Case Study: IBM achieves hypergrowth and scalable, consistent Customer Success with Gainsight

IBM Customer Success Operationalizes Hypergrowth Using Gainsight Playbooks

IBM, a global IT services company with over 1,000 Customer Success Managers (CSMs), faced a shift to subscription-based revenue after acquiring Red Hat and moving key products to Red Hat OpenShift. That transition made renewals, net revenue retention and expansion highly dependent on CSM effectiveness, yet more than half of the CSMs were new to IBM. IBM needed to rapidly scale and standardize its Customer Success function, reduce CSM-to-customer ratios, and drive hypergrowth across its Cloud Paks, AI apps and public cloud portfolios.

IBM implemented a nine-week onboarding, a Customer Success University with hands-on labs, and mentorships, then centralized processes and embedded standardized playbooks into Gainsight as the operational system. A dedicated Gainsight team and dashboards let CSMs track milestones, adoption and renewals, ensuring consistent execution worldwide. The effort cut CSM ratios dramatically (to 1:6 for Red Hat, 1:12 for AI apps, 1:10 for public cloud), improved consistency and enabled CSMs to act as trusted advisors, putting IBM on a path to hypergrowth.

IBM

Janine Sneed

Vice President of Customer Success