Calendar Integration to Show Upcoming Planned Meetings - Create a "Gainsight Calendar"

@andreammelde this is an ongoing need for us too, and although it’s not ideal, we will likely be going the route of having a CSM log the activity when the meeting is scheduled with a new activity “status” field that they can set to “Scheduled.” Then, when the meeting comes up, they can open the already logged activity to add in their notes from the meeting and any additional fields. 

Have you all implemented a workaround like this? Would be interested to know what it was and how it’s going.

I guess don’t understand why leaders would need to see the exact time and date for a future scheduled meeting for every customer account.  Sounds kinda like they don’t trust their CSMs to be on top of things. Is tracking the conducted meetings MoM not enough to give them insight into how their CSMs are engaging?

that said, could you use a custom CTA type, setting due date as the date of the meeting and sync those to Google Calendar to show that a meeting is scheduled for that day and report on that specific CTA type/reason with future date and they can log a timeline entry within the CTA to capture minutes?

@darkknight our problem is that only showing completed activities is a lagging metric, and managers are looking for a leading indicator of progress to completing certain activities within the quarter. we have a CSM KPI that is based around completing a certain number of key activities within the quarter, and managers find it hard to know how the team is tracking to goal when they’re only able to see what happened in the past and not what is set to happen in the future.

@sarahmiracle not trying to be adversarial by any means, but how does tracking the number of meetings held equivocate to tracking success for the customer?  I have never been a fan of point-and-click KPIs. 

@darkknight agreed on just monitoring the number of meetings - but we have specific meeting structures we are looking to track. The meeting structure revolve around an SBR type where we review our customers KPIs with our tool - which having a strategic relationship built with customers is shown to have better renewal instead of just being ticket chasers.

@andreammelde I still don’t personally see how tracking scheduled meetings in advance is relevant to that, more so than being able to track that those SBR types have occurred.  Having been a CSM previously, if my leadership wanted to keep tabs on whether or not I have scheduled meetings with customers, I’d feel like they didn’t have any faith in my ability to do my job effectively.  But maybe that’s just me?

@darkknight it’s not just faith in your ability - it’s also coordinating with other team, data points that our BI team can use, etc. Using that date to trigger Journey Orchestrators to help provide information to the CSM so they don’t have to dig for it. 

@andreammelde it’s not my intention here to criticize - just looking at this from the CSM POV. 
I am curious though why you’d have to trigger JO emails to provide info to the CSM rather than creating self-serve dashboard(s) and/or Success Snapshots they can pull necessary data and details for upcoming meetings.  I’ve found that to be far more effective and less intrusive than emails.

@darkknight we do those as well. Often our team, especially as we expand, may not always know the resources they can self serve. We are trying to minimize the “hunt” for self service.

Regardless - having a better connection with our CSM’s calendar to timeline is helpful in general. If there is a question of an account having something on the books, it becomes self-service to the other teams to get the information rather than bugging our CSM who already has a full plate. CSMs could then also have notes pre-set from their calendar to the Timeline, saving them time on templates. We can look at data that can help us understand if the timeline for the meeting needs to be moved.

If this solution doesn’t work for your team, that is totally fine. This would be helpful for the needs and asks of our team

I also think it’s important to consider the maturity of your CS org. We’re new to the CS motions, a relatively young CS team and department. We’re working on building good habits for our CSMs right now -- and those good habits mean having regular touchpoints with your book of business. This isn’t going to be a forever motion, but it’s necessary to build our foundation so we can be more strategic moving forward.