Pros and Cons of Comments vs. Interactions table

[Pam_Siebert]

Hi,

I created a base for our nonprofit to manage a program. The main table is called "teams," as we work with teams of young people and educators. I created another table that is linked to teams, called Interactions, so that staff can log interactions there- similar to a CRM. I have a Lookup field in the teams table to show the date and text of the last interaction.

The issue is that staff are ignoring this and using Comments instead. I have never instructed anyone to use comments, but it's there and it seems to feel comfortable for people. I am trying to think ahead to issues this will cause. I noticed in another question that you can't call up the most recent comment. Anything else?

Thank you!

[Matt_Jastremski]

Great question! I've run into this as well and it's tricky. Comments in AT are a bit of a double edged sword.

Pros:

• Ease of use: As you've noticed, comments are intuitive.
• Informal and conversational: People are encouraged to have a back and forth, not overthink their comments, and mention each other.
• Attached to any record: Show up contextually in whatever record is being viewed.
• Native: Trigger notifications in the web app, the mobile app, and send emails. Automatically clear (move from "Unread" when viewed).

Cons:

• Limited functionality: You can't easily retrieve or analyze comments. You can't search, filter, or report on them meaningfully. You can't trigger automations based on them or give them other attributes like status, date, visibility, etc.
• Potential for overload / falling between the cracks: If there's a lot of comment activity, it can be hard for users to sift through it all.
• Less predictability in where they take the user: Comments can be made both in interface views and at the base level, and if you tag a user that doesn't have the same permissions as you, it's not always clear where that other user will get pulled to when they click the notification.
• Don't "carry over" - If you do an export or backup of a base, or use an external frontend tool, there's no good way to really access those comments.

Additionally, I don't think you can really turn off comments - I believe you can hide the comments area on a record view but I don't think you can't prevent people from "@" tagging each other.
Where I've landed before is something like a hybrid model, where people can use the comments to collaborate but things like Interactions aren't "official" unless someone makes a record. The key to this is demonstrating the value/function/purpose of those records - e.g. they kick off other workflows, they show up on the official team calendar, etc.

[DisraeliGears01]

I mean, comments are never going to be as full featured as a record, they're much harder to parse on an ongoing basis. Comments don't give you an exact date/time after a few days either, instead of July 22nd you'll just see "3mo ago". You can't build anything that alerts or creates a status on comments, so for your CRM you can't add a flag for "Teams" that don't have an interaction in the last week (or whatever). Another big issue in my mind that crops up is filtering and access to comments.

If you only have 2-3 interactions total with a "Team" then it isn't that big a deal I suppose, but if there are meant to be 10s of interactions, it'll get messy very quickly. Comments are a bit Slack or Teams like in my mind, meant for a couple sentences of internal discussion. If staff were to document their email interaction and then add a comment like "@Jane it took 3 weeks for them to get back to me, might be better to call" that'd make sense to me. I'd def try to get people onboard with the Interactions table if you actually want to use this as a CRM, and perhaps emphasizing external vs internal comms might be a strategy for that?

[Matt_Jastremski]

Quick tip I can't believe I only learned like a week ago: If you hover over the "3mo ago" tag you can see the exact time and date!

[kuovonne]

Unless you train them otherwise, people are going to use whatever is easiest for them.

If you want people to use the [Interactions] table, you need to make it super easy for them.

Are your users working in a data grid view? Comments are very easy to use in a data grid view, and an [Interactions] table is very cumbersome to use from a data grid view of a different table. If you want people to use an [Interactions] table, you can make it easier for them by building an interface where you show the linked interactions on the same page as the main team record. You can also not include record comments in the interface page so that people won't use it (should you choose to go that route).

I agree with Matt about the pros and cons of comments. For most use cases, I find logging interactions in a separate table is better than in record comments. When the notes are in record data, you can search across them, flag them for followup, mark them as resolved, add attachments, etc.