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spencer_engel
Expert ⭐️
Jan 30, 2019 8:03 PM UTC
Solved

There's no way to automate reports to internal Execs in Gainsight

A customer of mine wants to be able to send reports to her boss. The use case is pretty straightforward: Right now, the exec is sent an Excel spreadsheet every Friday with a list of their accounts and key attributes. This exec does not have access to Gainsight, so simply having the exec viewing a dashboard will not work.

So what my customer wanted to do is automate a report that would be sent out to the Exec. Initially, I figured this would be straightforward, only to discover that all the potential solutions solve about 75% of the use case.

  • Send a program - Can't do this because every recipient has to be associated with an account ID. Even if the exec were assigned to a dummy account (which is apparently our suggestion?), the exec still wouldn't be able to get the report that spans across the whole customer base.
  • Send an outreach - At least with an outreach, you are still allowed to send to internal users without associating them to a dummy account. (Which begs the question: why can we not do this with programs anymore?) However, I recently discovered that we cannot attach reports to these outreaches, so I can't achieve this use case.
  • Share a dashboard - I suppose I can do this, but not in an automated fashion.
I'd love to hear if I'm missing something obvious here or if product has anything to add here with suggestions for how to achieve an important use case like this.

abhishek_sivaraman
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Feb 1, 2019 4:54 PM UTC
Hey All,

Valid Points. Good News here. We are going to remove the need to mandate account id/relationship id to reports when you send it via programs.

Also, we are including a exclusive strategy for Users in program which will help address these use cases specifically. It should be available in the coming 1 or 2 months.

Thanks

Abhishek S

31 replies

kelly
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Feb 1, 2019 6:59 PM UTC
Very exciting Abhishek!

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darkknight
Expert ⭐️
Feb 1, 2019 7:04 PM UTC
Abhishek - what is the resistance to enabling this from directly within Report Builder? Journey Orchestrator should not be our solution for internal reporting and dashboard delivery. With the volume of interest we have to have reports and/or dashboards emailed to managers, directors, executives, we're talking about a LOT of clutter and overhead in using Programs.

I am - and will continue to - advocating for a Report and/or Dashboard feature that allows scheduled delivery of reports directly from those tools, similar to how Salesforce does it. Journey Orchestrator should be considered a stop-gap, not a solution.

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Jeff Kirkpatrick
angelahibdon
Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Feb 1, 2019 7:28 PM UTC
I appreciate that there are efforts being made to make delivery of reports easier, however, I completely agree with Jeff. We also use Salesforce.

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Angela Hibdon
darkknight
Expert ⭐️
Feb 1, 2019 7:46 PM UTC
Thanks Angela.

Abhishek - to elaborate on this a bit more, in Salesforce I create the report, then Schedule Future Runs, add a user/email. Done and done.

If you're envisioning this to work with the typical JO functionality

WIth Journey Orchestrator, you have to (at a minimum)

- build the report in Report Builder

- go to JO and create an Email Template to attach the report

- Create a Program and Select your model

- create your source data set

- make sure you map any fields appropriately on steps 2-5 on the Participants Config (and save each one separately)

- go attach your template to the program model and map any tokens asappropriate

- End the outreach

- Publish the outreach

- Schedule the outreach

This of course doesn't even reflect the amount of clutter that will show in the Templates, Programs and Program Calendar.

There are so many extra steps required to this through a Journey Program.

I understand you can deliver something faster using Journey Orchestrator, but for internal/operational purposes, this belongs in Report or Dashboard Builder.

Please consider the user experience and the overhead required to develop and maintain for this use case.

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Jeff Kirkpatrick
darkknight
Expert ⭐️
Mar 1, 2019 7:31 PM UTC
diane_morneau
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mar 4, 2019 1:05 PM UTC
How about using a csv file to distribute your reports with Program until something better is made available?

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kelly
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mar 4, 2019 6:45 PM UTC
The report has to be associated with an account or relationship in order to attach it. There is no way to send a cumulative report (such as email metrics for previous 7 days) to a contact in programs.

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darkknight
Expert ⭐️
Mar 4, 2019 9:03 PM UTC
And I want to keep the pressure on to ensure that something better IS going to be made available.

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Jeff Kirkpatrick
amanda_neil
Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mar 12, 2019 2:23 PM UTC
This is defintely something we are trying to do and do not have the ability to do today. It seems simple enough that being able to schedule a report, not a dashboard, to run every week or based on a schedule would not be difficult, but maybe I am missing something. Hoping Gainsight has this ability soon.

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Helper ⭐️
Mar 17, 2019 6:20 PM UTC
This is a big need for us as well and would help our internal support team know which prospects and clients to add to Zendesk if triggered automatically as a report export.

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Anastassia Goidina