I was looking into an issue and then I was stumbling into this feature that is finding the intent of a note on the timeline and suggesting actions from it. At first, I thought, that was pretty cool, but playing a bit more with it I questioned more and more the use case for it. This is probably mainly caused by the fact that I question if notes are being used like this, at least that is my experience. The feature is switched off by default so if you would like to try this functionality yourself, that would require setting up notes analysis, but that is as simple as enabling it.
Setting up Notes analysis
In order to enable Note analysis to get intelligent instructions based on previous activities, you need to follow the next steps:
- Open the Sales Hub App
- Navigate to the Sales Insights Settings area
- Within the Productivity section find the Notes Analysis option
- Enable the Notes analysis enabled setting
- Select Save
Important note: not all languages are supported at the moment, for now, the following languages are supported: English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Norwegian.
How does it work?
When you add a note activity to the timeline, for example to the contact, the note analysis will try to provide suggestions based on the history of (custom) activities, notes, or auto posts for that record. If the suggestions contain multiple tasks, then it allows you to act on the ones you want. A suggestion could be to:
- create a new task
- create a new appointment
- create a new phone call
- create a new contact
For each of the suggestions, you have the option to Create or Edit and Create, which will launch the quick create form for the record. Since most activities are scheduled via a due date, my experience is that Edit and Create option is used in most scenarios.
The title of this blog post is ” Setting up notes analysis, helpful or not? ” and that brings me to the core of this post. I have spoken to many people and I can’t come up with a process where this would actually add lots of value to it. When checking the documentation from Microsoft around notes analysis (here), one of the examples that is mentioned here is the following:
Suggest new contact: Let me introduce you to John
I can’t think of a process where the notes would be used to contain this kind of information. Personally speaking, I would love to see such functionality in the description of a Phone Call or Appointment record. Once the summary of that activity is entered it will allow you to create new suggestions from it. Perhaps you have different thoughts or experience with this, then please let me know in the comments.
