Question

Customer-only hierarchy


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I love the hierarchy added to the latest release. it's great when you have customers with multiple accounts due to a large and complex relationship. The challenge I'm finding now is that we have a very ambitious internet research team and as such, have a ton of accounts in some hierarchies. For example, one has over 2000 accounts in their hierarchy, but only a handful are customers. This is for a variety of reasons but I'm wondering if anyone has explored better ways to display customer only accounts.



My first thought is that if Gainsight can't do it, how do I implement it? Is a formula field the best option to pull if someone is a Gainsight customer and then use that as a look up?

10 replies

Userlevel 6
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Hi Brandon,



Totally get the concern with showing all accounts when barely a handful are relevant in the hierarchy. One way to accomplish this with existing functionality would be to create a custom hierarchy in Salesforce (by creating a custom account lookup field) that captures the right accounts to manage. You could then select this custom field in step #1 under Admin --> Account Hierarchy. It's not uncommon to have multiple hierarchies set up in Salesforce (business vs. billing, for example), and is the main reason why step #1 is configurable.



That said, we will explore providing an option to filter out non-customers, based on the broader interest in doing so. Do note that skipping accounts can make roll-ups confusing potentially, as the numbers may not add up always. Unless, all roll-ups are done only with data from non-customers.



Thanks,

Manu
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First off- hierarchies look great!!! I definitely think the default hierarchy view should continue to show all accounts as I think this is important context.  That said, I think my users would appreciate the ability to filter out non-customer accounts, as needed.  We have some large, complex account families and I think hiding non-customers would make the hierarchy view a bit easier to process visually.  



Maybe there could be a checkbox they could toggle on/off that hides/shows non-customers? 
Userlevel 6
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Thanks for sharing, Sara! We'll explore adding such an option to filter out non-customers as needed. Would you agree that the actual roll-ups should still take everyone into account, i.e., we should not perform roll-ups with the reduced subset of customers? Also, any other filters you see yourself/your team wanting to apply?



We are also working on making these roll-ups available for ad-hoc reporting, outside the standard hierarchy section we just released. The same logic picked above should ideally apply here.
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I do agree that the roll-ups should still take all accounts (customer or non-customer) into account.  I can't think of any other filters that we'd need at the moment... maybe region?  I'll chime in if I hear of any other "nice to have" filters that come up as we roll this out to the team.
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Hmm, not sure I agree with Sara. Could be confusing to have a filtered list of a few records, and then look at a roll-ed up number and see it is not the sum of the visible records. If I am filtering for Accounts in a region (great idea) then I probably want the rolled up MRR or Annual Revenue for that region only.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Why aren't there any filters for Account Hierarchy?.



I have an account that is a parent account, and it has 90 children accounts, but the vast majority of those are expired / churned. I would need a filter in Account Hierarchy where I can only keep the active children. Is this possible?
Userlevel 6
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Thanks for posting, Cristina. There are two components here:


  • (1) Excluding from roll-up calculations
  • (2) Excluding from the hierarchy view
#1 makes sense. We might not want churned/inactive accounts to contribute to the overall ARR, for example. #2 is slightly more nuanced. If we remove churned/inactive accounts from the view completely, following would be the implications:


  • (A) There would be no way to ever see what churned/inactive accounts belong to the hierarchy, since they get permanently filtered out.
  • (B) The hierarchy structure gets affected when we remove an account that itself is churned/inactive, but has active customers as its children.
For #A, we could still have these accounts available in the hierarchy, removed from roll-ups of course (as an admin level filter). But give you table level filters to remove them from the view as needed. Now, because of #B, we can't hide intermediate parents that have relevant children, as that would break the structure. But if these churned/inactive accounts don't have active children under them, they would get removed from the view completely. 



Does this seem like a reasonable approach? 
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A way to filter would be ideal. such as filtering only Active accounts or filtering for only accounts that have a CSM attached to the account.
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I vote #1. That would work for my situation if we were able to filter the list to only show Active customers.
Userlevel 6
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Thanks for sharing, Johnny. Would filtering just in the hierarchy view suffice, or would you prefer to have this affect the roll-up calculation as well?

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