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Accessing the Notes section of a certain user

  • August 26, 2019
  • 9 replies
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Suvi Lehtovaara
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So, my team and I've been using "Notes" section on user profiles - for sharing details internally within our team. We access it by clicking Profile, when moderating topics.



My question is: can this be accessed in any other way? I.E. We do have customers who never post topics nor comments, but only send PMs to us - and there's no link to the users profile in that view.. Or is there?

and, why is this not accessible on the "general" user profile page?

Best answer by Julian

Thanks for sharing your insights, Suvi!

I might have found a workaround for your use case. :)

You could create a profile field which is:
  • a free text field (called "text input")
  • hidden to the user (only visible for Moderators)
  • set to allow enough characters (I have set it to 1000)


Then you can easily click on the username from the pm conversation, and you will see the notes in the profile pages. :)

Tip: If you then drag & drop this profile field to the top of the list in the user profile overview page, it will then also be located at the top in the user profile page. This way you can reduce scrolling a bit and find the info quicker.

As your specific case is... very specific, I would not expect a change in the original user notes behaviour soon. However I hope that with this workaround you have something that you and your colleagues will benefit from!
https://yhteiso.elisa.fi/
Ditte
Rudi

9 replies

Julian
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  • Julian
  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • August 27, 2019
Hi Suvi,

thanks for sharing your question here!

It is true that the notes section can only be accessed via a post of a user. Until now I did not really see an issue, as you usually only need to add notes once a user has become active (in the public community).

why is this not accessible on the "general" user profile page?

"why-questions" are traditionally the hardest to answer. 🙂 My guess is that this has been added quickly to this page a few years ago, to give you a quick opportunity to add a comment to a profile (without having to leave the topic page to see the "regular" user profile page). It probably was not in scope to add this to the regular profile page as it was considerably more work. But that is merely what I think what happened, I cannot find anything in the documentation as it has been added a few years ago...

I surely see your problem here, but I would be curious to hear how often this happens for you? Just to get a feel of the impact on your community. I will look if there is another way to get a note added in your situation, and of course share the feedback so that in the future hopefully you will see the same note option in the regular user profile page.
I follow my nose, it always knows
Suvi Lehtovaara
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  • Suvi Lehtovaara
  • Author
  • Helper ⭐️⭐️
  • August 27, 2019
Hi @Julian !

We've just recently started really utilizing notes, so I don't really have any numbers / percentages to give. BUT, we've made a slight change in our community culture recently - we invite people to send us pm's. Earlier we usually directed them to other customer service channels if the case in question needed more attention or we needed PII data from the customer.

And now that we invite people into sending pm's more "openly", we see that there are some customers that register to our community ONLY to send us a pm. So, there might even be a few customer per day that could fall into this category 🙂
https://yhteiso.elisa.fi/
Julian
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  • Julian
  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • Answer
  • September 4, 2019
Thanks for sharing your insights, Suvi!

I might have found a workaround for your use case. :)

You could create a profile field which is:
  • a free text field (called "text input")
  • hidden to the user (only visible for Moderators)
  • set to allow enough characters (I have set it to 1000)


Then you can easily click on the username from the pm conversation, and you will see the notes in the profile pages. :)

Tip: If you then drag & drop this profile field to the top of the list in the user profile overview page, it will then also be located at the top in the user profile page. This way you can reduce scrolling a bit and find the info quicker.

As your specific case is... very specific, I would not expect a change in the original user notes behaviour soon. However I hope that with this workaround you have something that you and your colleagues will benefit from!
I follow my nose, it always knows
Daniele Cmty
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  • Daniele Cmty
  • Helper ⭐️⭐️
  • October 25, 2022

Hi @Julian that is a brilliant idea!

I have now set up the following field

while it does show up on the backend of the user profile,

 

it does not show up on the frontend in the community.

 

did I do something wrong?

i would like for our admins to see it on the frontend as well, to save some clicks.

 

Julian
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  • Julian
  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • October 25, 2022

Thanks, happy to hear you found that valuable! 

I assume you tested this already while being logged in - I could also not see them here. Which made me think: 

Normally, CMs / Admins do not "delete” profile fields, but rather set them to "hidden”. On inSpired, there would be 5+ profile fields added to your profile page. So I could see if that would be confusing / an overload for people visiting that page.

I don't believe that this is the main reason for this - it probably is more a “historical” limitation in the sense that it was never implemented to work like this in the first place. Moderators usually work in the Control environment, hence probably back then we did not see it as an added value big enough to justify the investment...

I follow my nose, it always knows
Daniele Cmty
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  • Daniele Cmty
  • Helper ⭐️⭐️
  • October 25, 2022

Ok, so I guess there is no way to display it in the frontend. 

In this case we probably won’t make use of this. all the extra clicks may not be worth the effort (i would have to click 2-3 times just to see even check if there is a note in the first place, which in most cases there wouldn’t be.)

Would have been a handy little addition, but well! ¯_(ツ)_/¯  

have a great evening julian :)

Julian
revote
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  • revote
  • VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • August 25, 2023

Thanks @Suvi Lehtovaara for the tip about this topic.

I started to think about, I dont know yet, but if member wants to use his/hers RoA (Right of Access), should that field and the content there, to be included to the RoA report? I dont say this is necessarily issue, I am just thinking aloud.

Suvi Lehtovaara
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  • Suvi Lehtovaara
  • Author
  • Helper ⭐️⭐️
  • August 25, 2023

Thanks @Suvi Lehtovaara for the tip about this topic.

I started to think about, I dont know yet, but if member wants to use his/hers RoA (Right of Access), should that field and the content there, to be included to the RoA report? I dont say this is necessarily issue, I am just thinking aloud.

@revote Probably should be?

https://yhteiso.elisa.fi/
Julian
revote
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  • revote
  • VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • August 25, 2023

@revote Probably should be?

Yep, I think so as well.

Julian
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