Question

Sponsor Tracking Broken

  • 6 April 2016
  • 8 replies
  • 72 views

Userlevel 7
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  • Gainsight Employee: ACE
  • 548 replies
This is a PSA for the Community, and a cathartic complaint:



I learned in Gainsight support ticket 8742 that Sponsor Tracking is simply broken until the May product release. The system is creating records for changes that have been detected that are not real. For example, sponsor tracking says that an individual moved from Google to Apple, but that individual actually moved from Apple to Google 3 years ago, and is still at Google.



Apparently this affects all types of sponsor tracking: company, title, and location. I've turned off our rule that creates CTAs based on this data, deleted all existing sponsor tracking CTAs, and had to notify all our CSMs and my VP.



Sponsor Tracking was one of the great and sexy features of the product when we signed on, but it's been nothing but a disappointment, not just because of this, but also because of the issue described in https://community.gainsight.com/gainsight/topics/make-sponsor-tracking-more-reliable It's regretful that bugs that fundamentally affect the basic uses of a feature cannot be prioritized outside of scheduled product releases.

8 replies

Hi Seth,



Thanks for posting and I apologize for the for the errors that you are seeing in sponsor tracking. I work in the product management team and my team owns sponsor tracking. I have looked through the details of the Zendesk ticket. 



I wanted to provide some high level clarification and then request a call to go over some more details.



In summary, the issue you have raised is not an across-the-board logical issue in old vs. new data, but due to data inaccuracies while retrieving information for specific contacts on the social web. For the contacts you highlighted in the support ticket, in February, our crawlers retrieved a previous employment record instead of latest. 



Ironically, since then, the crawlers are getting the right information for these contacts. But since this right information (company, title) is same as what's already associated with the contact, we ignore it since we don't want to flag the card in C360 or raise a CTA. The only enhancement we will make in May is make the reporting more clear. Of course we want to continue investing in the accuracy and in the short term we will work on communicating the monthly accuracy level.



I'm not sure if I've been able to articulate the crux of the issue well. I look forward to speaking with you soon and elaborate more, understand how many sponsor changes were inaccurate, and plan to get sponsor tracking working for you again. Are you available to speak tomorrow Friday between 8am - noon PST, Monday 3pm - 5pm PST or Tuesday any time? 



For other customers reading this, I will also host a broader meeting on this topic for those interested. 



Thanks,

Gaurav
Userlevel 7
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Many thanks, Gaurav, for doing such thorough research on the issue I'm running into, and for your thoughtful & timely reply. I'd appreciate the opportunity to connect on the phone, since I admit that your explanation gives be a better understanding, but I still don't feel like I'm 100% clear on where this was at, where it's at now, and where it's going. 11am Pacific on Friday would be fine for me. Could you email me a meeting invite?
Userlevel 7
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Hi Seth,I recently started going through all of the unanswered or unresolved problems and questions here. Was checking to see if this  has been resolved or if it is an ongoing issue ?
Userlevel 7
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Hi Sai,

Thank you for checking -- I've gotten an answer to my questions here, and I now understand the underlying technology of Sponsor Tracking far better. My next step is to wait until Gainsight has humans validating each sponsor tracking alert before those alerts are actually passed into our data.
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We are finding the same to be true for our Sponsor Tracking - a CTA will fire, alerting a CSM that there is a match found, and then when the CSM goes in to view the Match, it says "We did not find any matches yet for this contact". 







I fear this CTA has become simply "noise" on the Cockpit.  Any suggestions or updates now to improve this workflow?
Hi Seth,



Human validation is in place for sponsor tracking for the last ~3 months. Please let us know if you have noticed any difference in the quality of changes and whether you are still seeing any false positives.



Thanks,
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Hi Kate,



This used to be an issue earlier and we fixed it around 3 months back.



But unfortunately, provided fix won't work for old pending profiles(old means profiles before fix).



To make it work please untrack and track a profile back.



Still if you see some issue please provide profile linked-in url to us. We will have a look on it.



Thanks,

Prateek
Userlevel 7
Badge +6
Thank you, Rajesh! We haven't been keeping an eye on the Sponsor tracking data, but I actually just got asked about it today, since our marketing team likes to nurture previous customers who have moved to new companies. It's great to know that I can rely on the data again.

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