Question

Email Assist - Vault-like Templates


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Hi - We would like to create a series of templates for CSMs to use with their clients as needed. Right now, creating a series of playbooks that contain the templates looks like the best option. However, there are a few challenges:



1) Playbooks need to be associated with a specific account. One recommendation to work around this is to create a generic account and associate the template with this account. The challenge is ensuring that the emails are associated with the right account in our reporting.



2) You can only fire an email once from the playbook. So, each time an email is used, another CTA would have to be created with the playbook or the playbook would have to be replaced in order to use it again.



Has anyone else built this out in an effective way and addressed these challenges?



Thanks,

Elizabeth

10 replies

Userlevel 7
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I really like this idea. It would be nice too to have the capability when adding a manual task to optionally select an email task (from a list of pre-defined template tasks). 
We do this often. The only difference for us is that we have a communications manager (me) who the CSM works with to say "I want an email sent to all of/some of my customers that says X" and our communications manager does all the configuration and sending via CoPilot.



1. We use CoPilot to write up the email template

2. We create a Power List with criteria such as "Account Owner = Bob Smith"

3. We send an Outreach using that Power List and Email Template



Example: A CSM wants to email all of their customers who use our mobile app. They have 40 customers who use the mobile app, and don't want to create 40 CTAs. We put the email together. We create a Power List with criteria that includes "Account Owner equals Bob Smith" and "Product contains Mobile App". The Power List then generates a list of their customers who use that app, and we send the outreach to all 40 customers that populated on the Power List.
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Thanks, Deb! I am the communications manager for our organization and we do a lot with CoPilot. My use case for this is more for the reactive types of situations. I want to templatize responses to our most common questions or situations so CSMs have something really thoughtful at their fingertips to address those. That gives me the ability to curate that messaging, but not have to be involved in each send.
Userlevel 7
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I recommended something similar in this thread as a "mini-copilot" option: https://community.gainsight.com/gainsight/topics/mini-copilot-just-for-csms-to-send-messages-to-thei...



Would love to get your thoughts on this and maybe an upvote and comment too! 🙂
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Thanks, Dan. I think that is an interesting concept and we've had some CSMs request something like that. I agree with Jeff that that may be going further than where I see our actual need. Two concerns that I would have:



1) We are trying to be very thoughtful about sending consisting messaging so while I don't want to be too controlling, we do want to be thoughtful about messages going to a group as large as a full portfolio.



2) If the message is valuable enough for a full portfolio, is it something that should go broader? How do we continue curation and sharing?



I think providing CSMs with capability to send to multiple clients and/or their portfolio has potential, but I'm just not sure of the full mini CoPilot capability. Would definitely be interested in more conversation about it and I have followed the post.


We struggle specifically with point 2 - You can only fire an email once from the playbook.



If the team receives an out of office alert from the initial outreach and want to send the email to the person listed on the OOO, then a new CTA needs to be created to use the email template again.



So from this use case, it would be great to be able to send multiple emails from the same playbook.
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This is something we struggle with as well. We ended up creating a generic "email" playbook, for one offs, with a blank email template in there that we can use to email to customers. Not ideal, but works for the time being. We just replace the playbook as we need more emails for that particular CTA. 
Hi,



Great discussion! 



You can create a playbook for each of the templatize responses and the CSM can use this playbook whenever required. Do you think this a feasible approach?



If not, then would you prefer if we give an option to the CSMs to create a manual email task?



Thanks,

Nitisha
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Hi Nitisha - Unfortunately, the process of creating a CTA, adding a playbook and then final prep of the email is just too cumbersome to really get the CSMs to leverage that as a tool. It's way easier just to build them a library of templates for use in Outlook, though we do lose the tracking.



The manual email task may have potential, but I would want to better understand how you envision that working before commenting.



Elizabeth


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I agree with Elizabeth.  Using playbooks and assigning CTAs is too cumbersome for CSMs for one-off email communication.  The ability to pull an HTML template from a repository and use it in Outlook is very valuable.  As a use case example, we want CSMs to send notice of a webinar to their customers.  The email template was provided by Marketing, so we want CSMs to pull the template from Gainsight themselves, and send without Admin assistance.  Copilot is too time-consuming and another CTA/playbook will get lost in Cockpit.

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