Improve formatting of CTA comments section

Related products: None

These came up as a requests from HPE ADM: 





Currently, CSMs use Comment field on CTAs to captures notes and next steps. 


They would like to have the formatting of this field improved, specifically: 




  • Enable rich text to improve visuals - e.g. bolding, coloring, bullets, etc. 

  • Increase size of comments box / make it more prominent

  • Improve copy/paste formatting - currently users copy notes into CTAs from other sources (e.g. emails), and they report that the formatting is very bad - there are unexplained gaps, bulletting and indentation aren't respected, etc. 
Hi Nadav, I'm curious if they have evaluated Timeline for capturing notes and next steps. I like to think of Comments on CTAs as "notetaking 1.0" and Timeline is "notetaking 2.0". Once more robust reporting arrives, then Timeline will become "notetaking 5.0" 🙂
As Dan pointed out, Timeline is the best way to go for note-taking! We are working on making it available at the CTA level soon, hopefully by Spring release. Copy-paste related issues have also been resolved in Feb.
Thanks Dan and Manu. Unfortunately they haven't been able to use Timeline so far as it wasn't available on the Relationship level - but we are definitely looking forward to enabling this soon and look into Timelines for replacing some/all of the note-taking on CTAs
It is great to be able to add notes to the Timeline for the CTA. The Timeline is currently available on the CTA level and not the Task level. I like tracking information on the Task level as well, so I use the comments area, since that is what is available. It will be great if the Timeline can be used on the Task level as well. Until then, it will be great if formatting is improved and expansion of the comment area is enabled for all comments sections.
Hi Rebecca, can you expand a little into your use case for taking notes on the task level (and not the CTA level)? What are some situations where there would be a series of updates on a task that you wouldn't want to manage at the CTA level?
Hi Dan! Thanks for the question. Let's look at an example where a CTA includes 20 tasks. By providing updates at the task level, you can keep the information compartmentalized. If you provide updates at the CTA level, you're losing a level of categorization that would provide a picture of where one is on each of the tasks. If a Customer Success Manager needs to step in to cover for another, it would be much easier and quicker if you could see what has already been done regarding each task. If you look at the information only on the CTA level, you'd need to map what applies to each task to understand what work has been done for each.
Thanks for that additional detail, Rebecca. I understand your use case better. 





One question on that process that you outlined - do your task level objectives entail multiple steps in and of themselves that might be completed over the course of many days or by different people?





The main reason I ask is that conceptually the design of CTAs and tasks is like this: a CTA indicates that a risk, opportunity or lifecycle event (or similar) needs attention. The CTA itself is a transactional activity that could be completed in a single step or that could entail a few tasks. Ideally each task is pretty self contained such that it would be assigned to a single person and not span multiple days. 





Also, if the CTA outcome encompasses a longer timeframe, it might be better captured in a Success Plan that would allow for a work breakdown by multiple objectives, each of which can have multiple tasks. 





Depending on the complexity of your objectives, have you considered perhaps capturing the more complex ones via a Success Plan? This FAQ guide has some good topics to help guide when to use a CTA vs a Success Plan.