5.2 Release - need ability to hide the Community and Support links on the GS search bar

Related products: None

We need the abilty to restrict the Community and Support links that exist on the GS search bar to ONLY Gainsight users with Gainsight Admin access permissions.











We do not want our end users opening support tickets with Gainsight directly (believe me, Gainsight does not want this either) or logging ideas/problems to the Gainsight community.  The ideas posted to the community from Red Hat need to be managed/throttled through our operations/administration team to ensure they are inline with our internal roadmap.





This to me feels like a pretty big item from an operational perspective.  How quickly can this get rectified?
Hi Jeff,  The support link is not for filing tickets but to provide access to Gainsight documentation. (Most folks don't have access to filing tickets anyway.)  On the community, we expect that over time there will be discussions not just about product features but on CSM skills etc. so it really is appropriate for everyone.  And anyway, we are happy to hear all inputs on the product and understand that most folks won't speak for Red Hat per se.  
Karl I can only speak on behalf of Red Hat, but if you will notice there are customers other than Red Hat liking this post.





All we are asking for is the ability to make this optional as we need to regulate this type of engagement between end user and Gainsight.  Is there a reason this cannot be made optional instead of required?
Quick add here...I acknowledge that the link is primarily to Gainsight GO for documentation and you are right that most users do not have access to file tickets (that probably won't stop them from trying) but we also don't want our end users to be confused either.  Much of what Gainsight has documented is either Admin related and our end users don't need access to that...or there are features that do not apply to our use case or we have not yet implemented and, again, do not want our CSMs trying things they read on Gainsight's website which may not be appropriate or applicable to our environment.





Plus, having a link to the Community from within the tool really positions the Community as more of a place to receive support and information about features and the use of Gainsight tool, rather than CSM skills and  CS industry best practices.   





I believe it should be left up to each customer to determine what is "appropriate" for their environment in this case rather than having that decision made for us, thus having the ability to disable the direct link to Gainsight GO and the Community should be an option that each organization can opt in or out of.
Hi Karl,


I do work at Red Hat now, but coming from another organization that was a Gainsight customer, I would have to agree with Jeff on this one. We had our own internal process to address Gainsight requests, ideas, and adds that our ops team would then contribute to the community or ask support. Jeff is right, where it can lead to confusion for a CSM, is when they click a link thinking they can put in a support ticket and don't have access and then don't know where to go from there, causing frustration with the system. 


I do foresee other problems with a majority of the training documentation being directed at admins, as well. 


I totally understand wanting to drive traffic and facilitate conversation on the community, so even if we could just restrict this so that only admins had this option on their view, that would be super helpful.


Thanks!
Do you see the Gainsight documentation and community links as different from the Salesforce "Help and Training" link in the header? One difference I see is that Salesforce has combined the two under Success Community, while Gainsight has Gainsight Go and Community as separate sites. Salesforce has both user and admin specific content, but perhaps their organization is less confusing. 





Just trying to better understand the concerns. Perhaps there is something we could do to that doesn't require taking away the entry points altogether. Admins would most likely be more active on such sites than end-users would, as I'm sure is the case with Salesforce too. But don't think we should be creating barriers for end-users, unless absolutely necessary. Just my 2 cents. 🙂
Hi


Have to agree with Jeff here for all the reasons he listed. We havent deployed all Gainsight features here so this has the potential to cause confusion amongst our user base. 


Whilst Manu draws parallels with Salesforce Help and Training we also have issues there sometimes where reps log tickets directly with Salesforce when they should be logging them through our internal systems similar to what Grace and Jeff describe above.


I would vote for making this configurable.
Manu/Karl - this is a legitimate request.  We, as the administrators and operations managers, know our individual environments, our end users, and our needs in this area and this has potential to make our jobs harder.





Some customers may want to have the community and support portal accessible to their end users, but you cannot assume that every customer feels the same way.   We are not asking you to remove this completely.   All we are asking is that you give us the option to make this configurable so that we as your customers can choose for ourselves what level of permissions sets are able to see and access those links.
Any additional consideration been given to making this configurable? 
Any additional consideration been given to making this configurable? 
I would like to raise this again. I am not really concerned about what other applications do or don't do - having these links in Gainsight has already caused us some issues.





We have an internal support process for Gainsight. Our end users do not need a link with direct access (nor should they) to Gainsight Support directly. Apparently you don't have to be a registered support user in order to leverage Chat.





We have enablement and training teams that provide documentation and training on features we have released internally. Our end users do not need a link with direct access to Gainsight documentation. Our end users do not need prompts to tell them "What's New" (unless that can be configured by US). This actually just confuses them because we haven't released nor do we leverage all of Gainsight's features at this point.





Look at this from the administrator's point of view and the challenges that this can cause. I cannot imagine we're the only company that would appreciate being able to disable those links.




We cannot have our userbase reaching out to Gainsight support for every day issues we, as admins, can resolve. It is critical that we be able to turn off access to Support (book icon) or have the ability to direct them somewhere else.

Any plans to include this feature in the near future?

Thanks,
Amanda and several hundred CSMs at ADP


Let me try to get this on the radar.