Feedback about BCC Email to Timeline feature

Related products: CS Journey Orchestrator, Email & Notifications

The new functionality released recently is helpful but I have feedback regarding this feature to improve its flexibility.





The idea of emailing meeting notes into Gainsight has received great feedback but we are facing some challenges into its adoption 100%. The reasons are its limitation around the following:





1. Our Team uses a project management software and we are running into technical challenges into emailing meeting notes from this app into Gainsight. The workaround is to send an email to user's personal email and then forward those meeting notes to external and internal recipients. This is adding overhead and involves same amount of effort as copy/paste meeting notes in Gainsight





2. Email Activity Type: Our Timeline activity types are added based on the milestones within customer journey. When we send an email to gainsight, all such interactions are added into Gainsight as "Email" activity type irrespective if it was a kickoff call meeting notes or Business review or escalation meeting notes. This will skew our reports during analysis as most of those valid converstions will be tracked and flagged as Email type.





Hoepfully there is a way of emailing meeting notes and flagging them into different activity types appropriately within Timeline using this feature.





3. Copy/Pasting Table layout in Timeline Activitiy Notes section: While copy/pasting the table either from excel or html format, the table looses its format and the text shows up in paragraph format. This has been added as a feature request here : https://community.gainsight.com/conversations/insert-table-in-360-timeline-activities-5bc73e0ae4b04588aaf85e14



Hi Sainyam, 





 





Thanks for your feedback! 





We always love to hear feedback from our customers. We have planned a lot of Timeline enhancements for this year. We will look into the possibilities of your feedback and update you here once we consider for release. 





 





Keep posting!





 





 




Hello @sainyam_sandhu





Regarding 2, I was going through an article https://support.gainsight.com/Timeline/Admin_Guides/Configure_Email_to_Timeline





you may build a report by selecting Activity Timeline as the source object and include filter criteria with field ‘Source’ equals ‘INBOUND_EMAIL’ to see how many activities are created/logged via email integration. This filter combined with another filter with subject line that contains Business Review/ Escalation or kick off call should give you a set of good reporting filters that you can apply to call them conversations rather than emails.




Great feedback. I also would like to see the documentation updated with more information such as what Activity Type these are logged as, I wouldn't ever just want to assume what the system does.





I also don't like that the end user chooses where to log to: Company or Relationship, that should be controlled on the admin side and there should be an option to make it visible on both ends.




We're getting similar requests to #1 and #2.





1. I suggested adding an internal email as a contact to the account, and then, sending the email to that, but that's cumbersome especially for the CSMs that have a lot of accounts. Would be great if the system could use the subject to determine which account to add to.





2. We have a similar use case. Often, CSMs are using their email to send recaps to trainings or business reviews, and they have requested the ability to have it marked as a different activity type than Email. Going with the subject idea here, maybe they could enter the activity type in the subject and have the system tag it appropriately?




Hi Heather, your suggestion on #1 is interesting. Could you share a bit more detail on how you think the subject of an email could be used to accurately map to the correct account?




Hi Dan,





I was just thinking that if the CSM put the company name in the subject that maybe that could be used to identify the account to tag it to. For example: Subject: Careerbuilder Update. Then, pull the Careerbuilder to attach to the correct account.




Yeesh this thread makes me glad we haven't enabled this yet.





For Heather's #1 option, using the customer name could be tricky because we have mulitple accounts with the same name. If there was a way to select a field to use as an identifier for Email to Timeline (we don't use Account Number - we use a custom field) and then advise CSMs to include that in the subject, that might more accurately identify the account to which the email should be attached.




@darkknight Overall, our team has nothing but positive things to say about the feature. It's been a huge timesaver despite some of the hiccups. We definitely would have the same issue with the accounts having similar names. I like you suggestion too!




Good to know! We have some additional internal challenges that make me very wary of enabling this feature until it's a bit more seasoned.




Thanks for clarifying Heather.





Open text fields typed in by humans are usually notoriously bad for doing any kind of automated matching. People misspell things all the time, and especially with proper nouns that spellcheckers don't help with.





Also, as Jeff mentioned, if you have account structures or relationships that have the same prefix and rely on other unique identifiers, the matching based on a free text entry would really get complicated and messy.





That's a big reason why the team went with the recipient(s) email address as this would be unique and able to matched directly to a person record that belongs to a company or relationship.




#2 is a big one - I've seen several community post discussing this, even outside of email to timeline. Just the abilty to change the activity type after something has been posted would be awesome.




100% agree. This is actually a big use case for our CSA team internally at Gainsight.