Turn off the "dynamic" Timeline Activity Type

I’d like to be able to control what they see instead of it being system controlled. We are seeing a lot of the system defaulting to email, but our team uses the chrome plugin to log emails, this adds unnecessary steps to log client meetings and updates.

This right here. 

Yeah, we automate a ton of Milestones for very specific purposes. I wouldn’t want TL to default to Milestone and dirty up our data

@wscuphamabnormal I would hope it only takes into account manual actions, but with this platform you never know!

This functionality now also overrides the scorecard setting from what I have tested.

Configure Default Activity Type
As an admins you can configure and select the default activity type and subject. To configure the default activity type:Navigate to Administration > Scorecard. The Scorecard screen appears.
Click the settings icon. The Settings window appears.
From the Default Activity Type drop-down list, select the required activity.
In the Subject field, enter the required name.
Click Save.

That is now ignored and supercedeed by a company specific default.

In terms of UX, and CSM will see different default timeline activity type depending on which account they are looking at.

This also going to add complexity in training new CSMs

This is not good

Hey @romain I don’t think it’s overriding it.  When I go to “Renew/Update Score” and leave the Log Activity box checked the Timeline type defaults to my Default Scorecard type “Update.”

But if I bypass renew/update and just click “Add Activity” the Timeline type is “Meeting”, which is what I would expect it to be if it were dynamic because that is our most commonly used Timeline type.

Doesn’t mean I or my users like the dynamic assignment there - but at least it doesn’t seem to actually be affecting the default scorecard type after all!

You are correct @darkknight ; The Renew button will create the activity based on the default set in the scorecard, while the Add Activity button will create an activity defaulting to the dynamic activity type of the company.

 

Of note, if the CSM is on the Global timeline creating Activities, the Default type would be switching company to company.

Hit and miss
Yay for finally achieving consistency of the global Create Activity button and the timeline-specific Add Activity that had us scratching our heads some time ago.
Now, the dynamic part… Not good.

+1. Our use of the Gmail plugin makes ‘Email’ the most commonly used Activity Type (i.e. ‘default’ based on this release), but our teams almost never manually log emails on the Timeline. From an efficiency standpoint this is slowing down the teams when they log Timeline entries and need to update the Activity Type nearly every time (it’s several clicks when you go to switch the Activity Type and then get hit with the pop up of if you are sure you want to continue). This should be optional functionality and would much prefer admins being able to define what Activity Type is the default.

Agree with everything mentioned here.

What appears to be unexpected defaults has created unwanted behavior that our CSMs see as broken +1

@manu_mittal @rahul_prayakarao 

++ to inconsistent experience on different Timelines, it’s odd to me that you would go to Timeline and see one activity type chosen, then go to another and see a different one.

It’s also an odd decision to me that Email is chosen as a default here. Defaulting to Email when (depending on your use case) emails are almost certainly all logged externally in Gainsight Assist via Outlook or Gmail and not in Gainsight Timeline directly, seems unhelpful.

Also ++ on Milestone, seems like we should have the option for this to be removed too given automated milestone creation.

Ideally just an option to disable this entirely would be great.

FYI @jake_ellis  the votes are growing on this one….

Thanks @darkknight. Our team is reviewing this and we’ll respond back to this thread with next steps. 

We have a lot of feedback from our team internally as well after this update. Most of the options that are defaulting currently are not options that are manually selected. We have a (generally speaking) four different meeting types that an end user would select & more often then not, we are not meeting with these customers commonly enough that any one of those four default. Our common default type that appears is Email, Support Chat, & Milestones depending on the customers journey. This has required our reps to add a minimum of two additional clicks every time they log an activity. 

After talking about it as an Admin team here, we don’t know if we have a great use case for defaulting any types at all, but if we could (at a minimum) default on User Roles, that would potentially look to provide us with a little bit more flexibility, but we are also very happy to look at other solutions if anyone has recommendations!

Thank you all for your attention and very valid feedback on this topic. After reviewing your feedback and discussing as a team we are planning to turn this feature off by default within the next week. For those who found it valuable, you can have it enabled by reaching out to techops@gainsight.com. 

We’ll share updates back in this thread.

I should really pay more attentino to these posts. Just spent some time talking with different useres trying to figure out if indeed the problem with the activity type being overriden in manual measures was something I did or fallout from this new feature. 

Thanks for hearing us out so fast! 

In my case my biggest issue is that our CSMs are logging events via groove into SFDC, and then I’m syncing from there. So all of those events are actually counting against the most used one. If this were only manually created activities then it wouldn’t be a problem for us. 

We are planning to push revert this feature on August 12th. If you’d like to enable it for your teams after that date, please reach out to techops@gainsight.com. 

Hello Everyone, this feature is now reverted. There will be no dynamic default activity type assigned to the timeline activities. If you wish to enable the feature, please reach out to techops@gainsight.com.