Enable ability to map Related Contacts (Account Contact Relationship object) in Email Assist

Related products: None

I add this as a comment on a different community post but figured I should post it as its own.





We use the Related Contacts function in Salesforce, which provides the Account Contact Relationship junction object to map a single contact record on the Contact object to multiple accounts.   In our use case, one contact might be a Key Contact on one account, but the primary Decision Maker on another account.  We use the Account Contact Relationship object to map that person to the second account (indirectly) where the contact type is set differently (on the ACR object).





Email Assist does not allow us to add contacts to an email unless they are directly associated to that Account via the Contact object.





Product suggested enabling Associate Contacts and removing the Account ID filter so that CSMs could select the appropriate contact(s) to whom to send the email in the task.  That leaves much room for error (someone accidentally selecting the wrong person from an entirely different customer account).  Besides that, you are limited to 4 search fields which appear to be standard Contact fields only (I don't see some of our custom fields listed).
Hi Jeff,





We understand the issue and also acknowledge that the workaround is not a clean solution. We will try to fix it soon. 





Thanks,


Nitisha
Any update?
We have situations where the we need to send emails tasks to people but don't necesarily want them on the contact object. We'd love to add them on the Person object and then be able to send the email task to them!




Hi Faust, are you saying you have some customer contacts that you want to appear as records in Gainsight but don't want to appear in Salesforce? Can you explain that use case a little bit more?




This is becoming a growing issue for us. We structure our Salesforce Accounts around company CIKs (which makes sense for our business purpose) BUT even on some of our smaller accounts there are often contacts that are ‘tied’ to multiple accounts/CIKs. We’ve started doing more email assists, usage tracking, etc. that are tied to contacts and our CSMs are struggling in these situations. We can ask our Salesforce team to manually reassign to different accounts, but that is time consuming and not an ideal situation either.


@darkknight We are looking into utilizing the Account Contact Relationship in our instance.. What is this still an ongoing issue? What other issues have you run into?
Also, how have you handled sending one time outreaches/programs from a CSV. When creating a power list, we have to choose the “Contact” option. 

 


We haven’t dove deep into email assist yet, but I’m assuming this is going to bite us sooner or later so I’ve put a vote on this.

Right now we are having problems syncing a single person with multiple ACRelationships to company person object for indirect relationships. Seems the load to people rule actions don’t allow mapping Account IDs which is the blocker.

 

Does anyone have a workaround for this? @darkknight @nitisha_rathi 
Or is this also a problem for your setups? 


@faust_belarmino  @ryanm  I have since moved to a new company where we (thankfully) do not use Related Contacts.  That feature was the bane of my existence (but moreso for @kelly who sadly still has to deal with them).  


@darkknight We are looking into utilizing the Account Contact Relationship in our instance.. What is this still an ongoing issue? What other issues have you run into?
Also, how have you handled sending one time outreaches/programs from a CSV. When creating a power list, we have to choose the “Contact” option. 

 

The biggest pain point is the end users, honestly. Most users do not grasp the Account Contact Relationship concept and update contacts incorrectly on the wrong object. 

The second biggest is that queries become a bit duplicative in that you are having to refer to two different ‘role’ fields, for example, to be able to pull contacts from both objects.


Hello All,

We are working on this, i will keep you posted about the updates.