Timeline FTW

  • 25 September 2017
  • 6 replies
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  • Gainsight Employee: ACE
  • 548 replies
When you switch from "use Gainsight however is useful" to "you need to use Timeline", it's slightly visible in the pageviews




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Awesome Seth - we have been seeing this in usage patterns across our customer base.  What are the top use cases for you for Timeline? 
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Whoa!  Seth FTW!!
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Pretty straightforward to begin with! Along the lines of, "Oh for the love, can we just all take notes about customers in the same place?" It makes it easier to find for the CSM themselves, too. That's what got the CSMs on board, along with it simply being a good note-taking tool (auto-save, formatting like bullets, etc.), which is table stakes. It's even gotten some of them interested in Cockpit, thanks to the follow-up Tasks automatically getting created from the Activity.



Our director-level is happy to be able to actually have visibility into what's going on with customers, for those where they're diving in to help triage/troubleshoot/strategize. They're also happy to be able to see what kinds of conversations CSMs are having across customers. Before, there was a lot of uncertainty around, "How many training calls do we do in a given week?" yadda yadda



For my part, as head of customer Ops, I'm eager to be able to see, "What does it actually [i]look like when a CSM has an XYZ-type call with a customer? What training or resources does it seem like they need to do that kind of call well?" I'm also happy to be able to reveal the Timeline to execs via the Account Widget and Sally in Slack.



And, touching on all three of those areas: we're launching a Success Planning effort. Having an Activity Type for "Executive Strategy Session" allows all three of the above groups to keep careful track of how much Success Planning is actually getting off the ground, and how effective it is.
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This is some great feedback Seth and we're really excited to read about the ways that Timeline is helping to solve challenges for your organization! 



What's on your "wish list" for Timeline features that you feel would make it even better/useful?
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Thanks for asking, Dan. One thing we're currently up against is that the Activity doesn't include a template for the Notes. When our CSMs have an Executive Strategy Session, we're asking them to record the notes in a Google Slide template, since its structure forces them (more or less) to fill out every box.



The alternative in Timeline would be to just give them some bullets to copy-paste, but then they might be more likely to skip bullets, rename them, recall them (inaccurately) from memory, etc. So, I'd rather that the Notes area be divided into actual sections for that Activity Type, and maybe they could even be required to fill out each one.



We're also trying to use the Subject to capture the purpose of the call, but we end up with some lousy Subject lines anyways. I'd love to be able to configure a drop-down list of Subject lines for each activity type, and then the CSM could modify it if appropriate, like Salesforce Tasks allow you to set up.



The other thing is that I'm eager to be able to push other pieces of data into Timeline, so that it's a record of the customer lifecycle, not just notes. I'm aware that's on the roadmap, but I think it will amp up the feature substantially for our team, so it bears mentioning.



I've posted another few feature requests here in Community, though I think they'd be less impactful than the above two:


  1. "All my Drafts" view
  2. Handle new External Contacts
  3. Rename standard Activity Types
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Great feedback, thanks for sharing Seth. We are really excited about making improvements to timeline and engaged admins like yourself really help us understand what to focus on. 

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