How to pull feature requests from CS and renewal calls in Gong, not just sales calls
By default, probably not the same way. Most Gong setups get their Smart Trackers, categories, and scorecards built the week the sales team turns Gong on, and CS and renewal calls tend to arrive later, sometimes into a different Gong workspace entirely, sometimes into the same one but outside every workflow the sales team already configured. Gong itself is built to record across the whole customer relationship. Its own customer success page talks about tracking value "from onboarding to expansion" and helping teams "win every renewal and expansion opportunity," which is exactly why so many teams assume the call gets treated the same regardless of when in the relationship it happens. The recording does. The signal extraction usually doesn't, and the reason is specific enough to check in about ten minutes.
There are two separate ways this goes wrong, and they call for different fixes.
Reason one: the call never entered the same workspace
Gong's Smart Trackers are workspace-scoped, not account-wide. Gong's own documentation is direct about it: "Trackers are defined and used within a specific workspace; if your company uses multiple workspaces, set up relevant trackers in each one." If your CS or renewals team was added to Gong under a separate workspace than sales, whether that happened for licensing reasons, team structure, or just because CS onboarded to the tool a year later, the "feature request" tracker sales built never got copied over. Every mention on every CS or renewal call in that workspace has been sitting there unscanned since day one, not because the tracker is bad at its job, but because it was never told that workspace exists.
This is worth checking first because it's binary. Either your CS/renewal calls live in the same workspace as the trackers you already trust, in which case reason two below is where to look, or they don't, in which case nothing in that workspace has been tracked at all until you set it up there directly.
Reason two: even in the same workspace, nothing routes attention to it
If CS and renewal calls do share a workspace with sales, the trackers technically do scan them. What's missing is anything that tells a human to look. Two Gong features carry most of that attention-routing job, and both default to a sales-shaped setup:
Call categories, which group calls for reporting, are built manually and usually from fields that already exist for sales: Gong's own guidance says to "create categories based on any fields that are available in the Search page. For example, CRM opportunity stages, specific teams, and more." A category tree built around Discovery, Demo, and Negotiation has nowhere for a renewal or onboarding call to land cleanly, so it either gets miscategorized or left out of the count entirely.
Scorecards are more explicit about it. Setting one up requires you to "add filter to set the types of calls you want this scorecard to be available for," and Gong ships six built-in templates to start from, one of which is literally named "Customer success and renewals," sitting alongside sales-focused ones like "Discovery and qualification" and "Demo and value selling." Gong treats CS and renewal calls as a separate setup step, not an extension of the sales scorecard. Most teams turn on the sales templates when they adopt Gong and never come back to add the CS one, which means nobody's scorecard review ever touches those calls, and scorecard review is where a lot of teams' "flag this for product" habit actually lives.
“we need SSO before rollout”
“any update on single sign-on?”
“SSO came up twice on this call”
Linear issue, quotes attached
insight report in NotionHow Dries found four months of renewal calls nobody had reviewed
Dries Coetzee runs renewals at Bidline, a bid-estimating platform for commercial contractors. Sales at Bidline had been on Gong for two years, with a "feature-request" Smart Tracker and a Discovery-and-Demo scorecard pair that the sales ops lead swore by. Dries's three-person renewals team got Gong access eight months ago, added to the same workspace as sales, but nobody set them up with anything beyond the ability to record and play back their own calls.
A contractor's ops manager mentioned, twice, on renewal calls four months apart, that Bidline's bid templates couldn't clone last year's line items into a new proposal. Dries remembered the second mention and went looking for the first.
Dries: I know [Customer] brought this up before, back around their last renewal. Does the feature-request tracker have it?
Sales ops lead: Should, if it was said clearly. Let me check... yeah, zero hits on your calls. It's only ever pulled from the sales workspace stats page, I never thought to check renewals.
Dries: So the tracker's running, it's just never been looking at us.
The tracker had, in fact, been scanning Dries's calls the whole time, since renewals shared the sales workspace. What had never happened was anyone building a category or a report that separated renewal-call tracker hits from sales-call ones, so the stats page the sales ops lead checked every week simply never surfaced them. The first mention had been sitting in a searchable transcript for four months, technically catchable, actually invisible.
Closing the gap yourself, this week
Three checks, in order, cover most of what's missing:
- Confirm CS and renewal calls are in the same workspace as your trackers. If they're not, set up the trackers there directly; Gong won't copy them over for you.
- Add a call category for post-sale calls, built off whatever field distinguishes them in your CRM (opportunity type, deal stage, or a manually tagged team field), so a stats view can filter to just those calls the same way sales already filters to theirs.
- Turn on the "Customer success and renewals" scorecard template (or build an equivalent) so those calls get reviewed on a schedule instead of only when someone happens to remember to check them, the way Dries did four months late.
None of this requires new tooling. It requires someone to notice the sales-first default and go build the second half of the same setup.
Where the native fix stops working
Doing all three closes the visibility gap inside Gong. It doesn't close the counting gap. Once CS and renewal calls are properly tracked and reviewed, you still have a request that might show up as a tracker hit on a renewal call, a support ticket from the same account two weeks earlier, and a Slack message from the account manager, with nothing connecting the three into "one account asked three times." You've also just created a second setup to maintain: every new workspace, every new team added to Gong, every scorecard template needs the same audit repeated, indefinitely.
Past a handful of teams and channels, that's the point where we'd bring up Modem. It reads the transcript from your connected Gong workspace regardless of which workspace, category, or scorecard the call happened to fall under, alongside Slack, support tickets, and email, and treats every mention of a request as one more data point on a running, counted topic rather than a tracker hit that lives or dies by which stats page someone remembered to check. A request mentioned on a renewal call and a support ticket becomes one topic with both quotes attached, filed as a Linear or Jira issue with the requester list riding along. We build Modem, so weigh that against the cost of the workspace-by-workspace audit above, which is genuinely free and worth doing regardless.
Two related guides worth reading: why Gong's Smart Trackers miss feature requests, which covers the separate matching-quality and backfill issues that affect trackers even when the workspace and category setup is right, and how to search every Gong call for a feature request, not just one, for what Ask Anything can and can't do once you're trying to spot-check calls by hand.
The smallest version you can start this week
Pull up your Gong admin settings, check whether CS and renewal calls sit in the same workspace as your sales trackers, and if they do, add one category that isolates them and turn on the customer-success scorecard template. That alone would have shown Dries the first mention four months earlier than the second one forced the question.
