Assign CTAs to a CSM Pool or Queue

Many companies are mixing digital touch and low touch as a way to more effectively manage the long tail of their customers. Through low touch, they need a way to easily manage a large amount of customers with very few CSMs. In this world, it’s not uncommon to see 1000 customers being managed by one CSM. This can often be quite challenging to manage for a CSM and it can often lead to an unbalanced workload across the team. 

The solve this, companies want to use Pooled CSM teams that work across the entire customer segment and aren’t assigned to a specific portfolio. Each CSM is dedicated to all accounts in the segment and would be assigned CTAs on a round-robin sequence based on their availability. This idea is similar to how support queues work in ticketing systems. There is no dedicated rep so the system identifies which person the ticket should next be assigned to. 

Current Workaround

I have previously implemented workarounds to solve for this use case but they aren’t very scalable. Here’s what we did:

• We created a new user called CS Pool. We set up the email as a distribution list so that it would notify everyone in the pool whenever Gainsight sent a notification. 
• We assigned all low touch accounts to this CSM Pool user.
• All CTAs are automatically assigned to the CSM Pool user and we used reports, dashboards, and the Cockpit for CSMs to see when a new CTA was created. 
• Once the CTA is created, it was up to the CSMs to pick it up and assign it to themselves. Managers were also able to triage the queue and assign CTAs to CSMs if needed.

For this solution, CSMs were self-assigned. If a CTA was still assigned to the CSM Pool user, it meant a CSM wasn’t working on it yet. We used this CSM assignment as the first step for the team to know if something was being worked on or not which helped us to better manage the queue. 

Improved Solution

The workaround above has many gaps. It is completely dependent on CSMs self-assigning themselves to tickets. This works ok for small teams but quickly becomes ineffective for teams of 5 or more CSMs. It also enables CSMs who want to grab all the CTAs and those who want to just sit on the side lines. 

An improved solution would be to have a similar concept of Salesforce’s Support Queues. Ideally, it would be great if we could create queues in Gainsight and assign CSMs to the queue. And then, ideally, we could use the rules engine to create assignment rules or order similar to how Salesforce uses assignment rules. 

In Salesforce’s assignment rule, you can define the following. I know it will likely be quite a bit of work to build this in GS but it would be helpful if we could at the very least be able to define the Order, Criteria, and User.