I think this is overkill. First off, Copilot is already a beast to manage for our marketing team...I wouldn't want to clutter up the Templates and Outreaches space with a lot of additional "one off" templates and outreaches. (I assume these would show up in the primary Co-Pilot in this scenario). Also, how would outreach scheduling be managed? If you have 100 CSMs globally all creating their own outreaches, that would have to have some kind of impact on the overall scheduling engine within Co-Pilot.
Those are just the first concerns I have off the top of my head.
What about a different tactic? How about enabling the ability to create "on demand" power lists or pre-defined powerlists based on a common set of criteria to whom CSMs may need to email regularly (all users, only Admin users, etc) from with a CTA Email Task? (
https://community.gainsight.com/gainsight/topics/cockpit-send-an-email-to-a-group-powerlist-of-users...)
Here, you could create one standard Email Template and attach it to a generic playbook. The CSM could simply create a Manual CTA, attach this playbook, then use the Email Task to send the email out to the target list of contacts.
Much better than creating a Mini-Copilot in my opinion.
Excellent discussion here! Way back when, one of the use cases we collected for the original design of CoPilot centered on one our Gainsight CSMs who sent his own 'Tips and Trick's emails to his portfolio. This use case got de-emphasized as full 1-many strategies inside CSM and AM teams exploded. I do think that the potential with individual CSMs is huge. My instinct is closer to Jeff's POV in that we could look to build 'up' from Email Assist rather than 'down' from full CoPilot. I definitely agree that designing a Power List from scratch is not something everyone will be comfortable doing. Do you think that we could get most of the way there by letting admins define default Power Lists for the CSM. E.g. each CSM might have access to a 'whole portfolio' Power List plus one for 'all users' for each of their Customers. They could then use something like Email Assist (but with an optional entry point outside of a CTA/Task) with the Power List as the 'to'. We have in mind something very much like that for the future of Gsnap.
I also agree with Jeff about not going down the mini-CoPilot route. What if we did something simple with the Email Assist To: field? I'd love to see some 'smart direction' there. For example, rather than filling in a name, fill in a role i.e. Admin. We could type in something like 'My Clients' in the To field and have it automatically filter to the contacts where that individual is listed as the CSM.
Just a brainstorm,
Elizabeth
I'm loving what Email Assist brings as far as functionality, which is part is what sparked my idea about something that is more than Email Assist, but not as complex as CoPilot.
One of the concerns I would see with accomplishing the outreaches I'm thinking of via a CTA would be that CTAs live on individual customer accounts, so I'd have to manually create a CTA for each customer that I'd want to send the template out to.
And I'm totally agreed with you, Jeff, that full CoPilot is going to be more complicated than the average CSM would be able to effectively learn and use. Maybe it would be as simple as simply defining a list of contacts with less options that are in the full powerlist? And then being provided an email editor where the message could be typed or pasted in, with ability to add tokens so the message could be personalized?
Yes Karl I agree with "letting admins define default Power Lists for the CSM. E.g. each CSM might have access to a 'whole portfolio' Power List plus one for 'all users' for each of their Customers." and "an optional entry point outside of a CTA/Task" so long as we have a way to track the emails that were sent via this method. Thanks!!
Just loving the virtual brainstorm here! (I am currently in a plane flying to India, which somehow makes it even more special. 🙂 Totally with you on not having CTA tasks as the only way for CSMs to get to email functionality. What would you think about a button like we have with Gsnap that floats on the Cockpit page that you can use to initiate an email. You select from some predefined set of template options and Power List (or a variation like the 'admin at this account' idea that Elizabeth proposed -- that is super cool). Wouldn't get logged as a CTA Task, of course, but would as an Activity of Type email in our (forthcoming!) Notes, Activity and Timeline feature.
I like it! Would love to get a preview / chat further with product team on the implementation of this if possible.
This is a great idea, Karl! Would take care of the majority of use cases I can think of. Awesome!
Ditto to Jeff!
We will talk in detail about Notes, Activities and Timeline in the Customer Roadmap Webinar on Nov. 3. That will be helpful background and since I know you are all coming to that (see what I did there 🙂, we can plan to follow up on the email topic later next month.
Great idea!! One note: reporting on emails sent directly by the CSM, rather than the scheduled by the Admin, will require the same level of reporting capability, at least for us.
Good point - Us, too
Any movement on this topic?
Our use case is exactly what you describe in the original post.
Email Assist is a non-starter because you have to create one CTA per account and manually address/token each one. So, the email template doesn't save much time and requires configuration time by either the Admin or CSM to trigger the CTAs.
I still like the Mini-CoPilot idea, assuming it would sit separate from CoPilot (i.e. not clutter the official CoPilot outreaches).
Late to the conversation, but this is exactly what we need! Just a place that our CSMs can go, grab an email template and send it to whoever they want. We have the same pain points that many above have mentioned:
- Don't want to create 30 CTAs in order to reach out to their 30 customers
- No other way to get a Gainsight email template in front of CSMs besides individual CTAs per company (we've stopped providing email templates through Gainsight because it's, by far, not the most efficient option).
- Most our CSMs are working around the limitation by creating one CTA, grabbing the verbiage from the email template and then sending from their own email. Not only do these not get tracked in timeline, but there's risk that they may forget attachments or other important info in the copy/paste.
The ability to define preset powerlists would be an added bonus! (as long as they have the option to send templates without a powerlist and just type in email addresses, as well).
Any chance this feature has made it's way to a roadmap?
Agreed. This keeps coming up for us as well. Our use cases are similar to the ones above. Once our CSMs hear about Copilot, that's the first place their heads go is to sending email to all their clients at once. Obviously, they can do via Outlook, but what interests them more here is the auto-tracking to Timeline and the ability to see Opens, Clicks, etc.
Agreed. This keeps coming up for us as well. Our use cases are similar to the ones above. Once our CSMs hear about Copilot, that's the first place their heads go is to sending email to all their clients at once. Obviously, they can do via Outlook, but what interests them more here is the auto-tracking to Timeline and the ability to see Opens, Clicks, etc.
+1 to this need. Needs are tracking opens and having email content templates that can be sent to 1, some or all - essentially replacing tout which is overkill for CSMs
