Time tracking integrations

Related products: CS Data Management & Integrations
Does anyone know of or have suggestions for simple project management time tracking solutions that integrate with Gainsight/Salesforce? Ideally we'd have a button associated with each CTA/task that starts and stops a timer then loads the time to a field in that CTA/task. I understand that is a bit of a pipedream, but the closer we can get to it the better.





Thanks!
Following.
Hi Britton - Are you looking for an app that is compatible with both SFDC and GS?





I know some companies that use CronSights - https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001gZ0hEAE





It's SFDC native but does not integrate with GS at this time.
Also - if we provided some form of time tracking within Cockpit and Success Plans - would this meet your needs for project management time tracking?
More than likely yes. I'd like to see the functionality before say for sure though. Is this something that is on the roadmap?
Hi Britton,





Could you provide some details on the time tracking piece





Is it a place where the CSM can log the time they have worked on a CTA (would a field on the CTA where the CSM enters the hours spent work?). Or is it something automated? (you mentioned about having a button to start/stop a timer. Could you provide some details on this?)





Also, would the time tracking happen for all CTA's / CTA's of a specific type (or Time spent on a Success plan)? Also what kind of reporting would you want on this?





Regards
Our ideal: A start button the CSM can activate when they start actively working on a task or a CTA/objective. Then when they complete the task/CTA/objective, they can click the button again to stop the timer. The recorded time will then be stored in the task/CTA/objective and be reportable through Reports.





Our more reasonable request: An editable time field on the taks/CTA/objective where the CSM can manually enter the amount of time they actively worked on a project (probably using a third party stopwatch app to track that time).
Stop and Start time for CTA, Great ask! This is something I am hearing for first time.


Tracking can be done at Task level also  🙂
Hi Britton,





Thanks for sharing this. You can add a field to the CTA object and once you add it to the detail layout...the CSM can enter the time they spent for each CTA.  (You can add that at the CTA, Task or Success Plan level)





Let me know if that helps
For now we have decided to just use timeline activities and the duration field there. But we would still like to leave the time tracking within cockpit at some point.





Thanks for the replies and pointers everyone!
Hi Aditya,





Could you provide a little more detail on how to add in custom fields to CTAs and Tasks? I was trying to set this up in Administration but it looks like you can only pick existing fields. How would you recommend going about implementing this for tasks and CTAs? 





Thanks! 
Hi Calvin,





You can add custom fields via salesforce. Once you add new fields to the "Call to Action" & "CSTask" objects, you will be able to add them to the CTA/Task layout. Let me know if you need any other information 
+1 Timetracking functionality like Britton Walker described would be the critical factor in allowing our Professional Services team to make use of Gainsight. Without adequate timetracking, we will have to choose another tool.


Currently working on some custom reporting logic - If I can make and schedule a report that aggregates billable hours from a custom field on tasks, that is enough of a working solution.
+ 1





This is fairly crucial for our organiztion as well. Very interested if this will be able to be implemented within Gainsight.



It looks like this is under consideration. Are there any updates here? :)



Following



Is this still being considered for a future release? Our implementation team would really love to have this functionality.



Critical for us as well, is there any update?

@dan_ahrens @sai_ram is this still being considered? I just joined a new org where I am revamping Gainsight and a large part of this effort will focus on getting more teams amalgamated into one system. I need to get one of them off another tool that they use because of its time tracking capabilities - since this is a professional services team, time tracking is crucial to them. 

In the meantime, I will be suggesting the duration field and a third party Chrome extension to track. 

@gunjanm - increasingly it seems that just having a time spent field on a CTA or Success Plan or Timeline activity, etc can be hard to properly track and aggregate. Other than adding a custom field on one of those objects, we don’t have on our roadmap the concept of a whole product time tracking tool. 

 

In fact, our Client Outcomes (CSM) team just launched the use of https://retain.ai/ to track their time spent on various customer activities. It’s a browser extension that works across different applications and pages. 

I’m with @dan_ahrens on this. You can track time on a CTA and Timeline Activity which allow you to tie time specifically to a task or event and to the customer. Time would sit in multiple objects (Timeline Activities and CTAs/Tasks) but you could pull this all into one object with a rule so that you can easily report on total time spent per customer or per CSM and per any time period you like. 

I just took a look at Retain.ai and it looks like it integrates with Salesforce and Gainsight. Is there any more info you could provide @dan_ahrens on this? Do you need to pull in your customer data into Retain and then use the browser extension to update the time? Are you able to get more granular with the data so you can see specifically where time was spent with the customer (was it all on meetings, or a particular PS task, or support ticket, etc)

Why I’m curious is because most other time trackers (ex: Harvest, Clockify, Toggl) are just time entry and CSMs would need to tag each customer when they enter their time. I’m not sure these tools would be an ideal solution. My guess is it would be quite a bit of time to maintain your customer lists in these apps and you are only able to add some high-level buckets to associate your time to. These apps do have the ability to start/stop time tracking though.  

 

@dan_ahrens How are the CSM’s liking retain.ai?

Hi @faust_belarmino - let me connect you with someone on our CS Ops team who has been closer to that implementation and usage. 

 

@jean.nairon @faust_belarmino So far so good with our implementation of retain.ai! We’ve had our first few rounds of getting insights from it, and we just trained our CS team last week so they can log in and see where they’re spending their own time. They also have a couple of enhancements coming out soon, which allow users to see how well they’re adhering to their intended work hours (so, a real measure of work/life balance), and whether they’re distributing their time equivalently to the anonymized average of the rest of the team.

 

Let me provide a bit more detail about how it works, technically. I’m sure that there are integrations and configurations that I’m not aware of, so I’d certainly suggest reaching out to them if any of the below sounds like it wouldn’t work for you!

  • It pulls our customers and contacts via a Salesforce integration, including account fields that can be used as filters.
  • We’re using its integration with GSuite that allows it to see subjects and recipients only on calendar events and emails. This occurs through the API, meaning it doesn’t require the Chrome extension.
  • A Chrome extension activates only the domains that you’ve whitelisted as the team’s web-based tools, such as Google Docs, Gainsight, Expensify, Seismic, etc. It tracks the time spent on page, and associates it to a customer using one of four methods: (1) page metadata like the page title; (2) a customer ID or name in the URL; (3) a configurable ‘HTML extractor’ that would read just a designated part of a page; (4) you can configure it to prompt the user with a small pop-up where the names of customers autocomplete in a search field.
  • We’re using its integration with Slack, where they’ve matched up certain public channels with customers, for those channels where that customer is the purpose of that channel. They pull how many messages each person sends in which public channel, and do not see the content of the messages. Private channels and direct messages are not accessible to it.
  • By matching up all of the above data with customers, they distinguish between time spent with a customer (customer meetings and emails), time spent about a customer (Slack messages, Google Slides, Gainsight, etc.), and time spent that’s not attributable to a specific customer.
  • We’ve spoken with them about tracking not just which system you’re spending your time in, but which workflows you’re working on (EBR, risk escalation, etc.). We were waiting for an enhancement to be able to be able to track in both ways, not just one, but we haven’t revisited that recently, so I’m not sure if it’s been released.
  • We’ve just got it set up so that they’re pushing our Retain data to our Gainsight S3 bucket. We’re excited about the idea of using it to drive dashboards, health scores, CTAs, etc., but we haven’t crossed that bridge yet or even scoped out where exactly we’d start. My guess is that it would be a CTA for, “It looks like you haven’t been in touch with this customer recently.”

Hi @faust_belarmino - let me connect you with someone on our CS Ops team who has been closer to that implementation and usage. 

 

That would be AWESOME. Thanks so much!

@jean.nairon @faust_belarmino So far so good with our implementation of retain.ai! We’ve had our first few rounds of getting insights from it, and we just trained our CS team last week so they can log in and see where they’re spending their own time. They also have a couple of enhancements coming out soon, which allow users to see how well they’re adhering to their intended work hours (so, a real measure of work/life balance), and whether they’re distributing their time equivalently to the anonymized average of the rest of the team.

 

Let me provide a bit more detail about how it works, technically. I’m sure that there are integrations and configurations that I’m not aware of, so I’d certainly suggest reaching out to them if any of the below sounds like it wouldn’t work for you!

  • It pulls our customers and contacts via a Salesforce integration, including account fields that can be used as filters.
  • We’re using its integration with GSuite that allows it to see subjects and recipients only on calendar events and emails. This occurs through the API, meaning it doesn’t require the Chrome extension.
  • A Chrome extension activates only the domains that you’ve whitelisted as the team’s web-based tools, such as Google Docs, Gainsight, Expensify, Seismic, etc. It tracks the time spent on page, and associates it to a customer using one of four methods: (1) page metadata like the page title; (2) a customer ID or name in the URL; (3) a configurable ‘HTML extractor’ that would read just a designated part of a page; (4) you can configure it to prompt the user with a small pop-up where the names of customers autocomplete in a search field.
  • We’re using its integration with Slack, where they’ve matched up certain public channels with customers, for those channels where that customer is the purpose of that channel. They pull how many messages each person sends in which public channel, and do not see the content of the messages. Private channels and direct messages are not accessible to it.
  • By matching up all of the above data with customers, they distinguish between time spent with a customer (customer meetings and emails), time spent about a customer (Slack messages, Google Slides, Gainsight, etc.), and time spent that’s not attributable to a specific customer.
  • We’ve spoken with them about tracking not just which system you’re spending your time in, but which workflows you’re working on (EBR, risk escalation, etc.). We were waiting for an enhancement to be able to be able to track in both ways, not just one, but we haven’t revisited that recently, so I’m not sure if it’s been released.
  • We’ve just got it set up so that they’re pushing our Retain data to our Gainsight S3 bucket. We’re excited about the idea of using it to drive dashboards, health scores, CTAs, etc., but we haven’t crossed that bridge yet or even scoped out where exactly we’d start. My guess is that it would be a CTA for, “It looks like you haven’t been in touch with this customer recently.”

@seth Thanks so much for this info! It’s super helpful. It sounds like the main advantage is tracking and aggregating the time spent on specific pages/urls/systems and associating it with the correct customer. However, the ability to track time according to workflows or specific processes isn’t all the way there yet…

This definitely gives us a good place to start! Thanks for your time and feedback! :D

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