Variant Email Templates In Email Assist

Great, thank you Monica!

Can you share what the current status of “Parked” means?  Thanks so much!

Hey Gainsight,

We’re in the process of overhauling our email templates just now, and as part of our “engage the customer on their terms” initiative, our CSMs are translating email content for their region/language.

The thought was that, each email template would contain a version for each language and, if used in a playbook the CSM would then choose the template variant before previewing and sending to the customer.  I now understand this isn’t possible; email versions can be identified in JO via criteria, and a CSM can select the email template version required when sending an ad-hoc email, but not if the template is used as an email template as part of a playbook.

I ask myself ok, so this isn’t possible, what are the options? 

1. The language needs to be defined in the CTA rule; requiring multiple email templates, multiple playbooks and multiple rule actions.
2. The playbook task must be a task only (not an email task), requiring the CSM to send an ad-hoc email, and selecting the correct email version before previewing and sending.

Option 1 is horrible from an admin perspective; it requires the number of email templates to increase by a factor of n, where n is the number of languages templates have translations for, the same for playbooks and rule actions.  Email template and playbook assets become more burdensome to manage given their volume, and rules (I assume) take longer to process give the factor of n rule actions added to identify which language playbook/template/CTA version would need to be created.  Additionally, what happens when an additional language is supported? Instead of adding a version to each existing email template, a new template, playbook and rule action would need to be created.  Total madness.

Option 2 is horrible from the perspective of the CSM; if the majority of customers (and therefore customer communications) are in English, having CSMs read the CS Task, then have to manually add an ad-hoc email to the playbook, etc, etc is a bad experience for end-users.

Even a halfway solution (playbooks/CTA rule actions distinguishing between English/non-English) isn’t palatable for the admin experience, and would still provide a poor experience for end-users where English isn’t the primary language in their territory.

If email versions are supported in JO and ad-hoc emails, 1000% they should be supported in playbook tasks.  Am I understanding this wrongly?  If the need for email versioning was large enough for Gainsight to develop and release for JO and ad-hoc emails, surely a 360 solution should be developed so email versioning can be adopted throughout the whole product?

@ssamarth @mpatra

#productparity

Woah @Stuart, it’s like you read my mind. @kim_stone, curious to hear your perspective here, especially as we’re trying to implement multiple languages for versioning. Sounds like there’s a pretty big gap in #productparity that still needs to be fixed. 😔

I have been exactly where @Stuart is describing (1) and to say it was a frustrating and cumbersome experience is an understatement.

In my previous org we had a team of translators, if that can give you the idea of how many languages we managed...17, IIRC, including Cyrillic alphabets. This was an absolute pain, as we had to clone each playbook just to be able to have an email task to attach a template in the intended language. Plus, branching all rules to filter by each language.

So, let me do the math:
Instead of 1 template with 17 versions + 1 playbook + 1 CTA, we had 17 templates instead of one (imagine “Template xxx [EN]”,“Template xxx [PT]”, “Template xxx [GR]”, etc) plus 17 playbooks “Playbook xxx [EN]”,“Playbook xxx [PT]”, “Playbook xxx [GR]”...) where we had to update the email task to grab the correct template and then a rule with 17 branches filtered by an attribute with the Person’s preferred language plus updating each action to select the correct playbook.

It’s not pretty. Nor efficient.

Upvoting here too. Our use case is the same as everyone’s.

Would be great if it automatically selected the version matching the language from the Person “Language” field, or default if not. AND to be able to change it. 

This way we could have our end users update the language from the person and help keep data quality. 

@mpatra - do you have an update on this item? I was shocked to see there are 100 people asking for this and it’s been open 6 years.

Cross posting here as well:
Just ran into this issue because someone asked me about using multiple versions in a playbook, and I assumed wrongly that the feature would be available after all this time and the revamps of cockpit and email templates.  I too noticed that it works in Gainsight Assist and Email Assist, but didn’t think to check playbooks since it seemed logical that they would all work the same.

Now, I have to create 2 separate tasks instead of just one, and that’s just more administrative work for the CSMs as well. 

How is this still an issue after all this time?

Even if multiple variants work in Gainsight Assist, if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t think it did.

Example screenshots below. 

I created four templates for our account teams to use in Gainsight Assist to promote conference registration, based on region and public vs. private sector.

Based on the second image, my eye does not go to the version selection box. Because there are critical differences in these templates, I want our account team to easily be able to apply the correct template, hence I need to create four templates when one should work in theory.

I would expect to see a larger callout prior to the template being applied if there are multiple versions, requiring the user to select their chosen template before even having the option to apply a template to their email.

Done my due diligence before posting 😉

Post is 7 years old. 

3 years ago:

Today:

What happened? Where’s the update explaining why an idea - that’s possibly amongst the most upvoted ideas - has been parked?

We’re over a 100 orgs requesting that. We really kinda need that feature.