Internal Customer Experience: When to Consolidate Tools with Karl Mosgofian, CIO at Gainsight

Karl Mosgofian on Customer Success Thinking Inside IT, Employee Experience Surveys, and the Collaboration Tool Dilemma

Karl Mosgofian, CIO, Gainsight | Interviewed by Luke Alie of Atolio

Karl Mosgofian is the CIO at Gainsight, whose software helps companies improve customer success, reduce churn, and grow net revenue retention. In this conversation he talks about how Gainsight's customer-first philosophy naturally shapes how IT thinks about internal employees as customers, how longitudinal employee surveys can surface meaningful signals without generating noise, and the difficult truth about collaboration tools: sometimes the people using different tools are actually happier.

Customer Success Thinking Applied Internally: How Gainsight's Culture Shapes IT

Luke Alie (LA):  Gainsight's whole focus is customer success. Does that mindset carry over into how IT operates internally?

Karl Mosgofian (KM):  Gainsight is all about increasing net revenue retention by improving customer success, product experience, and customer experience tools. The core idea is that you need to understand what outcomes your customers are trying to achieve and make them successful. That same mindset does in fact apply internally. I hadn't consciously thought about it framed that way until you asked, but it's a great way to think about it. We also have a very strong human-first culture here. Caring about the employee experience is not lip service. It's something we pay real attention to.

The parallel to customer success tools is real. In customer success you maintain stakeholder alignment, you track relationship health, you make sure you're having check-ins at the right level. IT has understood for a long time that if you aren't staying connected to the right people, you'll get in trouble. You need people doing the real work to tell you whether your tools are working for them. And you need to be aligned with executives at the strategic level too.

Longitudinal Employee Surveys: The Value of Asking the Same Questions Over Time

LA:  How do you measure employee experience in IT?

KM):  One of the things we've been doing for a while is surveying employees consistently, and asking roughly the same questions over a period of years. You get a lot of value from doing it once. You get even more value from tracking trends over time. Are we moving up or down on this? Where are we going? The single most valuable question is probably something like: do you have the tools you need to do your job? Because at the end of the day that's what it's about. I almost don't want to go more granular than that at the survey level.

If people say overall they are happy, that's a signal to not overreact to individual outliers. If people say overall they're frustrated, that's my cue to go deeper: hold focus groups, have conversations, investigate. The survey gives me a compass. It's not the full picture. And it's particularly important to make sure you're hearing from everyone, not just the US office, not just people in the building. If you're a global company, you need those voices from around the world.

The Collaboration Tool Dilemma: When Standardization Hurts the People It's Meant to Help

LA:  If everyone is using the same tools, survey data becomes more comparable. But is standardization always right?

KM):  This is where it gets complicated. My instinct as an IT person is that I want as much commonality as possible, fewer vendors, more integration. But if the reason some people are happy with their tools is precisely because their team gets to use something that works for them, and I come in and rip that away to standardize, I will have shot myself in the foot while thinking I was doing the right thing.

I also think a siloed collaboration tool is an oxymoron. If someone says their team uses a different project management tool and it's fine because they only use it internally, I'd say: that's not how it will stay. You collaborate with other teams. Pretty soon you've got four or five different tools because each team uses a different one depending on who they're working with. There's a real argument for standardizing on collaboration tools. And yet different tools genuinely do work better for different groups. It's a constant tension I don't pretend to have solved.

The middle ground I've found most useful is: commit to broad platforms that everyone uses, like Slack, and connect as much as possible into those. That may be the best you can do. Someone can be happy with their own tool and still participate in the broader system. And in a world where even large companies can't truly stop individuals from spinning up a Trello account, the question isn't whether you can enforce standardization but how you find a happy middle ground.

Advice for CIOs: Treat Employee Experience as an Ongoing Discipline, Not a Project

LA:  Any other advice for CIOs thinking about employee experience?

KM):  Think of it as an agile discipline, not a project with an end. There is no one perfect tool. There is no perfect vendor analysis that solves it forever. You try something, get feedback, iterate. And someone needs to own that process continuously. Think about the carpenter with the bad hammer: that person uses that hammer all day. If an information worker tells you their laptop is frustrating or their video software is broken, you are wise to take that seriously. Especially now, when many companies are reducing office footprint: take some of those savings and invest them in the tools people actually use all day.

LA:  Karl, thank you so much for talking with me today.

KM):  This was a great conversation. You actually made me think about some things differently. I appreciate that.