What are Custom Conversation Types?
Most of your customer interactions can typically be logged and tracked without you lifting a finger. Emails, support tickets, in-app chat conversation and even phone calls can be automatically synced in real time, or close to real time with Planhat 😃. But not all engagements fall into this category. You may for example want to track every time you have on-site training, in-person meetings, or no shows. For these situations you will want to set up custom "Conversation Types" to manually keep track.
How to Create Custom Conversation Types
Click on your avatar profile which is located in the bottom left hand corner of Planhat, go to "Conversations" and then click on "Conversation Types". This is where your custom conversation types are located. To add a new conversation type click on the "Add New" button in the top right corner. A form called "Add New Touch Point Type" will appear and this is where we will create our custom conversation type. The following fields need to be filled in:
Name your touch point: name your custom conversation type e.g. "Feedback Call". You can name it almost anything you like, you just can't use reserved type names which are: "email", "chat", "ticket", "call" and "note" (also don't include dots).
Pick a symbol for this Touch Point: choose one of the 28 available symbols to represent the conversation type e.g. for my conversation type "Feedback call" I would use the phone symbol.
Colour: select what colour you want your symbol to be.
Content template: add an agenda in here, notes, etc.
Category:
External: all of the communications that involve a customer. So when you email them, call them, meet with them, etc. These will be recorded and logged separately in Planhat for better reporting on processes.
Email: this is where you can sync your Gmail account with Planhat, and also where you create your email templates.
Once you sync your email with Planhat we will pull in these conversations (from the inboxes you have specified), and automatically record them as an "email" external touch point.
Calls: if you are using an external phone system, and this is a large part of your business or Customer Success strategy - then you can connect it with Planhat through the calls API endpoint. If you're using Aircall, you can simply set it up with our native integration then Planhat will log these in your activities as an external touch point.
Chat: get set up with our native integration with Intercom - it only takes a couple of minutes to get set up! If you aren't using Intercom, or have an internal chat tool - ask us for the API endpoint and we can see if this is a good option for getting your chat tool synced into Planhat! Planhat records these as external touch points.
Tickets: tickets are important to know about as a CSM, but you are usually not the one who is responding to the request. But if you have a call or a meeting with a customer, you probably want to know if there are any outstanding tickets!
We have native integrations with Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Desk (Salesforce) and they only take a few minutes to set them up. But, again, if you aren't using any of these you can use the ticketing API endpoint.
Internal: all of the touch points that don't involve you communicating with a customer, but could be tasks that you want to record in Planhat that need to be conducted internally. For example, meet with team member about how to move forward with company "x" before QBR. The company is still being worked on and receiving attention, but the customer is not being involved.
Email Template: add an email template, if you're not sure how to create email templates in Planhat, check out this article 👍.
Checklist: add a checklist, this could be a list of objectives that you want to cover in the meeting etc.
📌 Important to note: you need to have "Admin Access" to be able to view the "Conversation Types" page in Planhat. If you don't have that access and you need it then please discuss it with your team administrators.
Where Can You See & Use Conversation Types?
Once you have created your custom conversation types you can use them when logging and planning activities.
As you are logging and recording these activities, you will see all of these interactions reflected in the "Conversations" system report.
