Transcript

In this video, we’ll review the core account attribute types in Totango, including: Text, Number, Date, Currency, Lifecycle, and List / Multi-list.

Let’s say I want to track whether a customer has agreed to be a reference. How do I know what datatype is best for the use case–Text, Multi-Select, or List? The answer largely depends on whether you're pulling the data from or pushing the data to another system–because those data types have to match.

But generally speaking, there are other reasons for choosing data types. This is Ty, a Totango Customer Success Engineer, and he will cover the fundamentals of Totango data types.

First you have a text field, a text attributes. This is your default data type. It's applicable to many different types of data, so you can have your again your industry in here.

Then you have numbers and numbers can be whole numbers, they can be decimals, and numbers are awesome because numbers are awesome because. We keep not only a history of those numbers changing, but we have the ability to trend them and show them on a graph. So if we're looking at the contract value that number changes over time, we can, out of the box hit the little graph icon and see that that value has changed.

Numbers are also great because they can be used in custom metrics so if we wanted to be able to take two numbers and do some sort of math on them every day and then keep a history of that we can do that for health purposes. An example of that might be if we were going to use license utilization so the total number of licenses that are consumed divided by the total number of licenses that have been allocated, you get licensed utilization through a custom metric. By setting a field to a number type you're also able to do ranges when creating segments, so you can create a segment and you can say find me all customers that have a value between X and Y or greater than X or less than Y or any combination of the two. So numbers are very important.

Dates similarly are also important. And dates allow us to do things like date ranges so you can say find me all segments that had a date that changed in the last 13 days. Find me all segments that are you know finding all accounts that have a contract expiring in the next two weeks things of that nature so dates are dates are important.

And then we have some additional types of attributes that you'll run into currency similar to numbers but we add a currency symbol to it. We will add the decimal place of the comma will add the desk at the in the decimal on the end of it. Currency should always be consistent across the currency attributes. So if you want to raise your contract value in US dollars, and you have some customers that are in Indian rupees, then you should have another attribute that is in Indian rupees.

We have status types, which are your lifecycle stages. The nice thing about using the lifecycle stages, Totango stores the number of days that a customer existed in one of those statuses so how long was the customer onboarding. How long have they been an adoption, how long were they in one of these sub stages.

Then, last but not least, to the list and multi select lists. Lists are fantastic if you're going to manage in Totango but as soon as we start thinking about integrations and automation and things like that, lists can become difficult because you have to define a list and a multi select list on both sides of an integration, with case sensitivity and all of that information.