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
In upgraded Planhat, you configure Conversation types in the "Data" Global Tool - it's considered a specialist field on the Conversation model.
Navigate to the "Data" Global Tool in the top-right of your Planhat tenant
Note that typically only admins have access to this - you need the "Admin Access" permission
Select "Conversations" from the model list on the left, and then ensure that the "Fields" tab is selected (both pictured above)
Click on "Conversation Types" to open up a modal like this:
Click the image to view it enlarged
Any existing custom Conversation Types are listed down the left-hand side - external ones, followed by internal ones. You can either click on any one of these to open up its details on the right to view/edit them, or you can click "+ New Conversation Type" in the bottom left (shown in the screenshot above) to create a new Conversation Type - just fill in the form that appears on the right
Name: 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: choose one of the 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.
Internal: these 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 involved.
Email Template: optionally add an email template. If you're not sure how to create email templates in Planhat, check out this article 👍.
Checklist: here you can add a checklist. This could be a list of objectives that you want to cover in the meeting, etc.
Where Can You See & Use Conversation Types?
Once you have created your custom conversation types you can use them when logging and planning activities - so this is involving the Task and Conversation models. Here are a couple of typical examples:
In Company Full-Page Profiles:
In Project Workflows:
In the "Calendar" Home feature:
