CRMA Academy

Subscriptions and Watchlists

Schedule CRM Analytics widget subscriptions as recurring emails, combine widgets from multiple dashboards, use table subscriptions for real CSV attachments with their own permission, and pin trending metrics to your home screen with the watchlist.

Subscriptions and Watchlists

Notifications tell you when something breaks. Subscriptions tell you what's happening on a schedule whether anything broke or not — and for most business users, a Monday-morning email is the entire relationship they have with your dashboard.

Widget subscriptions

A subscription is set up from a widget's action menu. You choose a frequency — daily, weekly, monthly, at a time you specify — and CRM Analytics emails you that widget's current state on that cadence.

The feature people miss is that a subscription isn't limited to one widget or one dashboard:

  1. 1

    Subscribe to a widget

    From any dashboard, open the widget's action menu and choose the subscribe option. Name the subscription something meaningful — it becomes the email's subject line.

  2. 2

    Set the schedule

    Pick the frequency and the delivery time. Daily before the standup, Monday at 7am, first of the month — match it to the rhythm of the meeting it feeds.

  3. 3

    Add widgets from other dashboards

    Open a different dashboard, subscribe another widget, and add it to the SAME subscription. You end up with one email carrying pipeline from one dashboard, service metrics from another, and a marketing number from a third.

  4. 4

    Manage them from the Subscriptions area

    Analytics Studio has a Subscriptions section listing everything you've scheduled. Edit the frequency, add or remove widgets, or delete a subscription from there.

That third step is the one worth demonstrating. Most people assume a subscription belongs to a dashboard. It doesn't — it belongs to you, and it's a personal digest you assemble from anywhere in the platform. One email, your five numbers, however many dashboards they came from.

What the email looks like

The delivered email contains the widgets rendered as images, laid out with the subscription name at the top. Critically, each widget is clickable — it deep-links back into the org, straight to the dashboard the widget came from.

So the email isn't a dead end. It's a summary that answers most of the question in the inbox, and one click away from the live dashboard when it doesn't. That's exactly the behaviour you want from an adoption standpoint: low friction to read, obvious path to the real thing.

Subscriptions inherit the filter context the same way notifications do, so the same advice applies: filter first, subscribe second. And like notifications, they're personal — you cannot set one up on a colleague's behalf. Your job as designer is to show them the button.

Table subscriptions

Widget subscriptions send pictures. Sometimes people don't want a picture — they want the data. That's what table subscriptions are for, and they behave differently in two important ways.

Separate permission

Table subscriptions need the 'Subscribe to CRM Analytics tables' permission, granted independently of ordinary subscriptions. If the option isn't showing for a user, this is almost always why.

Real CSV attachment

Instead of chart images, the email arrives with an actual CSV file attached — data a recipient can open in Excel and work with immediately, on a schedule, without logging in.

This is quietly one of the most valuable features in the whole platform for finance and operations teams: a scheduled, filtered, security-respecting data extract that lands in an inbox every morning with no integration work at all.

Attachments are subject to a file-size limit of roughly 3MB. A wide table with tens of thousands of rows will exceed it and the delivery fails. Keep table subscriptions tight — the columns that are genuinely needed, filtered to a sensible window — rather than trying to ship an entire dataset by email. If you need a full extract, that's a data-integration job, not a subscription.

The watchlist

The watchlist is the lightest-weight of the three and the easiest to demo. You pin a metric — from a widget or a lens — and it appears on your CRM Analytics home screen, trending over time.

Two configuration choices give it its meaning:

Influence direction

Tell it whether up is good or bad. Revenue rising is positive; open case age rising is negative. The watchlist colours the trend accordingly, so a glance tells you the story without reading the number.

Reference line

Set a target or threshold to plot against the trend — quota, SLA, budget. The metric stops being a raw number and becomes performance against a goal.

Think of the watchlist as the user's personal KPI strip: three to six numbers they care about, from wherever in the platform they live, trending on the page they land on. Combined with a default view and a weekly subscription, it means a user has a relationship with your data before they ever deliberately open a dashboard.

Notification

Event-driven. Tells you when a condition is met — and stays quiet otherwise.

Subscription

Schedule-driven. Arrives on your cadence whether the news is good, bad, or boring.

Watchlist

Glance-driven. Always there on the home screen, trending, with a target to compare against.

One last piece of the adoption puzzle remains. All of this assumes users understand what they're looking at — and the final lesson covers how to teach them inside the dashboard itself, with onboarding videos and the Learn action.

Discussion

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Views

Save a set of CRM Analytics dashboard selections and filters as a named view, set a default so the dashboard opens on your slice, and share the URL — which encodes the view ID so a colleague lands on the same cut of data.

Onboarding & Learn

Attach a help video to a CRM Analytics widget with the onboarding property so users can teach themselves via the Learn action — and avoid the gotcha that the URL must be a YouTube embed link, not a normal watch link.