Gainsight uses data to help you keep your customers happy

Customer retention is the difference between life and death for subscription businesses.

Gainsight has closed $20 million in funding to help businesses keep their customers.

The company uses data analytics to eradicate churn.

A tremendous amount of time, energy, resources, and technology is funneled into customer acquisition, but businesses that run on recurring revenue have an equally strong need to retain their current customers.

Part of retention is simply have a good product and good customer service. If your product doesn’t suck, people are more likely to stick around. But that is not always the case.

Gainsight integrates with third-party applications to evaluate sales data, usage logs, support tickets, surveys and other sources of customer intelligence. It collects and analyzes this data to shine more light on churn rates.

The system will send early warnings about customers that are at risk of leaving so companies can swoop in and stop them. Gainsight also has tools for identifying happy customers and upsell opportunities.

As the oft-quoted Mark Andreessen famously said, “software is eating the world,” as is the software-as-a-service business model. Businesses of all sizes, but particularly smaller organizations, are increasingly drawn to cloud-based solutions that don’t have a high upfront cost and offer more flexibility.

There is SaaS out there for just about every business operation, from mobile app hosting all the way to expense reports. Gainsight pegs the subscription economy as worth $500 billion.

Furthermore there is a strong trend towards using data to drive business decisions. The cloud creates unprecedented opportunities to learn about customers, and reach out to them at critical moments.

Amidst these shifts, Gainsight saw an opportunity to build “Customer Success Management” tools that extend across multiple sectors of a business.

In addition to the funding, Gainsight also unveiled the latest version of its platform, with integrations with Salesforce, Oracle Sales Cloud, Netsuite, Microsoft, Dynamics CRM, SalesLogix, SAP, Siebel and more.

New features include “Customer360,” which presents comprehensive user profiles with information about usage, contracts, support activity, billing history, etc.. Gainsight also launched predictive analytics tools and an automated list of “to-dos” for customer retention.

Customers include Angie’s List, Castlight Health, Marketo, and Informatica.

Bain Capital Ventures led this round, with participation from existing investor Battery Ventures and new investor Summit Partners, which brings its total capital raised to $30 million.

Gainsight is based in Mountain View, California.