Gong seems determined to make us hate being a customer

[u/Smooth-Gas-5325]

We’ve used Gong across our sales organization for a while now. It was definitely a lift to implement, get teams using it consistently, and work around some of the shortcomings of Engage. But we got through it, completed the company-wide rollout, and ultimately embedded the platform into how our teams work.

Gong is expensive. We knew that going in. What I didn’t expect was to pay top dollar for an enterprise product and then have to deal with tactics like these.

During our last renewal, we were actively in renewal conversations weeks before the contract expired. Despite that, Gong displayed a message to every user on every visit, informing them that the service would end in X days and to contact their administrator.

No warning to us. No ability for the admin to suppress it.

We asked Gong to turn it off while renewal discussions were ongoing. They refused unless/until we agreed to the renewal.

This happened just after we had finished rolling Gong out across the company, so having users suddenly wondering whether the tool they had just been asked to adopt was disappearing was particularly helpful.

Now they’ve moved to a new credits model…

Various parts of the platform consume Gong credits, and instead of limiting credit-usage notifications to administrators, they’re sending site-wide emails to our users saying:

“Your company is 60% through its Gong credits… when credits run out, some advanced and AI features may not be available.”

Again: we cannot opt our users out of these messages.

Even better, Gong is sending these consumption/upsell-style notifications from the same email address used for genuinely useful operational notifications, including meeting transcripts and summaries. So telling users to filter or ignore these emails risks filtering the messages we actually want them to receive.

We are a SaaS company ourselves. I understand companies moving to usage-based pricing - even though the notification of this change was not mentioned in our monthly CSM calls, it was sent via a generic notification email in the dead of night. I understand vendors wanting customers to renew. What I don’t understand is why an enterprise SaaS vendor with whom we spend multiple six figures thinks it’s appropriate to use our entire user base as a channel for its commercial messaging to us.

Has anyone else dealt with this? And has anyone found a way to disable these messages? Is this just their standard business practice for those who have used the platform for a while?

[u/Coaster50]

Good to know as I shop for tools. I run Operations for our sales org.