Recent Gainsight Assist changes introduce risks/challenges

For all the conversations we have that a tool like Gainsight should bring to life a process that’s well thought out and effective, introducing a way to bypass required fields is a miss.

CS Ops and Gainsight CS experts spend significant energy building processes and workflows which are carefully crafted, then expertly built in Gainsight CS. To have those broken by a planned change (hat tip @romihache for detailing the pain), with no definitive timeline (pun quite intended) to make an additional change is unsettling.

Hearing there’s a VCAM, in my humble experience, is not a reassuring message if I have broken processes and workflows. What I interpret, fairly or unfairly, is that we’re months away from updates here. As a CS Ops expert, I’m left wondering

• Must I re-enable my CS team on how to best utilize Gainsight Assist? Or must I re-enable my CS team to update Timeline entries now missing required fields?
• Must I build new Reports to document the impact of the data quality deterioration introduced by the Gainsight Assist change?
• Must I re-build workflows, in the form of Rules or Data Designers or Scorecards or Programs to account for records with required fields not having values in those fields?

This is a change management “miss”, and I’m joining the chorus, currently composed of some very long-time, very loyal and very experienced Gainsight experts, that help arrive sooner rather than later.

Well said @matthew_lind 

I will add that, while the majority of the focus and urgency in the comments is rightly on the missing required fields, the fact that not every Timeline Activity makes sense to be logged via Gainsight Assist and admins must have the ability to “hide” certain types from GA should not be overlooked or forgotten. That also can affect data integrity as noted in the initial post.

Hello all,

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused by our recent changes in GS Assist plugins which may have affected your workflows.

We value your feedback and are actively working on improvements.

To address your concerns, for now, we’ve introduced a tenant level feature flag which when disabled can revert back to the previous functionality. 

Currently, it can not be configured by admin and you will have to reach out to support, and create a ticket to get it disabled.

@kstim for awareness! ☝

For context, while we understand that not everyone is satisfied with the updates, we’ve also heard from customers who are happy with the improvements. The goal is to balance the needs of all our customers so after considering all perspectives, we made the intentional decision not to roll back the changes for everyone. Additionally, we want Admins to be able to manage how and when they communicate any reversions to their end users.

@Ritika Jindal @sshroff 

I was told by my CSM that adding required fields to the selector in Gainsight Assist is not presently on the roadmap. 

To clarify - admins were not asking for the ability to turn off the Activity Type selector because we/our users don’t need that ability - we desperately need that ability, however for most of us it’s not usable and contributes to data problems without having the required fields available.

IMO this should be a top roadmap priority as it will improve the end user experience significantly. 

In tandem with that item, this should also be a top priority.

 

Dear Admins,

For the requirements around showing mandatory fields for the selected activity type , I want your inputs on a few things. Lets assume mandatory fields are available in GS Assist.

• For logging an inbound email (email received from a customer or anyone else) do you want us to
  • Restrict the logging of email by a CSM if mandatory fields are not filled  or
  • Not restrict it and just show it in the company timeline’s ‘draft’ so that they can come later and know certain fields are pending from their end to be filled  or
  • Log to company timeline even if mandatory fields are not filled (this is whats happening today as well) ?
• For logging an outbound email (mail sent by your CSM ) do you want us
  • Not to log that mail to timeline if mandatory fields are not filled or
  • Log it to the company’s timeline ‘draft’ or
  • Log to company timeline even if mandatory fields are not filled (this is whats happening today as well)?

Please let me know if you would also like to connect 1-1 for this.

Also, what are the different field types you make mandatory for an activity? Currently there are 7 field types supported for an activity- Date, number, date time, dropdown list, multi-select dropdown, checkbox and text.

Do you ever make associated records as mandatory?

Asking all of these questions to understand the requirements better.

​@Ritika Jindal 

Looking at each of the scenarios you mentioned:

• For logging an inbound email (email received from a customer or anyone else) do you want us to
  • Restrict the logging of email by a CSM if mandatory fields are not filled  - By “Restrict” I assume you mean it will prompt the user and they cannot proceed with logging until the fields are complete?  This is the ideal scenario.
  • Not restrict it and just show it in the company timeline’s ‘draft’ so that they can come later and know certain fields are pending from their end to be filled  - This is not ideal, IMO, because in my experience CSMs forget to go remedy their draft folder and admins are not able to report on drafts
  • Log to company timeline even if mandatory fields are not filled (this is whats happening today as well) - This is what we’re trying to avoid, so, no.
• For logging an outbound email (mail sent by your CSM ) do you want us
  • Not to log that mail to timeline if mandatory fields are not filled - It shouldn’t allow them to send the email if the required fields are not populated.
  • Log it to the company’s timeline ‘draft’ - This is not ideal, IMO, because in my experience CSMs forget to go remedy their draft folder and admins are not able to report on drafts
  • Log to company timeline even if mandatory fields are not filled (this is whats happening today as well)? - This is what we’re trying to avoid, so, no.

I think ideally  if there are mandatory fields that are not populated, Gainsight Assist would prompt the user and

• For Outbound Email: not let them send the email until the mandatory fields are populated
• For Inbound Email: not let them proceed with logging the email until the mandatory fields are populated

This is the safest approach IMO to maintain data hygiene standards.

Any field flagged as mandatory should be eligible for these restrictions, regardless of type, because any of those types could qualify depending on the use case.

Not everyone uses Associated Records, so I would only make that required if ARs are in use. 

On this, considering the issues I had creating new fields in call to action and task objects because “required fields weren’t populated”, we must not under any circumstance allow the logging of anything without required fields as it will likely, aside from data quality issues, cause other issues such as preventing us from creating new fields on timeline entries or using the timeline API or who knows what else. 

Realized never clicked on send, but I can see my response is aligned with what we have above😅

Hi ​@Ritika Jindal  Personally, I will go with the first option. If the mandatory fields are not filled in, mirror the experience we have in timeline. The second option has the potential of having drafts sitting forever (as admins we can’t do anything about them, not even know they exist) and the third one is what we are asking to avoid at all costs because it causes data quality issues and disrupts workflows.

I can see different scenarios where any datatype can be mandatory and I don’t see any reason why the experience should be different based on datatype. Same for Associated Records, if they are in use for the org the experience should be the same. #parity