Email Assist - emailing multiple accounts

JO will probably be the best way to address this need.

With Email Assist, you can manually type in the email addresses for the recipients and have emails sent separately to each email. However, this would not allow for the email sent to associate to the Company record for the person nor would allow for dynamic tokens in the email template as manually typing in email addresses doesn’t lookup to any records not on the Company record from where the CTA was created from.

You would have to create a CTA on a separate Company record (a placeholder or dummy record) and then have to manually type in the email addresses you would want to send to. The email would log to the placeholder/dummy account.

Thanks John. JO is not a route we can take here unfortunately  - our CSMs find it easier to just use their Outlook for this very purpose, and to be frank, JO is beyond some of our CSMs capabilities. 

Are there any plans to allow sending emails to multiple C360s? This has also come up several times in the past during BCC to Timeline when some contacts may belong to multiple companies.

Interesting - I’ve never allowed CSM access to Journey Orchestrator and just set email automation for them either by making a query or uploading a CSV of contacts.

Not sure on the second question. There is a Gainsight Assist for Gmail currently and I assume there will be a similar function for Outlook at some point: https://support.gainsight.com/Gainsight_NXT/Email_Assist/Chrome_Plug-in/Gainsight_Assist_Chrome_Plug-in_User_Guide

Hello @katerina_nemcova 

Are you referring just sending emails to multiple accounts here? Allowing loging thise emails to multiple accounts is there on roadmap i will keep you posted once its available.

Yes and great to hear!

Example:

Our CSMs are keeping in touch with their customers on weekly basis, for some of our customers we had to temporarily suspend some services due to COVID-19 so regular coms is critical. JO would not work for this because:

• the message is generic and in theory, it could be sent to multiple accounts via JO but each CSM wants to have a control over what goes out to when. Also some want to add their “personal touch” to the text e.g.  relate to their individual ways of working, or a note with contact me on the details below etc
• these messages can be going out weekly - we have 30+ CSMs so the workload for GS Admin to manage these individually via JO is not feasible
• We looked into allowing few selected CSMs (those managing 200+ low touch accounts) access to JO, train them on creating these custom communications but they found JO too complex, even with pre-set programmes and reverted back to Outlook 

I’m finding people are happy to use the Email Assist (or BCC to Timeline) for the odd email, and they all love the tracking capabilities of JO/Email Assist but are getting frustrated when they are unable to include multiple accounts or need to navigate to Draft to resolve Timeline bounces. If you could make this happen it would be a huge help for us.

Thanks

Katerina 

Hello @katerina_nemcova 

This is very helpful explanation. We need considerable amount of change to this support this functionality. I will keep you posted when it makes it our  roadmap.

@katerina_nemcova changed this to idea post for better tracking purposes. 

We have heard this same feedback from our team.  Journey Orchestrator programs/ data sets is not really what they should be working with- it’s too complex.  They’d like to be able to select multiple clients/ contacts and just send them the same email from cockpit or a similar area.  The workflow to have to create a CTA per client is cumbersome from an end user experience.

+1 to this idea. Loved it.

Just want to know how this works.

Like 1 to 1 or 1 to Many. Means 1 Contact - 1 Account or 1 Contact - Multiple/different Accounts

Thanks.

@katerina_nemcova @phani_kumar @mark_walseth  For this use case i would suggest to use Gainsight assist chrome plugin or outlook add-in, you can use it from your mail inbox. Gainsight assist is available for both NXT ans SFDC.

+1 to this idea, we need this as well, using the chrome plugin does not solve for the need to bcc multiple clients the same template across accounts and have it log against all of the accounts’ timelines. 

Hello @ml2019 
We are having added ability associate emails to multiple accounts to our roadmap, We will keep you posted about the updates.

We have had similar feedback from our end-users and many of them want to email multiple accounts at once for specific communications whereas we don’t want to utilize JO in this case. 

@katerina_nemcova out of curiousity what kind of email would a CSM send in bulk to multiple contacts at the same time, that wouldn’t require personalization for each customer? 

here are few examples @elliot_hullverson :

• notifications around pause/restart of a subscribed service - our business is FMCG data , retailers Point-of-Sale data so often we deal with delays or issues caused by retailers, and need to communicate these to our customers, depending which service is impacted for which cluster of customers. The current CV19 crisis has been a good example where we needed to send regular/weekly coms to our customers to keep them updated on how we’re dealing with XYZ and how it’s impacting them. Sending one letter to all was not an option but neither was sending thousands of customised ones. Once letter may be applicable to multiple accounts (by region/service purchased/industry) so no individual personalisation is required, other than the Strategic Account Manager handling this communication for their own customers. Our team handled this via Outlook but would have  been great to utilise Gainsight. People initially tried the BCC-to-TL link but soon got fed up with email ending up in Draft as Gainsight detected multiple accounts and needed manual intervention to log this coms.  
• Industry-specific newsletters - once per month, our CSMs create an update on what’s hot in the market(s) they look after to share with their customers. One CSM may look after several customers from 2 or 3 different industries, e.g. cosmetics/frozen food/confectionery etc so each newsletter will be relevant to a number of customers. We have over 40 CSMs so it’s not something we would want to handle centrally, and it’s also a good practice for CSMs to keep themselves abreast of any industry developments and to create/nurture trust with their own customers
• communication/updates relevant to a specific group of stakeholders e.g. a CSM may decide to run a drop-in session or a training of some sorts and needs to send an invite for all their product-user who buy specific product.
• Another example would also be a note to specific customers just before Xmas or main events. A lot of our customers tend to either switch off over festive periods (so require a temporary pause of some services - one message asking to let us know their requirements this year is sufficient), others are super-busy before/around Xmas so it’s a good time for us to be more “proactive” than usual as this often leads to new trials/upsells etc. Similarly, all our beverage customers go crazy before St Patrick's day and a CSM may want to reach out to their project managers with suggestions around trialling new products, extra support for existing subscriptions, and so on. 

@katerina_nemcova for the emails that are meant for mass communication and do not need a lot of personalization. I would recommend using Journey orchestrator/programs to set up automated customer marketing.  (Great for Product Releases, or general newsletters) 

• Query builder- dynamically pull in accounts/contacts that meet certain criteria 
• Create Email templates & utilize tokens to pull in data to add a little personalization
• Be able to send these emails from the assigned CSMs dynamically vs BCC in a one-off mass email 
• Set the frequency of delivery based on desired need (once every 7 days or once a month etc)
• In Programs, you can select these emails to be synced to SFDC (if you have SFDC), and then we can sync them to timeline (for certain communications) or build custom reports and add to dashboards or in the C360 section 

JO/ Programs - something that we wouldn’t want individual CSMs creating on their own, but this is something that you or admin could set up based on feedback from the CSMs.  

@elliot_hullverson  -  yes, i’m familiar with Journey Orchestrator and we do use it extensively but we do not have the resource to run custom coms frequently for 40+ CSMs (as per the few & others examples I outlined above) and which are a frequent requirement - we would need to employ another person to run this.  And as already discussed, it’s just not feasible to train CSMs on using JO - it’s way too complex.  

Seems like the only way is to stick with the current process of using Outlook until this is developed - looks like it’s on the roadmap.  

Hello @katerina_nemcova 
We are building a new component called email from anywhere, this should solve the problem of emailing multiple contacts. We will also enhance our Gmail plugin and Outlook add-in to be able to log these emails against multiple accounts in timeline.
If you have not checked our Chrome plugin or Outlook add-in please check them out. Outlook add-in will be released in Oct. Demo video will give you can idea.

Thanks @chethana, I was searching for the Outlook plug in but could not find any info. Thanks for sending. Looking forward to it!

Adding my vote to the pile. Our Gainsight users would also benefit from being able to bcc emails via the Outlook plug-in to multiple accounts. We have a shared and named CSM model and we also have other system users (marketing, product, etc..) that engage with users en masse.

Our CSMs would appreciate this too. Use Case: Several of our customers make up one district. The CSM meets with the district once a quarter and sends the same follow-up email with decisions made and next steps to every customer in that district. It would be great to log it to all the customer timelines at once.

Hello everyone,
We will start supporting this soon as part of Segments being able to be used in email assist. Till that we have alternative for this through chrome plugin and outlook add-in, here also we will start supporting logging emails to multiple accounts.

Hi Chethana, the Outlook add-in doesn’t currently allow end-users to send emails to multiple customers. As end-users don’t use Segments, is there a timeline for the plug-ins?

+1 to this feature.  I’ve had the ability to do something similar in the past with another competing solution.  This is very handy when there’s an ad-hoc announcement that needs to be made around something like an outage or system-wide issue.  We also have initiatives that require individual outreach to all customers from time to time that would benefit from something like this rather than going the JO route.

@vmoore outlook add-in do support sending emails to multiple customers, we are working on supporting logging that email back to timeline against multiple customers accounts. Let me know if you are still not able to send email to multiple customers from outlook add-in.

@jbeltrane Agree, this is a very common usecase, soon this will also be addressed.