In line editing in tabular report on dashboard

Thanks Jessica.!  I've heard this same request from a few customers as well.  Although different, it's similar to the concept of being able to manually edit scores from the "scorecard UI" view on Gainsight home.  A couple of high-touch customers that have multiple manual scorecard measures love how you can click & edit right on the screen for all your customers in one view.  Those same customers want to be able to edit other fields in a similar fashion (in some kind of Gainsight home or Customers tab tabular view). 

Hi Jessica,

Do they need this capability for Customers or Relationships (or both)? For Customers, would such a feature in our Customers tab be enough for now, or do you think Dashboards have to be supported as well (if yes, some example use-cases would be good)?

Thanks,
Manu

Hi Jessica,

We cannot provide inline edit of all data in tabular reports. Reason is that we need to take care of the business logic. For example, when you edit a measure score in scorecard mass edit view, the overall score cell should also change. This is custom business logic applicable only to scorecards. Similarly, there will be different business logic for different product sections and to take care of all these business logics will be a massive undertaking for the engg team. We can however provide in-line edit of text fields which generally don't have any business logic associated with it. This particular request is in the roadmap and will be executed.

Thanks,
Sumesh    

Hi Sumesh,

I had a customer request the ability to make in-line edits on text fields within a tabular report on a dashboard. Do you have insight into when this particular functionality may be implemented into the product?

Thanks!
Josh

Some version of this might be taken up next quarter, but I'll let Gaurav confirm. Could you please share some examples with us to better understand what kinds of data sets customers are wanting to update inline from dashboards?

Hi Manu - a good use case requiring this functionality would be running a renewal risk meeting. See below simplified example:

• The Customer, ARR and Renewal Date fields are pulled from system data.
• The Renewal Risk field would be modified via drop down where the user/manager would classify the renewal based on predefined categories.
• The Forecasted ARR would be a formula field where the ARR is multiplied by a factor related to risk - Commit would be 100% of the ARR, while various risk levels would reduce the Forecasted ARR.
• Notes would be a free text entry field

This would allow managers to run renewal meetings and update a large portfolio of customers without having to pull up each customer's C360 and edit fields exposed in the Attributes section.

Thoughts on this?

That's a fantastic use-case, Dan. 

We obviously don't want these comments to be siloed, so I'm assuming these should go back to the respective customer's Timeline. One potential direction we have been discussing internally is to add the ability to invoke the Timeline (for one customer at a time) from such reports. This would allow us to both consume and contribute with full rich-text capabilities vs. just making do with an editable comments field. 

The next level of thinking then is around whether or not this 'Renewal Risk Meeting' is something special. That is, is this something bigger than just a simple tabular report? Could we have notes and action items drawn from this meeting, as opposed to just individual customers? Do we want to remember who we discussed in each of the previous meetings (list)? Something like this would require a broader set of capabilities that we could build over the next few releases.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Hi Manu, I had not thought specifically of an integration with timeline, as this would be an internal meeting reviewing multiple customers vs. a customer facing interaction. 

In the example above, the data fields would just be data fields present on the SFDC account record or Gainsight Customer record. Some of the data presented would not be editable, like renewal date or current ARR; but some data fields would be editable like renewal likelihood and notes (and maybe something like "planned new ARR"). 

The goal is that instead of running renewal planning meetings out of excel (which we and most customers do today) that we could run them out of Gainsight. 

I'm sure there are other use cases too for instances where a report of multiple records in tabular format would require certain fields to be open to edit. 

Another good use case would be related to updating contacts in SFDC. Currently I periodically review all "core contacts" (adoption champion, GS admin, decision maker, etc) in my customer base, but if a contact is no longer a "core contact" I have to go to their specific contact record and edit them. It's a manual and tedious process. 

If I had a table of all core contacts for all customers and the contact role field was editable, I could quickly edit contacts via table instead of one-by-one on the SFDC contact page.

Inline editing of these fields would be SUPER helpful!!

Makes sense, Dan. I was not suggesting that an integration with Timeline is all we need. For the types of fields you mentioned, inline editing (or a similar form construct) is extremely useful and I can see how you might update a bunch of such fields during your review sessions. However, I don't think it's enough from a note-taking perspective. So perhaps a combination is what we need. 

Ah...I think I understand the confusion. I mentioned notes as it relates to any text comments related to that specific renewal event - not as in "note taking" for the account. 🙂