Your input needed - what should go in Timeline?

I would definitely prefer to keep the noise out and leave Timeline as a place to record actions between the customer and the customer success team.  When I am looking for NPS scores or other survey responses they are not far away on the C360.  The same thing goes with the other data points mentioned.  Thanks for Timeline by the way, it has been a great add to the solution

I would love to have as much info as possible in Timeline but I can also see the use case to reduce the noise, so my ask would be that whatever we decide doing if it can be turned on / off per type of update, that way the solution can be flexible enough to meet everyone's needs. Also, even if from an Admin perspective we enable a lot of system generated updates to happen, it would be good to have an easy way for end users to hide it from their view (maybe some toggles at the top of the screen?). Just my thoughts...

I would also love to have as much information in Timeline as possible (Milestones, survey responses, CTAs, etc) but also have the ability at the admin level to customize and choose what information shows up in Timeline.

Additionally, the ability to push updates to from rules engine and email BCC would make Timeline a no-brainer for our CSMs. 

 

I agree with having human interactions (emails, calls etc. manually created ) as well as value-adding automated activities added for the CSM to be aware of with the ability to filter or collapse timeline as a CSM what we want to see e.g. last 30 days of activity, summary view vs detailed view etc.

Thanks everyone for the great feedback so far. Keep it coming!

And so great to hear from you Jan!

For anyone who may not know, Jan is one of the original Gainsight employees (single digit employee number if I remember correctly), and will always be considered Gainsight royalty. 

I agree with everyone above! It would be best if Admins would have the options to include data points in Timeline or not, that way it is very flexible but robust tool that will work for many use cases. I think it works best if we limit the noise but for people that want more information included, the flexibility would be great! Also, we need to increase the timeline activity type quota! 

I also think the default reporting fields in the MDA - Timeline Activity object could be improved, or at least the option of editing that object so that we can connect it with Salesforce data. For example, I am not able to create a report displaying timeline activities by CSM per Manager. Instead, I have to go to the Task object in SFDC and this report is very helpful for managers to ensure that their team are utilziing Gainsight properly. Also, we can't report on the External Attendees of the Timeline Activity and that information would be useful for dashboard reports.

I would also love it if Timeline had an integration with Outlook, that way CSMs would have the option of whether or not the Email should also log in Timeline. It would save them a lot of time of having to copy and paste/or summarize the email in the timeline log. 

It would be great if timeline could be expanded to be inclusive of more touchpoints - I don't know of a better place to accomplish this. It would be very helpful, for example, to look back at various touchpoints logged in the Timeline to find successes and opportunities for improvement. It would also be important to be able to filter the timeline down for easier consumption. For example, filter down to just CSM logged items, items tagged by channel, items linked to CTAs, etc. This could greatly simplify the user experience for my team.

+1 for @Dan's comment.

@Jan, Great to see your comment here! 

We would love the ability to clone Timeline Activities.  

Also, we would like the ability to make Notes not mandatory (sometimes on a quick update the Subject and Notes both being mandatory makes for duplicative work for the CSMs)

We are just getting started with Gainsight, but these are a couple things I think would be really beneficial. 

In terms of adding more functionality while keeping noise to a minimum, I think a good solution here would be to add more filters to Timeline so if you want to remove automated postings you can just turn them off in the viewing filters. For me there are three ways I would like it be improved:

1. Zendesk integration so that details of support issues / resolutions are logged automatically to the timeline. In our company, support calls represent the majority of human to human interactions after the client has been onboarded, so would be essential to provide a holistic timeline of the customer journey

2. Gmail integration so that emails are automatically tracked. Having the guys copy paste emails into timeline will slow them down and I want Gainsight to increase their efficiency and minimise administration. Perhaps emails could be tagged as important for filtering?

3. @mentions so that people can move away from slack for internal communication about a client. 

Forgive me if any of these changes are already in place, or in progress. Please let me know if so, I am still only learning the functionality.