How can Gainsight improve the Global search


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We are interested in your feedback 

We are currently working on improving the Gainsight Global Search, we want to improve the user experience around global search. A couple of the things we are already considering include

  1. Administration - Supporting filters in the search configuration. These filters help admins restrict in-active and non-relevant records from appearing in search results. (here)
  2. Recent searches - Showing the recent searches to users. (here)

Few inputs that would help me here are

  • What are the top 2 challenges you face with global search today ?
  • What can we improve to make it easier for you to find the desired Company/Relationship record ?
  • What other entities do you want to search using Global search ?

Also any other thoughts or ideas that you may have to improve the Global search would be super helpful.


Thank you all for your wonderful ideas.

Gopal


25 replies

Userlevel 7
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@gopal_rao_kallepu are you in my brain? Just came here to post a request and was happy to see this was 3 hours not 3 years old.

 

  1. Here’s a recent issue I had: 

    I have a ticket number I can give you with a concrete example of this behavior. Not posting images here for confidentiality reasons. My thought was to mediate this, give users the ability to choose one or more of the search-enabled features they want to pass their search query through.

  2. Not my idea but another big win for admins (and maybe some end users) : 

     

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Thanks for the responding here @bradley

  1. Giving end users the flexibility to choose the searchable attributes(out of admin shortlisted attributes) is a great idea. We will explore this option.
  2. Being able to search on the GSID is not a straight forward thing, need to evaluate the feasibility. Meanwhile can you help me understand the following @Amrith82 and @bradley 
    • Any specific use-cases around users searching by a GSID ?
    • How common is it to search on GSIDs ?
Userlevel 7
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Thanks for the responding here @bradley

  1. Giving end users the flexibility to choose the searchable attributes(out of admin shortlisted attributes) is a great idea. We will explore this option.
  2. Being able to search on the GSID is not a straight forward thing, need to evaluate the feasibility. Meanwhile can you help me understand the following @Amrith82 and @bradley 
    • Any specific use-cases around users searching by a GSID ?
    • How common is it to search on GSIDs ?

In answer to #2, this is chiefly for admins benefit - there are times when I only have a GSID and I need to find an account, so having a quick way to just pop in the ID to the search bar and find the account is helpful - instead of needing to go into a report and filtering, etc.

Userlevel 3
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+1 for the GSID search

My current workaround for this is to open one of my go-to Company records/URLs and replace the GSID in the address bar with the one I’m looking for — which is more complicated than it needs to be

Userlevel 2
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Problem Statement

Currently, we have 20k+ records in Gainsight and there are many searches that return an unusable list of accounts because of conglomerates, similar names, or lots of parent-child accounts. What happens is you search for the company name and the results are accounts you’re NOT looking for. 

Effectively, some accounts cannot be found via search because 20+ prospects come up first. The only way around this is to 1) know who the TAM is and search for their name or 2) go to a report and click on the account link from the report. Either way, you must know how to find the account.

 

I don’t want to get into solutioning, but as examples we need one or more of the following: ability to see a longer list of accounts, ability to prioritize customer over prospect, multi-field search such as company name + CSM name, or something else.

 

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Thanks for sharing your use cases here @jbeaumont, very helpful. We will try to address these pain points

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We have records tied to companies and being able to search for these would be very helpful. If a truly global search is not feasible, then @bradleymcg’s first suggestion would be great.

 

“Giving end users the flexibility to choose the searchable attributes(out of admin shortlisted attributes)”

@gopal_rao_kallepu

In my use case, I want the ability to filter the global search to show Company records where ‘Account Type = Customer’ 

An effective solution would be implementing a global search filter for Account Types. 

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Our #1 challenge in Global Search is not being able to restrict results based on ‘Status’ from Company MDA.  

 

+1 for this: 

  • Giving end users the flexibility to choose the searchable attributes(out of admin shortlisted attributes) is a great idea. We will explore this option.
Userlevel 7
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I love that search is up for improvement. As I see it, there are at least two general areas up for discussion: (1) What’s allowed for input to the search bar and (2) What’s returned after a search

A few ideas:

  • Combination of search criteria: The ability to combine search criteria would be helpful. For example, being able to search Companies which also have a certain CSM. (I realize you can display the CSM in the search results, but you cannot use it within search that also includes a Company name.)
  • Advanced search: We’re asking the Search bar to do a lot, with little reinforcing help. Being able to “fail over” to an Advanced search dialog would be helpful. Plenty of other SaaS apps support this “one search bar” backed up by an Advanced Search screen. Twitter comes to mind right away.
  • Prioritization of results: With a nod to several previous posters on this thread, it’s very common to get a list of similarly named Companies, to the point where your user needs to pick through a long list, and often even then cannot locate the Company in question. Prioritizing the results would be a big win here. Records where the Current User is on the Account Team might get priority, or records the Current User is following, or records with significant Timeline activity, or CTAs, or which are previously selected frequently. Anything to guide a user to the likely target based on neighboring data would be a win.

 

Userlevel 1
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Echoing many of the responses above already, our end users do have to search through a list of similarly named, but not correct, account. We are using relationships, and often times the correct respective relationship on an account does not populate in the Global Timeline or Global Cockpit. 

This forces CSMs to have to navigate to the R360 of a Company to restart the process of creating an activity/CTA, which is frustrating and time-consuming. 

I would love to be able to search the name of the company + the CSM name + another attribute. 

Userlevel 6
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+1 to all that’s been requested with a big ask from us to be able to search on GSID (admin qol as others have said).

This thread is 11 months old, do we have an update on where this is at or maybe we’ll hear tomorrow in the roadmap session @gopal_rao_kallepu ?

@gopal_rao_kallepu would you enable search based on fields in custom objects as well? scaling Gainsight becomes very difficult with multiple teams when we have a complex structure for our CSM teams

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The top two challenges I face with the global search today are:

  1. It uses an OR search function when there are multiple words. I would like it be more exact and use AND so that if I search for ‘Legacy Bank’ I only find clients with those two exact words. I don’t want to see every client with ‘bank’ and every client with ‘legacy’. Or at least enable a way for the search to be more exact if not everyone wants it like this.
  2. The ability to move Relationship search results to the top instead of it defaulting to Company records at the top. We don’t use Company records. 
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We are in the final stages of Upgrading to Gainsight NXT and our staff noticed right away the Global Search feature is not helpful at all as we are unable to search by Custom fields, we previously setup and used within Gainsight SFDC.

 

I agree with having the option to choose whether to include non-Gainsight Customers in the Global Search.  For our Company we would not include. 

 

Our Company needs the ability to Search based on Custom fields as well, as we also have multiple teams when we have a complex structure for our CSM teams.

 

Custom fields: Unique Aggregate Office ID, Customer ID, Unique Provider ID, Related Name (Account is also known as . . .)

 

Userlevel 7
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Adding @Dheepak G to this thread.

Userlevel 2
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The “or” logic in the Global Search makes it so very difficult to find the records you are looking for. Logically, you feel like typing in the exact name of the customer will get you right there, but in fact, the opposite is true, and you get more results displayed. Honestly, the Global Search is hardly useful for us at all, especially since we use Relationships and the list of results is pretty much doubled again.

 

We would love a way to make the Global Search more configurable at the user level. For example, if someone wants “or” logic, they could leave that setting alone. Or if a user would rather have “and” logic applied, they could select that option. It would also be nice if behaved more like a search engine, and users could drop quotes and/or other operators right in the query in order to perform more intelligent search operations.

Userlevel 1

Thank you all for your feedback, this was very helpful in gathering requirements on how to improve our search experience. To begin with, our primary focus would be to improve the overall search experience and bridge certain pressing gaps in the current search implementation in phases.
We are currently working on designs for the overall search experience improvements and
I will keep this thread updated on the timeline

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Don’t know if it’s possible to still pile on, but like someone mentioned above being able to change the order so relationships are first would be a massive improvement for us or if Admins can restrict the search results to just relationships. we have to use relationships so we can segregate our actvities to specific products and we’re running into issues where they are captured at the Company which creates issues. Being able to filter out active, churn, or inactive would be great as well. 

Userlevel 3
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Echoing another response, we have accounts with similar names, so being able to show the MRR of a customer or other company attributes in the returned search would help CSMs get to the account they need, faster!

Userlevel 1

@jessica_owens We can configure for company attributes to be shown along with the result. Kindly refer the documentation for configuring them here

Userlevel 4
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Also echoing from others that one of our biggest challenges with the current global search functionality is when we’re searching for a client, a ton of other non-related and/or inactive client names appear. Love the idea of being able to filter which clients can appear in the search bar (i.e. only active clients, etc.).

Userlevel 7
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I’m perhaps out over my skis here, but I have to believe Horizon AI could improve the Search Bar significantly.

  • Imagine if Horizon AI would prioritize results based on which entries were clicked after similar previous searches.
  • Horizon AI prioritizes the accounts on which you have a lot of activity, or where your name appears frequently in Timeline updates or as the CSM.
  • And non-AI, I wish search would “failover” to a list. Searching the results on-screen can be tricky, especially if you’re limited to just 4 attributes to display (Relationship users know exactly what I mean). If a search could fail-over to a longer listing page that was itself definable, that would be extraordinary.
  • And also non-AI, with an analogy to sticky Dashboard filters, it would be outstanding if a user could declare filters on their Global Search that Gainsight retained. This would speed up the surfacing of likely results, and still over the user the opportunity to remove or relax the default filters when necessary.
Userlevel 2

Would help us a ton if we had the option in the admin side to filter what accounts can or cannot show up in the search based on Company fields.

Userlevel 1
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Hope this will get put on the roadmap this year! Some of our best end-users continue to bring up the pain points that have already been listed above by myself and others. 

Also +1 to the idea of searching on relationships only! It would be extra awesome if a filtered search feature could allow a user to filter out all relationships that they are not on too. 

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