Email assist available in all CTAs

Or having the Playbook get replaced just to add one blank email template

Hi Angela - are you still looking to use a template in this use case or just allow the CSM to email the customer and have the email recorded in Timeline?

The CSM would like to generate an email to the client associated with a CTA without needing to create a new "Blank Email Template" playbook associated CTA.  It would be nice to have the CSMs signature included in the blank email - but that is a whole other suggestion I have added to Community.  The CSMs should be able to create as many free form emails as necessary to resolve a CTA and have them all grouped in the single CTA.  It is possible 1 CSM would use a single templated email, but another CSM has a client that prefers to communicate by email and so all follow-up is done via email instead of phone call.  For the same CTA, with 2 different clients, the amount and content included in email communications can vary.  The request is for the CSM to have control over how many times and what content they are emailing for each CTA and still maintain the integrity of the CTA.

I like this suggestion - there are many times within a CTA that my team need to send multiple Emails and do not want to create a separate CTA.The ability to add "email tasks" to an existing CTA would be really useful.

One of the things we are thinking about is tighter integration between Gainsight and email clients (Outlook, Gmail, etc). There are (at least) two ways to solve for this. Would love your thoughts on what you have seen work the best:
1 - provide an extension so that from within your email client you can optionally sync an email you are going to send and have it appear in Gainsight. The user would select the correct Account, Relationship and maybe even CTA so that the email is mapped correctly.
2 - provide a lightweight email client interface in Gainsight so that you would pull up the Account or CTA and then send the email from within Gainsight, but the sending of the email would actually be done via your email client (more aligned with cloud services like Gmail or Office 365)

or what other tools have you used that managed the integration of the application with the user's email client? What did they do well and what did they miss the mark on?

I like both Options, and both would definitely work we ll to enable sending emails and in this case option 2 would be good. However, I guess there are other considerations wider than just the sending of emails - around how to elegantly record the response to the emails in gainsight (where it warrants it) and link it to the CTA. Some feedback from my team of CSMs is that they send an email from the Email Assist and then when they get a reply that they want to have in Gainsight - they cannot associate that reply with the original email/CTA and they have to manually go into Timeline and add it as an email activity. Having the ability to sync an email from Outlook (or other mail client) to either a customer/relationship or CTA would be a godsend for them. Especially if this applied to emails being sent or received.

We currently use the SFDC for Outlook add-in to add emails to an object in Salesforce. It works very well and allows you to link an email to an Account, Opportunity, Case or Custom Object directly from Outlook. It can add an email that is being sent or an email that is received. Prior to that we used Cirrus which at the time was the only option for gmail with SFDC.  It worked in the same way. Both worked well. I would say the SFDC for Outlook is probably the more elegant and provides excellent search facilities to find exactly where you want to sync your email.

Happy to discuss further.

Angela F said everything I was going to say, except we never used Cirrus.  

I would agree with Angela as well.  I have worked with Outlook integration with SF and we had the option to push the emails we chose vs sending over all sent emails from outlook to in order to minimize the clutter on an accounts activity page.  There was a feature at one point where you could select "Send and Save to SF" from within the email message in outlook and it would automatically sync it with the contact record in SF.  

One thing about the sync that was difficult was that we cannot move over the images often used in emails to our clients (screenshots) and this was true with copying and pasting the current email into the timeline now.  

In a perfect world I would love to see where we send the email with the option that we want to send it to SF, it syncs with the correct contact and account in SF and then populates in the timeline in the C360 of the account the contact is associated with..