Now that you can customize your Timeline Activity types, what additional activity types are others using?

Hi Jennifer,

We've added support for attachments in the latest release. Please give it a shot, and share any feedback you have on how to improve it further.

One new idea I came up with:
An activity type for "Success Story"

I have a bit of a personal mission to make it easy for CSMs to surface the customers who've met with some kind of success, and to flag the people, product features, resources, and business processes that helped achieve that success. It seems unlikely that we can get all that many Success Stories emailed out or sent to a Slack channel, but if they had a low-key way to do it in Timeline, where they'll already be working, and where they'll be constantly reminded about it by having it in the pull-down list, then we will (eventually) be able to put those into a report.

This is the whole list of activity types I drew up for us:

1. Call[list=1]
2. Checkbox fields for topics that could have come up:[list=1]
3. Use Case Consulting
4. Product Training/Explanation
5. Configuration/Troubleshooting
6. Contract: Upsell/Cross-Sell/Packages/Platforms/Licensing
7. Contract: Renewal/Cancellation

[/list]

Executive Strategy Session

Executive Business Review

Update

In-Person Meeting

Success Story[/list]

I love your idea on Success Story above, Seth.

One additional capability that you might want to consider using is automation based on Timeline entries. For example, since Activity Timeline is accessible via the rules engine, you could drop milestones, kick off CTAs, send an advanced outreach (using the query builder to add participants), etc. 

This has an incredible potential to automate any tasks that might follow after a customer interaction. Also, you can add custom fields to any activity type and those custom fields are also available in the rules engine for decision making and filtering. 

#automateEverything

🙂

These are great ideas! I particularly like the idea of logging escalations. In our instance, we've added a 'product feedback' activity type. On our customer calls, we get lots of "you know it would be really great if.." so we need a place to capture those. They idea being we can use this feature to funnel feedback to the appropriate teams and be the voice of our customers more effectively.

We've actually built another activity type for Cancellation Notice since I posted this. I'm loving this as we were not tracking our cancellations in a way we could report on them before. I've added 15 fields, which is the limit, for product cancelled, ARR per product, Total ARR Lost, Last Month of Service, Cancellation Code, Total Loss, New Vendor, etc., into the Cancellation Notice activity type and then I created several widgets and reports to show on a dashboard that I built for "At Risk and Cancellations". We review this dashboard internally in our weekly risk call and can now we can see how much we are losing, who our major competitors are and how many clients we are losing to each competitor along with ARR lost to that competitor, and many other cool facts. In addition, I can export the dashboard to a PPT for Board meetings. 

Interesting, Angela. Is there a reason you aren't capturing the cancelations as Closed-Lost Opportunities?

Yep! Our Renewals Team has not moved to an automated process yet. We do plan to use Opportunities to track these in the future. Right now our process is that the Renewals team emails me with the cancellation notice from the client with the details of the cancellation. I paste that into Timeline so we have a record of it in Gainsight on the account. 

Manu, the customer I had in mind when I wrote this is very low touch and largely automated their renewal process. But the VCSMs do handle renewal escalations quite a bit, so this is a great way to capture that history and have that activity kept in and reported on via Timeline. 

BTW, at least over the first week or so, "Success Story" wasn't getting used, so I changed it to a checkbox on the other Activity Types, called "

I really like the idea of adding a tick-box to Call to clarify the subject. When reporting on timeline activities - can report at the level of the tick box custom field?