Make Sponsor Tracking more reliable

Related products: None

There are many problems I see with sponsor tracking which really hinders our teams adoption of the feature. First there are many times when the person is not found in LinkedIn and even when we put the direct URL in they are still not found. Then when I click the "notify me" and wait for 48 hours (which is a long time and by then I have forgotten about it) they sometimes are still not found because they have a special character in their name or something like that. Ideally it would be great if I clicked on the link icon and it found them regardless of special characters or other problems. 
We've had similar intermittent problems with this feature.  A URL should be foolproof but it's not somehow.  I've had situations where I left it for an hour and retried and it worked.  Not very reliable.
Yes that seems to be the consistent theme with the group here as well. 
Hi Andrew,


Thanks for raising the concern, To get more accuracy in terms of finding people. I would highly recommend using linkedin url of that particular person. It helps our system to find that person fast and more accurate search result is provided.


In case if you still can't find profile in 48 hours, raise a support ticket and we can handle these case by case by re-indexing search on our side.
Yes, I already know that which is why I submitted this idea to improve the process. We have used the URL multiple times and it does not find them. Then I have to wait 48 hours if I remember to hit the "notify me" link if it still doesn't find them to then have support find them. Just doesn't make a lot of sense and would improve adoption I would think if the process was easier and more reliable. 
I'm working through this issue in Support Ticket 9094, and the "get notified" link doesn't always seem to work. (FWIW, I did learn -- and then found in the documentation -- that it's a known limitation that LinkedIn Premium accounts are sometimes inaccessible to Gainsight.)
Two things I learned from my support ticket:




  • "get notified" does not send an email; it simply adds the sponsor once their profile is found. That's not great, since the CSM never gets proactive positive feedback that it's worth taking this step.

  • In (at least) one case, I entered the URL of a public, non-premium LinkedIn profile, and it did not find a result. I clicked "get notified". After 72 hours, the profile was still not added. Gainsight support escalated the issue to get that one added manually, but I don't have an answer yet for how that could have occurred in the first place, so I'm not yet confident that it won't continue to be problematic in the future.

Yes, our adoption of this feature is very low because of all the reasons stated throughout this chain.