In Timeline, add external contacts who don't exist as Contacts

This is a very good use case. It would be cool if when contact is not found it pops up a window where you could actually create the contact on the fly.

Agreed - would be a great to automatically add a contact from within Timeline like you can in the regular contacts section. 

Or maybe that functionality pops up when you Log the activity? That way, you may know more at that point about their title, role, etc.

Hi Seth, as an end user of Timeline myself, I share your pain around new contacts. :)



I'll give you my personal workflow that addresses both convenience and contact hygiene for me. If I have a call with someone that is not in our SFDC contact database, I definitely agree that adding them on the fly is a bad idea - my focus needs to stay on the call.



What I do in that case is I'll note at the top of the plain text notes field "NEW CONTACT:" and then verify spelling of their first and last name as well as their email. Our SFDC org allows those as the bare minimum. After the call concludes, I pop open the contact list for that account and add the contact using the information I jotted down. 



This is important as arguably the #1 failure of CRM systems is bad accuracy on contacts or missing contacts. This step makes sure I do it before I can add them as an external contact to the timeline activity. 



Finally, since Timeline pulls data in real time, I don't need to refresh the page or browser after I've added the contact in SFDC. Just start typing their name in the external contacts pane and it now appears. 🙂

Hi All,



Thanks for post and ideas. We are planning to add the functionality to add attendees who don't exist as a contact.

Would you also like us to automatically add these attendees as a contact? Along with automatically adding them as a contact, would it be useful if we show a small pop-up to add additional data of the contact e.g. full name, role, etc.



Thanks,

Nitisha

Thanks, Nitisha. I'm checking with our CSMs on what they'd prefer.

Thanks, Dan! This is more of an edge-case for us, since all users of our product are automatically pushed into Contacts, so I think it'd be unlikely for our CSMs to build the muscle-memory on a specific workflow. I did point out to them the crux of your trick, though -- that the field is a live-search, which works stupendously with multiple browser tabs.

This would not work for us, unfortunately.  We need to add free-text contacts to Timeline Activities as our non-clients should never be added as Salesforce contacts.

No, please do not add as Salesforce contacts automatically.  This might be a good toggle for admins to have.

Hi Angela, we love that you are planning on using Gainsight as your Customer Success CRM system!



Can you explain a bit more about your business logic that determines when a contact should be added to the SFDC CRM system vs the Gainsight CRM system?

Thanks, Dan.  One example is when our CSMs need to track non-athenaNet users who are not in Salesforce at all and never should be.  These might include an insurance company representative that might join client meetings to help resolve issues with claim submissions.  It will be important to note that person attended the meetings and be able to filter for meeting when this person attended, but we would never add this person to Salesforce since their relationship is with the client and not with us directly.  Salesforce is used by all departments at athenahealth and we would not want to create any confusion about who we can speak to.

I'm with @Angela Domenichelli - Please don't add.  SFDC should house only those contacts/clients we have direct contact with at the Account level.  As she states above, "It will be important to note that person attended the meetings and be

able to filter for meeting when this person attended, but we would never

add this person to Salesforce since their relationship is with the

client and not with us directly."  Makes or better data hygiene.