Ability to start a thread from Copilot?

Related products: None

I have an interesting idea that was purposed to me by a customer that I thought I'd get some thoughts on.





The basic idea is a 1:Many email for an account via Copilot, where we just send one email and have several contacts within the same thread.





The use case behind this, is that if we send the same email to multiple contacts within the same account, you end up with several threads and limited collaboration between CSM and the multiple points of contact.  This can leave an opening for miscommunication or having a CSM telling multiple people the same thing, when it could have just been communicate once through a thread.
This is interesting Tom. Not sure if I'm thinking along the same lines with you, but are you saying that if there are, for example, 10 contacts for a given Customer - instead of sending 10 separate emails with a single recipient for each - to send 1 email with 10 recipients for that email?





That would be very interesting indeed. 





I think you'd have to include this as an option, as some emails (like an NPS survey invitation) would want to stay 1:1 in nature. But other emails would certainly lend themselves to a group distribution. 





Love it!!
Hey Dan,





Yup that's exactly what I'm getting at!  Now I feel like I should have actually included numbers in my initial post, but that's what we're wanting.





I agree though, we'd want to keep this as an option (I'm picturing a checkbox) instead of actually changing the way Copilot itself works.
It is not a great customer experience that we currently send multiple customer contacts the same email all in separate threads.  They have no visibility into who else is receiving the email and if they should respond or forward it on to the customer POC.  We know the customer POC and who should be copied so we would love the ability to address the email to the customer POC and CC the other customer contacts that should also be aware of a transactional email.





Example Use Case: A renewal is coming up for a customer and you want to notify the customer POC of this renewal but at the same time you want to copy the customer billing contact so that they are aware of a price change.  You also may want to CC the Sponsor (Decision Maker) at the customer if this contact is different than the POC.
I would second Jeff's point. That would be awesome, and we have the same example use case.
This feels very similar to the conversation in this community post: https://community.gainsight.com/gainsight/topics/ability-to-cc-bcc-contacts-on-copilot-outreach





Use-case: co-pilot


is sends an automated welcome email (triggered off a closed won new customer


opportunity) from the account executive which intro's the post-sales


team (as a cc) to the customer.
Yeah, that post was referring specifically to internal contacts which would awesome to have as well.  This one is referring to customer contacts.
I like this use case a lot.  The core notion, it seems to me, is that the process (in this case the sending of an email) should take place at the Customer or Commercial Relationship level rather than at the person level.  Overall, Gainsight is very much an Account/Relationship level thing -- think about CTAs always being at the Customer/Relationship, for example.  This is similar to what you would expect from a Sales-y tool and different from what you would see in a Marketing-ish tool (the marketing world is rushing to overcome this limitation with the 'Account Based Marketing' concept).  The best thing, of course, is to fluidly combine operations at any level.  A related use case, by the way, is to send an email to one contact and then a followup to that person's boss.  That sort of thing is really hard to do in a marketing-oriented tool. 





Anyway, to the use case mentioned above: how would you imagine specifying who are all the people who get one email?  The simple thing would be to specify that you want only one email to all the folks who meet the Power List criteria but are from the same Account or associated with the same Relationship.  But that isn't super flexible.  And you also get into the question of which contact to use for resolving token mappings.  Would about still having one email per Power List entry but then explicitly calling out CC recipients by role or something?