Time tracking integrations

@dan_ahrens @sai_ram is this still being considered? I just joined a new org where I am revamping Gainsight and a large part of this effort will focus on getting more teams amalgamated into one system. I need to get one of them off another tool that they use because of its time tracking capabilities - since this is a professional services team, time tracking is crucial to them. 

In the meantime, I will be suggesting the duration field and a third party Chrome extension to track. 

@gunjanm - increasingly it seems that just having a time spent field on a CTA or Success Plan or Timeline activity, etc can be hard to properly track and aggregate. Other than adding a custom field on one of those objects, we don’t have on our roadmap the concept of a whole product time tracking tool. 

In fact, our Client Outcomes (CSM) team just launched the use of https://retain.ai/ to track their time spent on various customer activities. It’s a browser extension that works across different applications and pages. 

I’m with @dan_ahrens on this. You can track time on a CTA and Timeline Activity which allow you to tie time specifically to a task or event and to the customer. Time would sit in multiple objects (Timeline Activities and CTAs/Tasks) but you could pull this all into one object with a rule so that you can easily report on total time spent per customer or per CSM and per any time period you like. 

I just took a look at Retain.ai and it looks like it integrates with Salesforce and Gainsight. Is there any more info you could provide @dan_ahrens on this? Do you need to pull in your customer data into Retain and then use the browser extension to update the time? Are you able to get more granular with the data so you can see specifically where time was spent with the customer (was it all on meetings, or a particular PS task, or support ticket, etc)

Why I’m curious is because most other time trackers (ex: Harvest, Clockify, Toggl) are just time entry and CSMs would need to tag each customer when they enter their time. I’m not sure these tools would be an ideal solution. My guess is it would be quite a bit of time to maintain your customer lists in these apps and you are only able to add some high-level buckets to associate your time to. These apps do have the ability to start/stop time tracking though.  

 

@dan_ahrens How are the CSM’s liking retain.ai?

Hi @faust_belarmino - let me connect you with someone on our CS Ops team who has been closer to that implementation and usage. 

@jean.nairon @faust_belarmino So far so good with our implementation of retain.ai! We’ve had our first few rounds of getting insights from it, and we just trained our CS team last week so they can log in and see where they’re spending their own time. They also have a couple of enhancements coming out soon, which allow users to see how well they’re adhering to their intended work hours (so, a real measure of work/life balance), and whether they’re distributing their time equivalently to the anonymized average of the rest of the team.

Let me provide a bit more detail about how it works, technically. I’m sure that there are integrations and configurations that I’m not aware of, so I’d certainly suggest reaching out to them if any of the below sounds like it wouldn’t work for you!

• It pulls our customers and contacts via a Salesforce integration, including account fields that can be used as filters.
• We’re using its integration with GSuite that allows it to see subjects and recipients only on calendar events and emails. This occurs through the API, meaning it doesn’t require the Chrome extension.
• A Chrome extension activates only the domains that you’ve whitelisted as the team’s web-based tools, such as Google Docs, Gainsight, Expensify, Seismic, etc. It tracks the time spent on page, and associates it to a customer using one of four methods: (1) page metadata like the page title; (2) a customer ID or name in the URL; (3) a configurable ‘HTML extractor’ that would read just a designated part of a page; (4) you can configure it to prompt the user with a small pop-up where the names of customers autocomplete in a search field.
• We’re using its integration with Slack, where they’ve matched up certain public channels with customers, for those channels where that customer is the purpose of that channel. They pull how many messages each person sends in which public channel, and do not see the content of the messages. Private channels and direct messages are not accessible to it.
• By matching up all of the above data with customers, they distinguish between time spent with a customer (customer meetings and emails), time spent about a customer (Slack messages, Google Slides, Gainsight, etc.), and time spent that’s not attributable to a specific customer.
• We’ve spoken with them about tracking not just which system you’re spending your time in, but which workflows you’re working on (EBR, risk escalation, etc.). We were waiting for an enhancement to be able to be able to track in both ways, not just one, but we haven’t revisited that recently, so I’m not sure if it’s been released.
• We’ve just got it set up so that they’re pushing our Retain data to our Gainsight S3 bucket. We’re excited about the idea of using it to drive dashboards, health scores, CTAs, etc., but we haven’t crossed that bridge yet or even scoped out where exactly we’d start. My guess is that it would be a CTA for, “It looks like you haven’t been in touch with this customer recently.”

That would be AWESOME. Thanks so much!

@seth Thanks so much for this info! It’s super helpful. It sounds like the main advantage is tracking and aggregating the time spent on specific pages/urls/systems and associating it with the correct customer. However, the ability to track time according to workflows or specific processes isn’t all the way there yet…

This definitely gives us a good place to start! Thanks for your time and feedback! :D