the customer experience.

To facilitate this process, Gainsight has launched its Customer Cloud. “We are bringing disparate data together that used to be siloed in functional specific software,” Subramanian said. “We are bringing that into a single source of truth to truly provide an actionable customer 360, one that provides meaning to different teams with the right context, and then drive action off of that.”

One way to use this new approach in practice is to identify the gaps that customers are seeing in a company and reverse-engineer this process to find out how to solve the problems.

In an example of a product that is not easy to use, the solution does not just involve the product team to make the product easier, according to Subramanian. “Services need to onboard customers more effectively; you need documentation so that they can access and understand the key aspects of your product in a more concrete way. So all of that needs to come together,” he said.

The biggest difference between the old 360-degree view and the new is the context and the outcome that the process is trying to deliver, Subramanian added. “At Gainsight what we’re trying to do is use a many-to-many relationship mapping so that if you’re a services team member or a sales member, the view you’re accessing is curated to what you need to actually do,” Subramanian explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Comcast CX Innovation Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Comcast CX Innovation Day event. Neither Comcast Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE