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Gainsight Inc.

Configure Email to Timeline

This article explains how to configure the Email to timeline (E2T) feature in Gainsight. After reading this article you can enable end users to access the Email to timeline feature.

Overview

Gainsight now enables users to log customer communications as Timeline Activities using a unique inbound email address. Previously, CSMs had to copy and paste customer email content from their inbox to a Timeline activity. Now, using the unique inbound email address, CSMs can automatically log their customer emails to Timeline for accounts and relationships. This feature helps you record your history of significant interactions, so CSMs, Execs, and Sales reps, for example, can quickly get up to speed and understand the customer relationship by reviewing Timeline.

This feature enables Admins add their list of users, and generate a unique inbound email address that CSMs use to logs customer emails as activities on Timeline.

Use 'Email to Timeline' to capture email sent from external email applications such as IBM® Lotus Notes® and Microsoft® Outlook® and with webmail such as Gmail® and Yahoo! Mail®. Email to Timeline attempts to match the email address (domains) in the To, CC, and Bcc fields with the address in the Email standard field. Email to Timeline doesn’t support matching on custom email fields. Gainsight ignores invalid email IDs or domains which you have not included while configuring email.

Note: You can only use the text email version of the enhanced email message. Images or screenshots will be added as attachments.

IMPORTANT: You need to give minimum Time To Live (TTL) of one hour for the emails to reflect in Timeline. This TTL value is used to improve the performance of this feature.

We strongly recommend watching this 9-minute video introduction to Email to Timeline before you start configuring the feature!

Prerequisites

  • Ensure that required person records (customer contacts) are added to Gainsight. They can be added from C360 > Person section > +PERSON when the Person associated with a specific Company or Relationship respectively.

    Note: For Persons, the bulk upload option is available from Rules using Load to People action type. For more information, refer to the Load to Person Model using Rules Engine documentation
    You can also upload Person records from the Administration > Person page.  For more information, refer to the Uploading Person Records into Gainsight article.

  • Ensure that Accounts, Relationships, and Users are loaded to Company, Relationship, and User Objects in Gainsight respectively. Following are the data loading channels:

    • For more information on syncing User, Account, Relationship data from SFDC to Gainsight, refer to the Salesforce Connector article.

    • For more information on loading user records from the User Management page, refer the User Management article.

    • For more information on loading Company and Relationship records from the Data Operation page, refer to the Data Operation article.

  • Confirm that Email to Timeline feature is set as True in your org.

  • Ensure that the Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) settings checkboxes are selected in Administration > Email Configuration > INBOUND EMAILS tab > Security Settings section, if you want to disable the security check for DKIM and SPF. Leaving it unchecked satisfies the security requirements in order to use this feature seamlessly.

    Securtiy settings.png

    • SPF is a Domain Name System (DNS) text entry which shows a list of servers that should be considered/allowed to send email for a specific domain. Owners/administrators are the only people who can add/change the main domain zone

    • DKIM verifies that the content of the messages is trustworthy and remains unchanged from the moment the messages left the initial mail server. This additional layer of trustability is achieved by an implementation of the standard public/private key signing process. Once again the owners of the domain add a DNS entry with the public DKIM key which will be used by receivers to verify that the message DKIM signature is correct, while on the sender side the server will sign the entitled mail messages with the corresponding private key

  • Ensure that Accounts, Relationships, and Users are loaded to Company, Relationship, and User Objects in Gainsight respectively. Following are the data loading channels:
    • For more information on loading Company and Relationship records from the Data Operation page, refer to the Data Operation article.

    • For more information on loading user records from the User Management page, refer to the Add Users from User Management article.

    • For more information on syncing User, Account, Relationship data from SFDC to Gainsight, refer to the Salesforce Connector article.

Graphical Representation of Email to Timeline

For general guidelines, refer to the Email to Timeline for End Users article.You can also refer to the following Email to Timeline flowchart to understand the working of the feature.

Email to Timeline flowchart.PNG

Configure Inbound Emails

To enable the Email to Timeline feature for users, perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to Administration > Email Configuration.
  2. Click the INBOUND EMAILS tab.

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  1. Select the Timeline checkbox in the Enable Inbound Emails section.

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  1. Scroll up/down in the Users section that contains the list of names and email addresses of the users who were given access to send emails to Gainsight. Emails to Timeline sent by users without access will be discarded.
    Note: In the Users section, there are two search icons.
  • First search field known as search and select users is used to find a user and add in the list of users who have access to the Email to Timeline feature.
  • Second search field is to find out the specific user who is already added and can access this feature. This is way you can find out a specific user quickly.

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  • Admins need to select and add users manually one by one. Gainsight Team is working on providing the ability to add filters on User object and allow admins to enable this feature for bulk users.
    IMPORTANT: Ensure that you click SAVE every time you add/delete any user.

    If you do not see the user/contact whom you want to add in the list of users with access to the Email to Timeline feature:
     
  • Navigate to Administration > Data Management > User Object > Data where you can check if the person record already exists.
  1. Enter a sub-domain in the Inbound Email Sub-domain section.
    Note: After saving, the sub-domain cannot be changed.

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IMPORTANT: The sub-domain that you provide here will be used for generating inbound email addresses. The sub-domain should be 20 characters max, and formed from a set of letters, digits, dot and hyphens (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, .), but not starting or ending with a hyphen. Sample system generated email address with its sub-domain: timeline+ivem1rnvahj9qejpnqb3ua3bs5@global.gainsightapp.com

  1. Add domain(s) from which Gainsight should accept emails in the Security Settings section. Gainsight identifies/validates only those emails with the domain(s) which are added in this section. This ensures an extra layer of security. Domain should be formed from a set of letters, digits, dots, and hyphens (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, .), but not starting or ending with a hyphen.

Security settings pat 2.png

  1. Click SAVE.
    Note: As soon as you save the Inbound Emails configuration, a welcome email will be sent to those users who were added just now. For more information about the end-user’s experience with this feature, refer to the Log Customer Emails as Timeline Activities article.
  2. (Optional) You may build a report by selecting Activity Timeline as the source object and include filter criteria with field ‘Source’ equals ‘INBOUND_EMAIL’ to see how many activities are created/logged via email integration.

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Note: If you do not have the Contact ID in the Company Person or Relaitonship Person object, the External Attendee field only has the name of the attendee which is not hyperlinked, in the logged emails. The Name field in the Salesforce Task or Salesforce Event objects in SFDC have no values, when the Activity is synced.

Add Person Section to C360

This section explains how to configure the person section on the C360 page. Once you configure the person section on the C360 page, end users can identify which of the contacts are added to the Person section.

To add person section to C360 page:

  1. Navigate to Administration > C360 Layouts.

  2. Click the edit icon of the layout used on C360 pages.

  3. Drag and drop the Person section from left pane to right area.

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  1. Click the configure icon for the Person section. The Configure Section window is displayed.

  2. On the ADD PERSON tab drag and drop fields from the Available Fields section to Selected Fields section. End users can view these fields while adding a new person record from the C360 page.

  3. Click the LIST VIEW tab.

  4. Drag and drop the fields from the Available Fields section to Selected Fields section. End users can view these fields on the Person List view page in C360.

  5. Click the DETAIL VIEW tab.

  6. Drag and drop the fields from the Available Fields section to Selected Fields section. End users can view these fields on the Person detail view page in C360.

  7. Click SAVE.

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Similarly, you can add the person section to the R360 page.

Limitations

  • The maximum number of inbound emails allowed is 100,000 per day per tenant.

  • Total Email Content + Attachments size limit is 20MB, and each attachment’s maximum supported size is 15MB.

  • Email to Timeline can create a maximum of 5k draft email activities per Tenant. After the limit is exceeded, Gainsight rejects the drafts.

  • In Admin, ‘SAVE’ is mandatory after add/delete of a user.

  • If the person is present in both company and relationship, Gainsight enables you to select either company or relationship where the activity will be posted.

Notes:

  • By default, the activity will be posted at the Relationship level unless the end user selects to post to Company.
  • This selection can only be made by the end user. Admins do not have the ability to control where the end user posts the activity.

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  • If External recipients are not included in the To line, Gainsight saves the activity as draft.
  • When there are multiple External attendees in which if one attendee exists in both company person and relationship person but the other attendee exists only in company person, then It saves the timeline entry as draft.

Limitations which are identified and Planned to be Addressed in Future Release

  • Bulk User Enablement: The experience right now for customers is to select and add users manually one by one. We are working on providing the ability to add filters on User object and allow admins to enable this feature for bulk users.
  • Audit Logs: There are various combinations where an email sent to Gainsight can be rejected by the system. Some of the possible failure reasons are:
    • Per day Tenant Limit of 100,000 inbound emails
    • Author Email and inbound email mismatch
    • Author email not available as an internal user in Gainsight User object
  • Ability for admins to see the messages which have failed, added to draft and the reasons for the same is not available at this point.
  • User has to scroll to the bottom of the page and save for every action performed (user added or deletion).
  • Reply to the user via Email the status of their email which was posted to timeline. This is especially useful whenever the post to timeline fails or the post is added to drafts.

If you have queries, view the Email to Timeline FAQs section of the Timeline FAQs article.

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