Enable Personal Email Templates for CSMs and AMs to create

+1, we are looking to consolidate our email tools and start leveraging Gainsight Assist but the lack of personal templates is a bit of a blocker.

This functionality was just requested by one of our end users too. Would love to see this considered.

Wish I could vote twice here… sharing internally for visibility!

Creating a few templates for our CSM teams is doable. Creating them by the handful is not scalable.

A feature like this needs to tread carefully, especially if used at scale. End Users are not as familiar with digital marketing best practices, opt out reqs etc. Mistakes on the part of an end user could have customer experience, security, legal or sender reputation impact.  At least when an experienced admin owns the creation, the use case has been vetted as appropriate and  have been properly built & tested and the   This (and any end user feature) should be equipped with admin access controls to allow each customer to determine determine if it’s appropriate for their environment/needs and to enforce compliance.

Great point @darkknight -- this feature would definitely be best matched with highly robust access controls.

Maybe if admins had overarching visibility into a template library and were able to review/lockdown/remove templates, to give more control. Not something available to ALL end users, but I could easily see higher-level end users wanting (or needing) to be able to make those changes without having to run everything through one or two admins.

@dayn.johnson I wouldn’t want to sign up for being responsible to review end user templates. If this feature is released, it should be able to be turned off by an admin, then each environment can decide if/when the feature is enabled for end users. And then it’s “use at your own risk”. 

I’m cringing thinking about users misusing/mapping tokens, not testing formatting before sending out. 

@marcos.beinder thanks for raising this, and I think it’s a valid use case.  I understand playbooks/tasks/email templates all have a place in creating a standardized approach in scaled CS.  However, a large part of a successful relationship with an account is the personal touch, which can be lost when applying 1 email template across many CSMs, who each have their own tone and approach.  If the ultimate messaging provided to the customer is the same, I think there is a use case.  Also, CSMs may wish to create their own templates for ad-hoc outreach.

@darkknight, I also share your concerns though about correct use of tokenization, and ensuring these are accurate moving forwards.  It’s a bit like letting someone use report builder when they don’t fully understand how the data is structured, you don’t know if that report is going to be accurate or not.

Saying this, CSMs on top of their game likely just have any content they reuse that is not in templates saved in a word doc or notepad. Perhaps the ability to have email templates and admin ability to turn off/on tokenization?

@Stuart 💯 I like your thought on giving admins the ability to turn off/on tokenization.

I knew that the ability to create templates is already in development (as @ssamarth marth has noted by changing the status of this ticket) as part of the Multi-Customer Email Assist feature. Hence my significant reservations about making Templates broadly open to end users, because if they have the ability to create their own templates and distribute them en masse, it’s even more of a concern. 

There most definitely need to be, as @dayn.johnson put it, “robust access controls” allowing admins to determine when and how this feature and it’s associated capabilities are appropriate and enabled. 

I fully agree, @darkknight -- and I hadn’t even thought about the tokenization issue. *cringe* 

Fantastic idea, @Stuart -- I’d think it’d be something that we might want to be able to lock either the template or certain content blocks for editing -- which starts to bring up another avenue into an email template “saved content block” library. It’d make it so much easier if CSMs were able to drag and drop in content blocks as needed that already had tokens properly configured, and were then able to customize the email as needed.

Maybe something in the templates that admins are able to review and lock/unlock, so once CSM leads, for instance, put their requested build together, it was able to be reviewed/approved.

I could definitely get behind this with a good approval process, and working with a few select individuals who understood the tokenization process. There’s definitely a lot that goes into the customization/tokenization/formatting, my main thinking was around trying to reduce a bottleneck if there was a need for templates available for CSMs.