How to Set Up Multi-User Assignment

Objective

Provide information to Outreach Admins and Users regarding the setup of the Multi-User Assignment feature, along with some high level test cases you can use to run a general purpose validation of the feature in your instance. Use this guide to launch this feature inside your organization and review high-level aspects and procedures.

Applies To

• Outreach Users
• Outreach Admins

Before You Begin

Before you set up the feature, we recommend that you become familiar with all of the below:

• For all customers: Multi-User Assignment Overview
• If you are already using CRM or want to use CRM in the future: How to setup Multi-User Assignment with your CRM & Multi-User Assignment APIs
• For existing customers using CRM that want to migrate to Multi-User Assignment: Multi-User Assignment Migration Overview

Please also note that the Multi-User Assignment feature cannot be rolled back in your Settings by admins once enabled for your org. Outreach Technical Support can assist with this request. Click here to learn more.

Set-Up Procedures

Enabling Multi-User Assignment

Note: If you already have the feature enabled, feel free to skip this section.

Considerations and Best Practices

Note for Existing Outreach Customers
If you are an existing Outreach customer, you might have some additional considerations. Please follow the instructions provided in the Migration Overview to opt-into the feature. If you are not seeing the opt-in experience, please submit a technical support request.

We recommend that you practice the setup steps and validate the feature in your sandbox and/or testing environment in a smaller group of users before opting into the feature for all employees.

The best time to enable is when you believe your business has the most downtime window for Outreach users and any apps you have associated with Outreach. An example of an associated app is your CRM.

The best time to enable is also when you are fully comfortable with the feature, fully considered the governance changes that come with the feature, tested it thoroughly in your testing and/or sandbox environments, you have trained and notified your users and stakeholders on the upcoming changes and provided a clear channel of communication on changes they expect to see and resolution channels if their daily workflow is disrupted.

Once you are ready and fully comfortable with the feature, proceed below.

To Enable Multi-User Assignment

1. In the Outreach application, navigate through Settings > Orgs > General > Multi-User Assignment.

2. Click the Edit button.
   
3. Click each checkbox to confirm your understanding of the statements and unlock the Enable Multi-User Assignment button.
   
4. Click the Enable Multi-User Assignment button to make the feature available in your Outreach instance. Note that this only enables the feature for your organization. Continue below to set it up for your users.

Creating users and assigning profiles

1. Log into Outreach.
2. Click Users.
3. Click + User.

For test users, create an email address in your sandbox that is different from their production email address. Adding “+sandbox” to the email name will treat the account as a different instance for Outreach but the same for an email mailbox.

To test how different roles with different permissions are behaving, you may create multiple accounts in the Outreach sandbox with different suffixes such as “+sandboxAdmin” or “+sandboxSDR”. In the example below, three users were created with emails: alice.doe+sandbox@outreach.io, alice.doe+sandboxAdmin@outreach.io, and alice.doe+sandboxSdr@outreach.io.

Assigning Profiles

1. Select a user.
2. Click Assign Profile.

Different profiles can be assigned via the Assign Profile button that appears above the user table when one or more users are selected by ticking a checkbox to the left of the user name. For example, two users with emails alice.doe+sandboxAdmin@outreach.io and alice.doe+sandboxSDR@outreach.io can have different permissions associated with them.

Limiting Users from editing Assignees

Multi-User Assignment introduces a new setting under each of Prospect, Account and Opportunity record types that allows admins to further restrict if the assignees have the permission to edit the assignments. By default this is not allowed which is more restrictive than the current governance model which allows owners to edit their records by default.

This is especially useful for customers that want to maintain the assignees in CRM and only sync them into Outreach either through the CRM plugin (available for Salesforce customers only) or through the APIs (for all customers). Choose the best option for your business.

Here’s how the setting looks for Prospects, as an example:

Creating and Assigning Job Roles (Optional)

Job Roles allow showing business responsibilities of a user (as AE or SDR) in the UI. Job Roles and their assignments are managed by the administrators.

1. Click Settings > Job Roles.
2. Click Add job role.
3. Navigate to Users. 
4. Locate the user for the role and click Edit.
5. Navigate to Job role.
6. Select the appropriate role.

Assigning Users to Accounts, Prospects, and Opportunities

Note: If you are a CRM customer who wants to manage assignees in your CRM, you can skip this section.

Assigning multiple users to a record

We are using Accounts as an example, the user workflow is the same for Prospects and Opportunities as well.

1. Navigate to Accounts.
2. Click on the account.
3. Click Edit.
4. Enter the users for the account.
   
5. Click Done.

Adding Users in bulk

1. Select the required Account, Prospect, or Opportunity.
2. Select Assigned > Add.
3. Add the users as required.

Filtering Accounts based on assignment

After you assign multiple users to multiple accounts, you can navigate to Accounts and use the Assigned filter to select accounts based on various criteria.

 

Disabling (Rolling Back) Multi-User Assignment

Multi-User Assignment is a core governance feature and cannot be rolled back, disabled, or otherwise turned off by admins. If you believe the feature is disrupting your business workflow, please submit a Technical Support request for feedback, considerations, and resolution options.

Advanced considerations

By default, Outreach keeps the value between the ‘Owner’ and ‘Assignee’ fields in sync to ensure the existing governance implementations continue to work with the Multi-User Assignment experience.

If you have a strong business reason and firmly believe that you need to change the default behavior, we recommend that you read and understand the following sections entirely first. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us in case you have any questions.

Deep Dive into the Auto-Synchronization Behavior

Once enabled, Multi-User Assignment assumes that users are ready to completely move over to using the new ‘Assigned’ governance model. And therefore ‘Owner’ is downgraded to a non-consideration for Prospects, Accounts and Opportunities. However, ‘Owner’ is still required for other features like Sequences, Templates and Snippets which don’t understand the ‘Assigned’ model just yet.

With that in mind, the system takes two specific corrective actions so as to not break your existing sales workflows. Let’s take a look at them and understand the design.

Corrective action 1

If the ‘Owner’ value is updated for a record, the new owner user will be appended to the ‘Assignee’ list instead of replacing the existing owner user.

This is done because changing ‘Owner’ for a record is an unexpected user action in the Multi-User Assignment context. So the existing ‘Assigned’ list is maintained to ensure the assignees have continued access to their records, but the new owner is also provided access to the record to respect the owner change.

If the intent was to remove the previous owner user, you can remove them manually from the ‘Assigned’ list after updating the owner field.

Corrective action 2

If one of the ‘Assigned’ users, who also happens to be the owner of the record, is removed from the ‘Assigned’ list, they are also removed from the ‘Owner’ field and the next user with the lowest ID is elected the ‘Owner’ automatically.

This is done because, while the ‘Owner’ field is not material to Multi-User Assignment, it needs to have a non-null value for other features to work.

Overriding the auto-synchronization corrective behaviors

If the default behavior is not for your business, our recommendation is that you should simply take full control of managing the owner and assignee fields yourself. And therefore, you can effectively override the default behavior with a behavior of your choice that aligns with your business needs.

If you use CRM, please follow our CRM setup instructions. If you do not use CRM, you can use our APIs to manage the fields yourself.

Additionally, we would also recommend that you investigate and understand why your users are still updating the owner field. Ideally, you should be able to guide them to move over completely to using the ‘Assigned’ field exclusively.

Disabling the Auto-Synchronization

If for whatever reason, you are not able to manage the fields on your own, Outreach provides the option to disable the default behavior as a last resort.

Note that Outreach cannot guarantee that your governance models will continue to work if you disable the auto-synchronization. Please use extreme caution and fully understand the access control implications before making this change.

To disable the default behavior:

1. Log in to Outreach as an Admin.
2. Click Settings > Org > General.
3. Navigate to Multi-User Assignment > Owner-assigned value auto-update.
4. Click Edit.
5. Confirm that you take responsibility for managing your governance.
6. Click Disable.

If you want to turn the behavior back on in the future, you can follow the same steps to ‘Enable’ it. However, you’ll need to make sure your assigned users are up to date before you do so and all your governance enforcement continues to function.

Once you have fully set up Multi-User Assignment, you should be able to test the various scenarios and, if needed, fine tune it to match your business needs.