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Why an admin should avoid repurposing a seat.

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Max Crouse
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Applies To

  • Admins who are adding a new user to their Outreach instance.

  • Admins who are replacing a user in their Outreach instance.

Answer

When a user no longer needs their Outreach seat, or a new user needs to be added to the Outreach platform, it can be tempting and convenient to rename an existing seat in Outreach and repurpose it for a new user.

This workflow should be avoided and instead, an Outreach admin should lock the previous user's seat and create a brand new Outreach seat for the new user. For help with creating and locking user seats in Outreach, admins can reference our article on that here: Outreach Seat Management Process

While repurposing a seat can seem like a valid workflow, here are some of the possible risks your Outreach instance can run into when doing this:

  • Previous data and activity - Your previous user's record activity as well as their data history can become unreliable as the ownership of these records and events will be mixed in with the new user's data. This will make pages such as record activity, outbox, meetings, and more, inaccurate when the new user's information and history are added to this.
  • Record ownership - The previous user's ownership will essentially be transferred to the new user's ownership, which can seem helpful in regard to prospects, accounts, and opportunities, but can get difficult when Outreach content such as templates, snippets, and sequences are also transferred. If you're interested in transferring record ownership to your new user, please consider the 'Propagate prospect ownership' feature, more information on that can be found in this article: How To Enable Propagate Prospect Ownership
  • Reporting - As the activity from both users is combined over time, reporting on the new user will become extremely inaccurate as the new user is retaining all the previous information and reports from the previous user. For example, if the previous user made five calls to one account and the new user made another five calls, your reporting page would indicate the new user made a total of ten.
  • CRM Integrations(Plugin) - If your team utilizes a CRM integration such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, the previous user's seat will most likely be mapped to their user equivalent in your CRM platform. Repurposing a seat does not repurpose the mapping and all the new user's activity will be logged under the old user's CRM user profile. This not only logs incorrect information on both your CRM integration and Outreach platform but can also break the synchronization between Outreach and your CRM integration for most records as Outreach will not be able to properly synchronize with conflicting information.

If an Outreach admin previously repurposed a seat in Outreach, you will simply want to correct this mistake and rename the user seat back to the previous and original owner, lock them, and create a new seat for this new user.

In addition to this, locking and creating seats in Outreach together can often display incorrectly and not show the newly opened seat that you just locked. If this occurs, please fully refresh your internet browser and try again.

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