Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Parked

Timeline - Pros and Cons - (Thoughts and Feedback appreciated)

Related products:CS Timeline & Activity Tracking

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
November 21, 2017
32 replies
4043 views

As people have started using the Timeline feature, I was curious what everyone is finding or viewing as the Pros and Cons while putting this feature into play. I thought I would start with a few thoughts and attempt to get people talking about how and why they use the feature or perhaps why they have chosen not to (yet).

Pros:

- one can sort or only show timeline data based on a specific activity type

- diary of events and account updates in one place

- draft notes for the next meeting and future discussion points for the account

- log calls, onsites, weekly updates, EBRs, latest Deal notes, At Risk Notes (create a specific activity type for each)

- Given the SFDC widget, most others in the organization can see the Timeline data and find CSM updates one place

Cons:

- small to see/view/edit the information in
the GS widget - exploring ideas, but not sure we have many options based
on the SFDC account/opp page layout.

- (from what I know - disclaimer) the Timeline only accepts
manual entries and no way to auto-add entries like CTA completed or
Renewal closed. Believe this functionality is on the GS roadmap for the rules engine to auto-add
entries into the Timeline.

Bottom Line:

- Overall, I believe most teams benefit by deciding on one or two places where ALL the
activity / account / deal notes live and the Timeline could easily be that place.

Thoughts, Feedback, alternative uses of the Timeline are welcomed !!

journey orchestrator

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jame_ervin

Contributor ⭐️⭐️

What I am finding frustrating about the Timeline is that it has behavior that is inconsistent with CTAs. It doesn't make sense that CTAs and the associated tasks do not sync to the Timeline, but Timeline actions with subtasks become CTAs. And email tasks in CTAs become Timeline entries. Additionally, Timeline tasks have a visible type attribute, but CTA tasks do not. It is very confusing and inconsistent.

Our team was very excited about using the Timeline to track in-person interactions vs phone/online interactions. But since we intend to have the key repeatable actions live in CTAs and Playbooks, this same attribute is unavailable, and we need to account for this in our design in order to answer what seems like a simple question: how much time are CSMs spending with customers and how much of that time is via in-person meetings or in a phone call/web meeting.

dan_ahrens

Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Hi Jame,

Sorry that you're feeling frustrated. There is a lot to configure both from a software and process standpoint when considering how your organization will use Timeline. Here are a couple configuration options that you may not have been aware of that can help you as you understand how you can choose to configure your system:

Using Timeline from within a CTA - you can create timeline entries on a specific CTA in the Task Pane (see details here). These entries will also appear on the main timeline view, so saving your team an extra step. Note, you can also set the attribute type in the task view:

Email tasks synchronizing to Timeline - you can optionally turn off the sync of Email Assist tasks to Timeline. Most customers choose to keep this on, but it is a global option to turn off if you find it does not work for your processes.

Tracking time spent with customers - if you add the duration field to your activity type, you can track this whether the event was logged in the CTA Timeline view or on the main Timeline display.

Hope this helps and let us know if you have any other questions that we can help with!

VP of Customer Success at Forcepoint

jame_ervin

Contributor ⭐️⭐️

Hi Dan - thank you for your response.

We are aware of the CTA specific Timeline, this also writes back to the main timeline.

Our playbooks are designed to include tasks for things like preparing and hosting an executive business review, so the CSM just checks off the completion of the task. Using the Timeline would require them to close out the tasks and log an activity for each meeting. But the CTA tasks would not have a duration.

This of course still leaves a gap in providing a full view of all activity related to a customer, as the Timeline would only have a subset of the activities. It has been very confusing explaining to our team why some things show up in Timeline and some things do not. It requires extensive diagramming.

Was the Timeline ever intended to be a complete view of the customer related activity? It certainly doesn't function that way today.

dan_ahrens

Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Hi Jame,

Timeline activity types are identical whether you record them under a CTA or on the main Timeline screen, so if the activity type is configured to have a duration, the CSM could enter the duration from the CTA timeline view.

The Timeline view on the CTA was designed to provide a simplified view of all actions on that specific CTA only. The thought here was that while working a CTA, relevant notes can be easily viewed, but to publish the entire account history in the small task pane would not be user friendly.

So if you want to see the entire account history, view the timeline for that customer using the C360 page. If you want to only see notes history on a specific CTA, view the timeline for that CTA using the CTA task pane.

VP of Customer Success at Forcepoint

jame_ervin

Contributor ⭐️⭐️

The account history doesn't include completed CTA tasks, so you have to toggle between the Cockpit and the Timeline to see the activities for a given account. There is no way to get complete context on all account related activity.

Right now the best answer I can give my users is sometimes items for your CTA will show up in the Timeline, but most of the time it won't so you need to look in multiple places.

dan_ahrens

Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I think I follow you now - unless the CSM takes notes on a CTA task, you are correct that the CTA task would not be visible on Timeline.

There was some intent behind this: the design for Timeline was to provide a central location for note taking (teams were often previously using Evernote, One Note or other platforms for taking notes). As to why we don't pull in all other account related activity (support cases, survey responses, calls to action, marketing events attended, etc) like some other account history panels (like the account history in SFDC) do is that those can often get very cluttered with both high and low value interactions. Feedback has been that if we pull too much into Timeline, it will be hard to find anything because the stream would have a "low signal to noise ratio".

That said, we are seeing some interest in expanding the capabilities of Timeline and will be building in additional features to allow other sources (including using a rule to create timeline entries). Potentially by our Spring 2018 release we'll have the ability to use the rules engine to create a timeline entry, so if you really wanted closed CTAs to appear in Timeline, you could do that once that capability arrives.

🙂

VP of Customer Success at Forcepoint

heather_hansen

VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Our CSMs are loving timeline, and it's become the place where they take notes and also track items that we don't schedule for them. For example, we've created custom activity types for Trainings, Chair-sides, Product Feedback, etc, and they use timeline to enter these items and include key information. They also love the ability to add the attachment there and easily reference it without having to look through the Chatter history or go to a specific task in SF.

darkknight

Expert ⭐️

Heather - are you syncing custom activity types back to Salesforce as events? I'm trying to set that up now - but it's not syncing for some reason after I run Start Manual Sync. Wonder if you might know the magic phrase to make it work? :D

Also, Gainsight, this document appears to be in need of updating. For one thing, it still says you cannot attach files to Activities, which you can now. Also - it says:

"To configure activity sync:

Navigate to Administration > Workflow > Activities > ACTIVITY SYNC.
Under General Settings, select the appropriate value for Salesforce Status and Salesforce Priority, which are Salesforce standard fields.

Note: This is a mandatory selection. Sync and field mapping will not work unless these fields are assigned appropriate values."

I don't see those fields under Activity Sync:

Jeff Kirkpatrick

darkknight

Expert ⭐️

@Tom - one thing I feel is missing from Timeline is the ability to search Activity or Attachments by date range. That could be a handy use case.

Jeff Kirkpatrick

darkknight

Expert ⭐️

Jame I have a similar concern.

It feels like an extra step to require a CSM to Log an Activity within a CTA when we already have a task to prepare for and conduct the EBR. I get the need to have a place to capture notes/attachments, etc I just wish it was a little less clunky. I also agree that having ONE view of all related activity is important. You will have some CTAs that have logged activities associated with them but you'll have CTAs that do not, so if you want to track/report on overall customer activity, you have to pull from two sources, so I'm with you here.

Jeff Kirkpatrick

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