Create contacts during client task setup, and more!


Email smart suggestions

 

When sending emails from a work timeline, Karbon will suggest and display relevant email addresses in the ‘To’ field, based on the details of that work item. This includes emails associated with the contact assigned to the work, emails already on the timeline, and the email address the Client Tasks are being sent to.

Similarly, when sending emails from a contact timeline, Karbon will suggest the emails associated with the contact, including secondary email addresses.

More information on the smart suggestion rules

 

Create a new contact when sending Client Tasks

 

You can now create a new contact while setting up Client Tasks to send. This saves you time and clicks, versus needing to create a contact separately.

 

Share emails with a direct URL

 

You can now share an exact email conversation from your Triage with a URL. Navigate to the options menu (...) of a specific email, and select Copy Conversation Link.

To be able to view this, your colleagues must be Karbon users in your organization with pre-existing access to the email.

 

Contact exports update

 

Contact exports now include an export of Client Groups. This includes a Client Members tab that lists all the members associated with Client Groups.

On top of that, exports of all contacts now include a column for Client Group.

 

Connect4 integration

 

Karbon now integrates with Connect4, a meeting management tool designed to turn every meeting into an actionable client experience.

With this integration, you can:

  • Turn Connect4 client meeting actions into Karbon tasks.

  • Easily reference assigned tasks across your team to ensure no client work is missed for delivery or upsell before the next meeting.

  • Create a consistent meeting workflow of template agendas, meeting minutes and actions for every client meeting with your team.

  • Start meetings quickly with your clients in Connect4 using your Karbon contact database.

Learn more and get started 

 

Other updates

  • You can now click and open URLs within task titles.

  • Your sent folder in Triage now displays who you sent the email to, rather than ‘Me’.

  • You can now access the options menu (...) for Notes when they are in the collapsed view in Triage.

 

To the comments! Let’s hear what you’re excited about. Lots of time savers in this update, but I think many of you will be gravitating toward that export of client group members - any ideas how that will change your workflow?

Yes! I requested the email conversation URLs, that’s great! Thank you 🙏🏾

Great update to Sent and smart suggestions too


I thought that we could previously see the actual email address when sending client tasks (I may be wrong on this).  I can no longer see the email address, which means I have to guess which contact to use when a client has multiple email addresses.  

Don't really like this update.  :disappointed:

 

 


Totally agree with Melissa Glock, email address is now missing when selecting the client email for client tasks. This is extremely important to have, not only for clients that have more than one email, for multiple clients with the SAME FIRST AND LAST NAME.

Please fix ASAP.


Hi @Melissa Gock & @LD7E 

Thank you so much for making us aware of this! We appreciate your feedback.
We are looking into this currently and will be resolving it as soon as possible. 

Thank you for your patience in the mean time and do feel free to reach out to support any case you have any other issues. 


I agree with the comments above. We would like the visibility of the email addresses for the same reasons as mentioned above. 


Great update overall, but that email thing is an issue for us as well. 😀


I’m having the same issue with the emails within client tasks.  It’s really messing up my workflow - doesn’t even suggest the client email address for the work that I’m doing.


  1. I just added a contact form a client task. Love this feature.
  2. Some clients show up with emails, but only if they don’t have a title.

I like the idea that we should be able to send to the client based on their company and title, not their email address.

There’s another thing: My link to To-Dos is gone from Triage once it’s cleared.

I feel like these two changes, though in line with the Karbon work philosophy, left us, the users, a little in the lurch.

I would have loved to have been warned about the changes before they happened. I don’t want to delay the development cycle, but maybe proposed changes can be released on the Karbon Feature Ideas platform for review and comment during some predecessor step. This would allow comments and any visceral reactions to take place before changes are made, giving Karbon the opportunity to address the info gap, or make adjustments if needed.

What do you think?


+1 for the need to see email addresses when selecting contact to send client task to


Hi Friends! So there’s no ambiguity: the removal of visibility of email address when choosing a client task recipient was NOT an intended change. We made some other changes to the UI we think are helpful, and this omission missed our QA. We’re working to get it back soon. Apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime. 


I would have loved to have been warned about the changes before they happened. I don’t want to delay the development cycle, but maybe proposed changes can be released on the Karbon Feature Ideas platform for review and comment during some predecessor step. This would allow comments and any visceral reactions to take place before changes are made, giving Karbon the opportunity to address the info gap, or make adjustments if needed.

What do you think?

This is an interesting idea.. I think tech company’s modus operandi is typically MVP first, bug fixes later. There are many times I feel (and Karbon is not the only nor the biggest offender here) no actual user of the product has been involved in the design process of this system that’s been released... what frustrates me more though is when you tell them (other companies) something makes no sense and they say “it’s based on user data and feedback”, but I know that I’m in the vocal minority and most users think it silly too but don’t make any noise 😅 Karbon listens to the noise (I feel).

More on your idea, if Karbon were to reduce the turnaround time of updates to get feedback (which I suspect they won’t want to, understandably):
1. If it were a proposed changes post, I think make it opt in (I think most users won’t like an extra notification for the same updates - but I know you and I would)
2. Is a post enough? I don’t think I’d have picked up on the change to Sending Settings from this post (I need to actually be using something)


  1. I just added a contact form a client task. Love this feature.
  2. Some clients show up with emails, but only if they don’t have a title.

I like the idea that we should be able to send to the client based on their company and title, not their email address.

There’s another thing: My link to To-Dos is gone from Triage once it’s cleared.

I feel like these two changes, though in line with the Karbon work philosophy, left us, the users, a little in the lurch.

I would have loved to have been warned about the changes before they happened. I don’t want to delay the development cycle, but maybe proposed changes can be released on the Karbon Feature Ideas platform for review and comment during some predecessor step. This would allow comments and any visceral reactions to take place before changes are made, giving Karbon the opportunity to address the info gap, or make adjustments if needed.

What do you think?

 

Thanks for this @max ! The sentiment here is great, but I’d challenge you to flip it on its head. First, some context:

 

As an innovative product, we walk a delicate line between delivering functionality our customers know they want, but also challenging them with process designs that shake up expectations. A balance of both is essential. Most feature requests are driven by functionality people are used to having in other products. If all we did was copy other products, we would not, by definition, be innovators (and all you wonderful people probably wouldn’t like us as much as you do now). But, we’d also be idiots not to listen to our customers ;)

 

So… when features large or small release, they fall into one of two categories:

  1. We are trying to accommodate specific user requests.
  2. We are trying to innovate something.

I’ve shared that context because I think your original question/idea deserves different answers depending on which of those two categories the feature falls into.

 

For feature functionality built in response to customer requests, our NEW area here in Community for pitching ideas should come close to doing what you describe, but in reverse order. Customers pitch ideas, other customers share their own perspective, and we watch for items with broad appeal that fit into our overall design and production capacity. Being engaged in that part of Community is a great way to achieve what you described in your suggestion.

 

For innovative features, I would again sub-divide into large features and small. Large features (Time & Budgets, My Week, Documents, etc) get pretty extensive customer beta testing before launch. The key there is more having the right Support documentation available at launch to help early adopters who weren’t in the beta group. Feedback on how we’re doing on this is welcomed with particularly open arms.

 

That finally gets us to our last group: small innovative features. The trick here is that some of the best innovation takes some getting used to. That means holding tight through initial negative reaction. Of course, some of these items might also end up just being flops. Sometimes you don’t know until you try. The good thing about smaller releases though is that we can typically roll-back or fix in short order if needed.

 


@evanrnhall, the way Karbon interacts with their customers is the biggest differentiator I’ve experienced since coming on board and one of the reasons I’m such a huge advocate of yours.

I agree with you 98%. I understand the difficulty you have in bringing highly requested features to the table while also innovating for the future none of us see as well as you do.

It’s a little like representative government, lol. Sometimes what we want is not what’s best, but that’s why we hand the job off to someone else to make those tough decisions. I’m the first to admit that I have a lot of ideas, many of them bad, and I’m relying on you to consider them (which you have done, and well), and make the best decision on how to move forward (which you also do well).

My 2% disagreement: Dropping updates on Monday morning is a little rough for us. It might make it easier for us if updates hit Saturday so that my team trickles into them and so they can help each other out with the change instead of everyone waking up Monday morning to a new change all at the same time.

Here’s my feature idea about it: Product Releases on Saturday (vote if you feel led 😉)

Keep up the good work and excellent customer interaction. 😀


@max never say never! (I mean, I know sometimes we say never… but mostly we try not to).

In the short term, the balance we’re trying to keep is this: our releases come out morning/afternoon on Mondays in Australia (your Sunday). This is beneficial because our whole Southern Hemisphere development team is in the office and on-hand juuuust in case there’s a fire to put out. 

A release on US Saturday means folks are working on the weekend. While we all do that at some point, having it be the “regular” schedule year-round isn’t ideal. But, more importantly, unless 100% of the team worked weekends, it means we would be less well staffed to handle deployment emergencies than we are in the current cadence. Ultimately, we have to prioritize the overall stability of the app. But again… never say never! 

 

I always like to look for the, “what can I do now?” if the ideal solution isn’t available yet. For you and all customers, that’s keeping the feedback coming (here in Community is probably best). Let us know what those “new change” pain points are when they come up - the more specifics the better. That will be really helpful for us in understanding so we can ideate on potential solutions that are more practical to effect than a change to deployment cadence given current constraints. 


For you and all customers, that’s keeping the feedback coming (here in Community is probably best). 

I agree there is no perfect time (day of the week) to drop an update that may or may not cause a glitch or disrupt a workflow - and none of us should be expected to work weekends (appreciate some of us will, sometimes, but as a rule of thumb I never expect anyone to work a weekend - except industries that must - hospitality/hospitals etc and I expect they should be paid penalty rates).

As for the last point - I really do appreciate the notification in app that there has been an update, a link to the summary thread (like here) and the opportunity to comment things I like or things I don’t like/glitches I experience post-update! I will whinge a lot, about a lot, but the communication of updates is top shelf in my opinion, thank you Karbon for this 🙏🏾👏🏾


Have we got an update to the email visibility issue? It is now holding up time-sensitive Work and it is no longer just an inconvenience. Have we got an ETA for the fix?


@Cate @Melissa Gock @LD7E @Jeff Jobson @max @Aaron Reid @SamG 

Good news! Visibility of email addresses when selecting client task recipients should now be working again. Thanks again for your patience.


@evanrnhall with Suggestions in the Send To field of a client task:
- these don’t show email adresses (should they?)
- I have been suggested two contacts, neither contact has anything at all to do with the organisation I am sending the client task for (is that right?)


@evanrnhall with Suggestions in the Send To field of a client task:
- these don’t show email adresses (should they?)
- I have been suggested two contacts, neither contact has anything at all to do with the organisation I am sending the client task for (is that right?)

 

Hi @SamG ! The “smart suggestions” are thus far only on new emails from timeline, not client tasks. Don’t worry, just a matter of time until you see it in more places though.

 

Client task recipient suggestions currently should be showing email address  - if yours are NOT please submit a Support ticket (I just tested in my account and it’s working). 

BUT note that you won’t see the emails on the list that pops up when you first click into the “send to” field - you have to start typing something into the field and then the list will reflect emails. This will be cleaner once we have the actual smart suggestions integrated into client tasks.


BUT note that you won’t see the emails on the list that pops up when you first click into the “send to” field - you have to start typing something into the field and then the list will reflect emails. This will be cleaner once we have the actual smart suggestions integrated into client tasks.

This is my experience.

I didn’t realize that the email suggestion was for timeline emails, not client tasks. That makes more sense now, lol. 😀


Hi @SamG ! The “smart suggestions” are thus far only on new emails from timeline, not client tasks. Don’t worry, just a matter of time until you see it in more places though.

Thanks @evanrnhall. I, like @max thought the Smart Suggestions were on Client Tasks too. One of the reasons being, when this update was released, it was Client Tasks that we started having the issue with (of not seeing the email address - @Melissa Gock’s picture) - which, have the ‘not smart’ suggestions always not showed the email address? Or was that a consequence of the same update that made them not show on contacts we were searching for, and it hasn’t been changed back like the others were?
I suppose I forgot that Client Task suggestions were never ‘smart’. I hope someone, in hindsight, has realised it was a little silly to originally create a “Suggestions” popup for Client Tasks, but the suggestions be other clients not related to Work or Group 🙂
Looking forward to Suggestions on Client Tasks becoming Smart 🙏🏾


Hi @SamG ! The “smart suggestions” are thus far only on new emails from timeline, not client tasks. Don’t worry, just a matter of time until you see it in more places though.

Thanks @evanrnhall. I, like @max thought the Smart Suggestions were on Client Tasks too. One of the reasons being, when this update was released, it was Client Tasks that we started having the issue with (of not seeing the email address - @Melissa Gock’s picture) - which, have the ‘not smart’ suggestions always not showed the email address? Or was that a consequence of the same update that made them not show on contacts we were searching for, and it hasn’t been changed back like the others were?
I suppose I forgot that Client Task suggestions were never ‘smart’. I hope someone, in hindsight, has realised it was a little silly to originally create a “Suggestions” popup for Client Tasks, but the suggestions be other clients not related to Work or Group 🙂
Looking forward to Suggestions on Client Tasks becoming Smart 🙏🏾

 

The Client Task suggestions have never been “smart”, but those days are numbered. The way emails do and don’t display now is, believe it or not, the way it’s always been ;)

There were UI changes (and some backend stuff) to client tasks as part of this release, which is what caused the bug in this thread, but that was all unrelated to the smart suggestions on timeline initiated emails. 

This is actually a great microcosm example for a lot of what goes on behind the scenes in development (not a secret per se, just not necessarily visible). In our latest Roadmap webinar you’ll have seen what we have up our sleeves to radically enhance the whole Client Task feature this year. As a lead up to that work there’s foundational changes to make, old code to tidy up, etc.