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bruno_giacomelli
bruno_giacomelli
Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
November 29, 2016
Question

Timeline vs CTA: What will you prefer to register activities?

  • November 29, 2016
  • 16 replies
  • 505 views
Hello Everyone,

With the new feature of timeline and the log of activities, I'm curious to know how other companies will encourage CSMs to register customer activities.

In our case, today we are using CTAs to log meeting/calls annotations.

  • CTAs pros: can create reports based on CTA reason, duration, etc.
  • Timeline pros: much better interface, formatting, connect with contacts, etc.
This means that if I want to use both, a CSM would need to follow this process:

  1. Receives a new QBR CTA.
  2. Do the call.
  3. Take notes logging a new timeline activity (without reason categorization).
  4. Go to cockpit and close QBR CTA without annotations.
This would result in a CTA disconnected from its notes.

What will you guys going to recommend to your teams?

Cheers

      16 replies

      Show previous replies
      manu_mittal
      Gainsight Employee ⭐️
      manu_mittal
      Gainsight Employee ⭐️
      March 9, 2017
      Hey Manish,

      Being able to log Activities from CTAs is planned for Spring/May release.

      Thanks!
        justin_majors
        justin_majors
        Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
        March 9, 2017
        Yes, when will the timeline and CTAs work together?
        justin_majors
        justin_majors
        Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
        March 9, 2017
        Perfect! 
          manu_mittal
          Gainsight Employee ⭐️
          manu_mittal
          Gainsight Employee ⭐️
          March 9, 2017
          One of the main goals of this project was to not have comments be siloed in different areas of the product. It should be possible to combine all the commentary together and get a true picture of what's going on with a Customer. 

          What we are very actively working on right now is the ability to log activities from within a CTA. ETA is Spring/May release. This would then be extended to Scorecards, Success Plans, etc. over subsequent releases. 

          There are a couple of ways in which Activities and CTAs would soon work together:
          • You'll be able to log Activities of any type from within a CTA.
          • If you log an Activity this way but with inline next steps or to-dos, these would become Tasks under the same CTA -- so one list of to-dos.
          • If you log an Activity outside of a CTA but with inline next steps or to-dos, these would cause a CTA to be created and then Tasks would be added underneath. 
          The last point to address is whether or not all Activities logged from CTAs would be automatically available at the Customer level. We want them to be because it makes a ton of sense, but at the same time, we also want to provide some means of volume control. So what we are planning to do for May is the following: Admins will be able to tell Gainsight, for each Activity type, whether or not such Activities are 'always important'. For example, an admin can configure that all 'Calls' are important but all 'Emails' might not be. This would then ensure that all 'Calls' logged from within a CTA are automatically available on the Customer's Timeline, but everything else remains confined to the CTA. This flagging will be available for individual Activities, too, so end-users also have some degree of control over what gets rolled up.

          I hope I was able to address most of the questions, and would really love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
          vadim_matusovskiy
          vadim_matusovskiy
          Contributor ⭐️⭐️
          April 27, 2017
          Hi Manu,

          Just to confirm - all good and this option will be added with the May 16 update?
          dstokowski
          dstokowski
          Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
          May 3, 2017
          You will see that ability to log Activities (and create Tasks!) from Timeline with our May release.  This will be released to customers May 23.  The release went to Sandboxes this morning.
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