Time tracking integrations

@dan_ahrens How are the CSM’s liking retain.ai?

Hi @faust_belarmino - let me connect you with someone on our CS Ops team who has been closer to that implementation and usage. 

@jean.nairon @faust_belarmino So far so good with our implementation of retain.ai! We’ve had our first few rounds of getting insights from it, and we just trained our CS team last week so they can log in and see where they’re spending their own time. They also have a couple of enhancements coming out soon, which allow users to see how well they’re adhering to their intended work hours (so, a real measure of work/life balance), and whether they’re distributing their time equivalently to the anonymized average of the rest of the team.

Let me provide a bit more detail about how it works, technically. I’m sure that there are integrations and configurations that I’m not aware of, so I’d certainly suggest reaching out to them if any of the below sounds like it wouldn’t work for you!

• It pulls our customers and contacts via a Salesforce integration, including account fields that can be used as filters.
• We’re using its integration with GSuite that allows it to see subjects and recipients only on calendar events and emails. This occurs through the API, meaning it doesn’t require the Chrome extension.
• A Chrome extension activates only the domains that you’ve whitelisted as the team’s web-based tools, such as Google Docs, Gainsight, Expensify, Seismic, etc. It tracks the time spent on page, and associates it to a customer using one of four methods: (1) page metadata like the page title; (2) a customer ID or name in the URL; (3) a configurable ‘HTML extractor’ that would read just a designated part of a page; (4) you can configure it to prompt the user with a small pop-up where the names of customers autocomplete in a search field.
• We’re using its integration with Slack, where they’ve matched up certain public channels with customers, for those channels where that customer is the purpose of that channel. They pull how many messages each person sends in which public channel, and do not see the content of the messages. Private channels and direct messages are not accessible to it.
• By matching up all of the above data with customers, they distinguish between time spent with a customer (customer meetings and emails), time spent about a customer (Slack messages, Google Slides, Gainsight, etc.), and time spent that’s not attributable to a specific customer.
• We’ve spoken with them about tracking not just which system you’re spending your time in, but which workflows you’re working on (EBR, risk escalation, etc.). We were waiting for an enhancement to be able to be able to track in both ways, not just one, but we haven’t revisited that recently, so I’m not sure if it’s been released.
• We’ve just got it set up so that they’re pushing our Retain data to our Gainsight S3 bucket. We’re excited about the idea of using it to drive dashboards, health scores, CTAs, etc., but we haven’t crossed that bridge yet or even scoped out where exactly we’d start. My guess is that it would be a CTA for, “It looks like you haven’t been in touch with this customer recently.”

That would be AWESOME. Thanks so much!

@seth Thanks so much for this info! It’s super helpful. It sounds like the main advantage is tracking and aggregating the time spent on specific pages/urls/systems and associating it with the correct customer. However, the ability to track time according to workflows or specific processes isn’t all the way there yet…

This definitely gives us a good place to start! Thanks for your time and feedback! :D

@faust_belarmino So glad it’s helpful info! I’d just say that I don’t really know the state of tracking workflows/processes, so I may be shortchanging the capabilities on that front.

I would like to ask if there was an update on this? We are looking for a way to measure the time spent by CSMs on each task and we need to be able to record it in Gainsight
Any alternative that can be explored?

Thank you!