Using Gainsight for Time Tracking: Beyond Adoption Metrics to Efficiency Insights

When most Customer Success organizations think about Gainsight usage data, they focus on adoption metrics: Who is logging in? How often? Are they updating records? While these metrics are important, they only tell part of the story.

What if we could use Gainsight not just to measure whether the CS team is engaging with the platform, but also how much time they’re spending on different types of activities — and whether that time is aligned with strategic priorities?

With the right setup, Gainsight can become a time-tracking engine for CS work, revealing inefficiencies, informing resourcing decisions, and guiding automation investments.

1. Tracking Time Spent on Customer Engagement

Gainsight Timeline is more than a digital diary — it can be a powerful time log.

By assigning estimated time values to different activity types, you can calculate the total engagement time per customer, segment, day, or week. For example:

Since you already know each CSM’s book of business and customer segment (high-touch, medium-touch, low-touch), you can model expected engagement patterns per segment and compare them to reality.

2. Estimating Time Spent on CTAs

CTAs capture more than tasks — they capture workload.

By categorizing CTAs (Risk, Expansion, Lifecycle, Day-to-Day), and assigning an estimated effort per task type, you can calculate the total time spent on each category.

This gives visibility into whether CSMs are spending more time firefighting risks, driving growth, or progressing customers through their lifecycle.

3. Capturing Untracked “Hidden” Time

Not everything shows up in Timeline or CTAs.

To understand manual effort — such as identifying risks that aren’t surfaced by the system — you’ll need qualitative input. Short interviews or surveys can uncover:

• Time spent researching customers

• Time spent identifying risks manually

• Time spent tracking down missing data

This step highlights opportunities for automation, AI-driven alerts, and better integrations.

4. Measuring Time Lost in Tool-Switching

Many CSMs work across multiple tools daily — Gong, Tableau, Salesforce, spreadsheets — to find the data they need.

By mapping where Gainsight isn’t yet the source of truth, and estimating the time spent navigating these other systems, you can quantify productivity loss and make the case for deeper integrations.

Putting It All Together

With these data points, you can build a time allocation model that breaks down:

1. Engagement Time – Day-to-day customer conversations and touchpoints

2. Risk Management Time – Activities tied to risk CTAs or churn prevention

3. Expansion Time – Efforts tied to upsell/cross-sell

4. Lifecycle Time – Activities by stage (Land, Onboard, Adopt, Renew, Churn Save)

Once you have the actual proportions, you can work with CS leadership to set expected benchmarks for time allocation. For example:

This comparison becomes your reality check — showing where the team is over-investing or under-investing time.

Driving Continuous Improvement

Once you establish a baseline, you can track changes over time, especially after introducing process improvements such as:

• Journey Orchestrator automations

• AI-driven risk detection

• Data integrations that reduce tool-switching

• Standardized playbooks for recurring workflows

The goal isn’t to monitor CSMs like a stopwatch, but to free up their time for the highest-value activities.

Final Thought: 

Gainsight’s value isn’t just in tracking what the CS team is doing — it’s in helping you understand if they’re spending their time on the right things. With a structured time tracking approach, you can go from measuring adoption to actively driving efficiency, capacity, and customer impact.