My suggestion for how we approach this is to give you the option to view the feed either as conversations or as items with the following features:
So to meet Naylor Accountancy's requirement they would:
It's important to understand that certain features introduced by Inbox won't be available because they apply to conversations only:
I think this works for Naylor and creates quite a lot of flexibility for everyone as well.
It occurs to me that a new feature (for later!) that we could introduce is the idea of a notice board that you can just pin notes to at the practice level (so not tied to any client or contact) and the contact level. That might be a cool way to address this and other requirements as well. You would add a note. You could set an expiry date or just leave it up there. It would be up to you to remove or unpin it. These types of notes wouldn't appear in the Inbox as they're completely standalone. If there's interest in this I will post this as a separate feature request.
I previously commented that notes under the previous setup were difficult to find because of the lack of two features.
Hi Steve
With the Inbox update, you can now optionally set your own title for a note and see the author:
However, when a note is not given a title, the title defaults to "Note" as you have seen. The reason for this is because Inbox introduces the concept of conversations and every feed item needs a title in order to fit the concept.
When displaying notes without titles, you can still see the first line of the note content:
With all of that being said, we never want customers to feel that updates have diminished their experience so walking through it, would it be fair to say that a better default title would address what you need - in addition to the "items view" that's being discussed? If so, what do you suggest?
Could be something like "Note added by {initials} on {date}" or "{first line of note}". The latter may look strange in the conversation view though as the line would be repeated.
Please let me know.
I would suggest that entering a title not be optional. Sending an e-mail without a subject line is considered bad practice and I feel the same should be applied to notes. This would also address the issue of repeating lines you raise.
If this is not possible then I would suggest a default of first line of note followed by user name. The date already appears in a separate column after the status flag so this is not necessary as part of the title.
As an aside, I would note that the optional title box you have added is not obviously a box you can make an entry in. At a glance it looks like a system instruction. The fact you cannot select the text inviting you to enter an optional title only serves to reinforce this. Please can you amend how this displays so it is clear that this space is for entering a title to the note.
I have also identified another issue. A number of notes were imported from our previous CRM system, Xero Practice Manager. As I recall, these appeared as individual notes in the previous version of Onkho. They now appear to have been compressed into a single note. Where a client had a lot of notes imported, this once again makes finding a specific note difficult. The compacted notes are all dated 1 March 2019. I can send you specific client names privately if you need this information to follow up on this.
Many thanks for providing us with feedback on the experience you had using Inbox so far! As Emanur hinted above, we're very keen on making sure everyone is able to use the platform in the way that is most convenient to them and getting feedback is critical to making that happen.
I think the items view that we're currently working on will address most of the issues you raised, as it will be very similar to the old activity feed design we were using before. It will likely be even better, given that we will have a few more filtering options. Moving forward, I think one will use the conversations view to browse through high level topics over the lifetime of a client and the items view for finding a specific note/email/etc they are looking for. Let's get that out and if you still feel that finding notes is troublesome, we will iterate on it.
Onto the issues that won't get sorted out by the items view:
1) Not being able to see the first line of notes in the conversations view
I suspect this has something to do with the browser you are using. I was unable to reproduce the issue on Chrome, Firefox or Edge, so it's a bit puzzling. Please note that we only guarantee compatibility with Google Chrome. If you are using Chrome, please let me know.
2) The optionality of note titles
I see this as a subjective matter - I'm sure there are customers that prefer not having to type in a title for each note they create.
That said, if the field where you can enter the title is not sufficiently obvious that is, in fact, a field, then we should work on improving that. We'll try to sort that out over the next couple of days.
3) Your imported notes having been merged
This should not be the case. When Inbox released, we took all the old notes and we made them into 'new' notes and placed each of them in a separate conversation. The notes that were separate before should still be separate now. If that's not the case, please email me at victor@onkho.com mentioning that you are fine with me looking at the content of these notes. You said they were all dated March 1, so that should be enough to help me find them.
This was released last night. To access the items view click on the ellipsis button in the top right hand corner of the activity feed and choose "Use items view".
You can filter for one or more item types and your choice will be remembered for the next time you look at any contact's activity feed. To go back to the conversation view, follow the same instructions as above but click on the "Use conversations view" option instead.
An announcement will go into the platform today as well as new documentation in the Success portal.
Hi Steve
It looks like the migration of old feed items is what is "cluttering" your view. Functionally, this is the same as the old view but some of the feed items have been changed into notes because they wouldn't be compatible with Inbox otherwise.
I'm going to raise a specific support ticket as we need to better understand how you use notes so that we can apply some data fixes to get you the view you need.
Please look out for an email shortly.
Have moved this outstanding issue to support so locking this topic for now.
Emanur Rahman
[Based on discussions with Nikolai and Rona at Naylor Accountancy]
The activity feed in the Contact page (At a Glance tab) now shows by conversation rather than individual items. We would like to be able to view the feed as items e.g. notes etc.
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