How the Customer Success Team at Momentive used Gong to shape high-quality customer conversations

Momentive, the parent company of products that include SurveyMonkey, needed to evolve quickly due to the pandemic. When its global team went remote, the initial shock of a distributed workforce caused variability in the customer experience. When Momentive’s sales team — who were already Gong users — asked the Customer Success team to use Gong, several insights came into view. 

“After listening to Gong calls, we realized that we could improve the consistency in how our customer-facing roles executed calls,” says Kim Nguyen, Enablement Manager of the Customer Success team. “We needed to explicitly state how we wanted our team to interact with customers and how we expected our managers to support frontline reps.” Knowing that customer experience was one of Momentive’s clear pathways to business health, Kim and her team took this task seriously. 

Kim manages the learning experience and program for the customer-facing roles on Momentive’s Customer Success team. She had noticed that when managers started listening to the calls customer success managers made from home, they had a harder time helping those reps prepare for and execute calls (as opposed to when everyone was in the office). 

“With this realization,” says Kim, “the High-Quality Customer Conversation (HQCC) Program was born.” Momentive defines HQCCs as “live and outcome-driven conversations with customers, where Momentive acts as a trusted partner through call standards, elevating dialogue, and asking thoughtful questions to build relationships and achieve shared outcomes.” 

Those outcomes eventually brought their customer experience to new heights. That was the beginning of what they call their Gong journey.

With the HQCC concept established, the next step was creating a series of clear expectations for CSMs that aligned them around shared business goals. First, says Kim, came the foundational elements that make up a high-quality call:

Prepare in advance: Review the account, including previous discussions, before a call.
Be professional: Arrive at all calls early, with your camera turned on and a non-distracting background.
Control the call from beginning to end: Leverage contextual information you learned from past interactions to keep every agent aligned and one step ahead of the customer on calls.
Follow up: Log your entry and send a follow-up note to the customer in a timely manner.

Showing up to calls with Gong data about previous conversations made it easier to strengthen existing customer relationships, rather than starting fresh on each call. As much as that made employees’ lives easier, the impact it had on customers was clear… 

With the elements of high-quality calls clearly outlined and new customer care protocols established, managers could regularly evaluate staff and help them stay on track. “The call elements we outlined are tricky to identify, so we focus the majority of our training on managers,” says Kim. 

In order to do that, the Customer Success team set Gong-based expectations for its sales teams. “Weekly, every customer-facing role sends one recorded Gong call to their manager for review,” says Kim. “In turn, managers listen to that call, complete one Gong scorecard per team member, and provide feedback in a one-on-one.”

Being able to listen to recorded calls alongside a clear list of expectations makes one-on-one training sessions more focused, which saves managers and frontline staff time. Weekly call listening sessions amongst leadership also helped confirm the benefits of Gong’s recorded and AI-analyzed calls. 

“Every week, one manager comes in and brings two or three snippets from a call to share,” says Kim. “Leaders bounce around ideas about coaching, and managers receive guidance from those with more experience.” With these tools in place, training and evaluation became seamlessly integrated.

Most importantly, with every call they evaluated, managers and frontline staff gained knowledge that helped them better serve their clients. That made each customer call more relevant and focused than ever before.

Managers and staff also came to rely on a specialized Gong scorecard. Kim says it’s “the most scalable way for managers to listen for the same competencies across customer calls and give structure to their one-on-one coaching sessions.” 

Scorecard feedback provides clear instructions for improvement and levels the playing field between employees, as everyone is evaluated on the same, clear features. “It’s also a great way to measure team progress to see if everyone’s implementing managerial feedback,” says Kim. 

The Gong scorecard allows managers to assess an employee’s performance across weeks, months, or quarters, as well as in specific areas. That makes it easy to track progress and focus their feedback so it’s highly effective in shaping customer interactions. 

By using Gong to create the HQCC program, Momentive identified opportunities for growth and created a more cohesive, collaborative work environment. Given that the company’s mantra is “Feedback is fuel,” it’s no wonder that Gong’s data was a welcome propellant. 

“We believe that HQCCs are critical to our business and our team members because they help us provide our customers with a consistent and valuable experience,” says Kim. 

“It all started with our Gong journey.” Beyond the coaching support and strengthened internal processes, Gong’s data-backed offerings made Momentive a stronger partner to their customers. Calls aren’t just another faceless encounter, rather, they are now valuable, evolving, mutual relationship-builders. That’s the kind of growth everyone wants to see.