What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Callie Brennan trained Jess Ferrand, the heaviest user at Delancey Haig, on questions, refresh timing, pages and dashboards. Her main worry was whether answers are current. She is sold on the dashboards and wants to share them.
What happened: The 87-minute training call on 16 Sep 2024 covered asking questions, checking the refresh time, building a review page and the dashboards builder. Jess built a client pre-read and a grouped dashboard.
Customer view: Her first worry is whether the brain is up to date. Two stale answers, a placement and an unpaid invoice, both turned out to be a day behind the nightly refresh, and she had stopped trusting the money figures.
Commercial: Jess says a few people do nearly all the use of the forty seats, and she will share her page with other directors. She also raised a shared drive connector and asked for a stale-answer warning.
Watch: Callie owes Jess a product request, a setup note for the systems team and a short answer on the connector. No promise on timing was made for the connector or the warning.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Who was there
BG-Demo
Them
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Callie Brennan to pass Jess's stale-answer warning request to the product team.
- Jess to send the systems team contact and the shared drive owner to Callie.
- Callie to send a setup note and a short answer on the shared drive connector.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Stale answers between refreshes nearly cost Jess her trust in the money figures.
- A few people do nearly all the use of the forty seats, so adoption is narrow.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Jess will share her review page and dashboard with other client-account directors.
- A shared drive connector could deepen use on Growth, which has connector room.
Transcript
- Callie BrennanHello Jess, can you hear me alright? I can see you but the audio looked a bit flat for a second.
- Jess FerrandYes, got you. Sorry, I'm in the little room by the lifts because everywhere else is booked. It's a bit echoey. Can you hear me?
- Callie BrennanPerfectly fine. Right, so before we start, here's the plan for the next hour and a bit. We've got eighty-seven minutes booked, which is generous, so I'd like to do four things. First, how to ask the brain a question so you get an answer you can put in front of a client. Second, how you tell whether what it's telling you is current. Third, we'll take one of your real client reviews and build it together. And last, the dashboards builder, because Growth includes it and I don't think anyone at Delancey Haig has touched it yet.
- Jess FerrandHonestly I've been using it since it went live. I used it this morning. I don't really need the basics, I just need to know I'm not missing the clever stuff.
- Callie BrennanThat's fair, and that's what I'd heard from Daniel, that you're the heaviest user by a distance. So I'll go fast on anything you already do and slow down where you tell me to. Deal?
- Jess FerrandDeal. Though I'll warn you, I never read the manual. Somebody sent round a guide and I opened it, saw the table of contents and shut it.
- Callie BrennanHa, no manual today, I promise. Can you share your screen and open the chat panel? I'd like to watch how you actually phrase things.
- Jess FerrandSharing now. Can you see it? It's the browser tab on the left, the one with all the little pages open. I've got far too many open.
- Callie BrennanYes, I can see it. Lots of tabs. Go on then, ask it whatever you'd ask before a review. Pick a real client if you like, I don't mind what's on screen, we're on the same side.
- Jess FerrandOkay. I've got a technology client review later this week, so let me do what I always do. I type in the client's name and then 'what's going on'.
- Callie BrennanRight, and it's given you something decent. But look at what you asked. 'What's going on' is very open, so it's reaching for whatever's most recent across everything. That's why you've got a complaint, an invoice and a placement all in one paragraph.
- Jess FerrandWhich is what I want, to be fair. That's the whole reason we bought it. The client asked me straight out last time whether we'd resolved their complaint about the late shortlist and I had no idea. I'd been in the CRM and the helpdesk and the accounting system and I still couldn't tell.
- Callie BrennanExactly. So what I'd suggest is you keep that open question, but then follow up with narrower ones. Ask it what's open and what's closed on complaints, then ask about vacancies, then invoices. Three short questions beat one long one, because each answer comes back with its sources attached.
- Jess FerrandSources, yes, the little links underneath. I never click those.
- Callie BrennanClick one. Go on, the complaint one.
- Jess FerrandOh. Right, it's taken me to the ticket itself. So that's the actual ticket, with the actual notes. And there's the date it was closed. Okay, that's actually useful, I can see who closed it.
- Callie BrennanThat's the habit I'd like you to get into. The answer tells you the shape, the source tells you whether to trust it. What I need from your side is that when you're about to say something to a client that matters, you open the source first. Takes ten seconds.
- Jess FerrandFine. Ten seconds I can do. Is this up to date though? That's my real worry. Last month I asked about a placement and it told me the candidate was still in notice period when they'd started the week before.
- Callie BrennanGood, that's exactly the right worry, so let's spend proper time on it. Do you remember the two tickets you raised recently?
- Jess FerrandOne was that, I think. The other was a search that kept coming back empty. They were both answered quite quickly, actually, I'll give you that.
- Callie BrennanGood. So here's how the refresh works. Before we switch on anything, the brain does a nightly refresh, and on business days it's complete by seven in the morning. So when you sat down at half past eight, you were looking at last night's picture of the world. Anything that changed after the refresh, a candidate starting, a note someone typed at lunchtime, isn't in there until the next morning.
- Jess FerrandRight, so that's the placement thing. Someone updated it in the afternoon and I asked the next morning, so it should have been there. But if they updated it that same morning, no.
- Callie BrennanPossibly. I'd want to look at the exact timestamps before I say which it was, I don't want to guess. Can you find that candidate and open the record's source? Look for the 'last refreshed' line, it's right at the bottom of the source panel.
- Jess FerrandGive me a minute, I'm hunting for the name, I've got it written down somewhere. Okay. Found it. Bottom of the panel, 'last refreshed', it's got a date and a time. And that's earlier than when they were updated in the CRM. So it just hadn't caught up.
- Callie BrennanThat maps cleanly onto what I was saying. It wasn't wrong, it was a day behind. The thing to do is read that line before you quote anything time-sensitive. If the refresh time is before the change, go to the CRM directly for that one fact.
- Jess FerrandOkay but that's a bit annoying. I'd rather it just told me. Can it flag it? Like a warning, 'this might be stale'?
- Callie BrennanNot as a warning on every answer, no, not today. What it does do is show the refresh time, as you've seen. I'll pass the request on, it's a sensible one. I won't promise you it's coming, but I'll put it in writing to the product team with your wording.
- Jess FerrandPut it in with my wording, please. 'Is this up to date' is literally the first thing I think every time.
- Callie BrennanNoted. Right, let's go to the second thing, search, because I think your empty search ticket is the same family. Type in a client's name, the exact way you'd say it out loud.
- Jess FerrandOkay, typed it. Nothing. Look, it's blank. This is what it did before.
- Callie BrennanMm. And is that how the client is spelled in the CRM? Because search matches on what's in the record, and recruitment firms love a trading name that's different from the legal name.
- Jess FerrandOh, for goodness' sake. It's the group name in one system and the trading name in another. Let me try the other one.
- Jess FerrandThere we go. Eleven, no, a whole page of results. So it's me. Right. Well, that's embarrassing.
- Callie BrennanNot at all, everyone does it. A tip, though: in the filter at the top you can search by the organisation record rather than by the text. It joins the names up for you. Try that, with the group name again.
- Jess FerrandOh, that's better. It's got both. So I can just always use that one.
- Callie BrennanThat's the one. And I'll say it again because it matters: the brain is joining records from your CRM, helpdesk and accounting system, and where the names don't match we'll tidy that up with your admin. Who looks after that on your side, do you know?
- Jess FerrandSomeone in our systems team. I couldn't tell you the name off the top of my head, I just email the shared inbox. I'll find out.
- Callie BrennanPlease do, and send me their name, because I'd like to leave a setup note with them. I never hand over without one.
- Jess FerrandWill do. Right, can we do the actual client review now? I've got the real one in a few days and I'd rather build it than just watch.
- Callie BrennanYes, let's do exactly that. Open a new page. Pages are the thing most people underuse. You give it a title, then you ask questions inside it and the answers sit there as blocks you can keep, move or delete.
- Jess FerrandOkay, new page, I've called it the client name and 'review prep'. Now what, I just ask in it?
- Callie BrennanYes. Start with vacancies, open ones first. Then placements this year. Then what's been invoiced and what's been paid. Then complaints. Four blocks, in that order, so it reads like the conversation you'll have.
- Jess FerrandOkay, that took a while because I kept stopping to check things. The vacancies are right, I know those. Placements look right. The invoices, hold on. There's one that's showing as unpaid and I know the client paid that. They told me on the phone.
- Callie BrennanOpen the source on that one.
- Jess FerrandIt's the accounting system. Last refreshed, same as before, early this morning. And the payment, oh. It's dated yesterday afternoon. So again it's just behind.
- Callie BrennanSo that's the same pattern, and it's consistent, which is actually reassuring. It's not that the data is wrong, it's that your invoice was settled after the last refresh. Tomorrow it'll show as paid. For your review, you'd say it's been paid, and you'd be correct, and the brain would agree by then.
- Jess FerrandRight. Honestly that's fine. I just needed to understand why. Last month I thought it was broken and I stopped trusting the money bit altogether.
- Callie BrennanWhich is what I'd hate. If you stop trusting one part, you stop trusting all of it, and it's a good tool. Okay, one more check on that block. Can you ask it for the total invoiced this year for this client, and then compare it with what you'd expect?
- Jess FerrandI've done it and, yes, it's about what I thought. Slightly more actually, there's a credit in there I'd forgotten.
- Callie BrennanGood. And worth knowing that a credit is a one-off, it doesn't say anything about the relationship going up or down. Say that to the client as it is.
- Jess FerrandGot it. Now the complaints block. This is the one I care most about. The client asked me straight out last time and I looked daft.
- Callie BrennanThen let's make it as solid as we can. Ask it for every complaint, open and closed, with dates and who handled each.
- Jess FerrandOkay. Three of them. Two closed, one still open. The open one's recent. And there's a note on it from one of our delivery team that I hadn't seen, saying they've agreed to call the client. That's brilliant, that's exactly what I needed. If I'd walked in without that I'd have been caught out again.
- Callie BrennanThat's the use case, right there. So that page is now your pre-read. Next time, you can duplicate it, swap the client, and ask the same four questions. Ten minutes instead of an afternoon.
- Jess FerrandCan I share it? Some of the other client-account directors keep asking me how I do this.
- Callie BrennanYou can, yes, pages can be shared inside your organisation. Click the share button top right and pick the people. Just check the sources still open for them, because what each person sees depends on their own access.
- Jess FerrandOkay, that makes sense. Honestly half of them don't log in. We've got forty seats and I think a few of us are doing nearly all of it.
- Callie BrennanThat's quite common in the first months. Forty seats is what Delancey Haig is licensed for, and what I'd like is for the page you've just made to be the thing that pulls the others in. People join when they see a colleague walk into a review knowing everything. So share that, and tell them what it did for you.
- Jess FerrandI will. I'll send it round this afternoon. Sorry, what's next? I've got a lot of questions about the dashboards thing actually.
- Callie BrennanLet's go there, then. Dashboards builder. It's the part that's included on Growth and not on Starter, so you're paying for it whether you use it or not.
- Jess FerrandHa, well, in that case. Show me.
- Callie BrennanFrom the left menu, choose dashboards, then new. You give it a name and then add tiles. A tile is just a saved question with a way of showing it, a number, a table or a chart. So everything you've just asked on the page, you can turn into a tile.
- Jess FerrandOkay, I've made one. It's the open complaints tile, as a table. It looks a bit plain.
- Callie BrennanPlain is good. Now add a second tile for open vacancies as a number, and a third for placements by month as a chart. Then drag them into a row.
- Jess FerrandRight. It's a proper little view. Three things on one screen. Can it do it for all my clients rather than one?
- Callie BrennanIt can. Remove the client from the question and ask by client instead, so it groups. You'd get a table of every client you look after, with the three measures alongside each. That's the one I'd put on a second screen.
- Jess FerrandThat I would absolutely look at every morning. Is it live? Like if I leave it open, does it update?
- Callie BrennanIt updates when the nightly refresh lands, so it's as current as everything else, no more and no less. It won't tick over through the day. I'd rather tell you that now than have you leave it open and wonder.
- Jess FerrandFair enough. Honest answer, I appreciate it. Some of the other tools I've used just pretend.
- Callie BrennanNot something I'd do. Okay, build that grouped one now, and I'll sit quiet while you do. Shout if it throws an error.
- Jess FerrandDone, I think. Oh, it's got the column headings in a funny order. Can I move them?
- Callie BrennanDrag the header. Yes, just like that. And you can sort by clicking it. Put open complaints at the top, so the clients you need to worry about about come first.
- Jess FerrandOh, that's good. That's actually the whole of my Monday. Two clients at the top I need to ring. Okay, I'm sold on that one. What else is hiding?
- Callie BrennanA couple of smaller things worth ten minutes. First, saved questions, so you don't retype your favourites. Second, asking by person rather than by organisation, which helps when a client contact moves and you want to know where they've gone.
- Jess FerrandThe second one, yes. We lose contacts all the time. Someone moves to another company and we're the last to know. Show me that.
- Callie BrennanPick any contact you know has moved. Ask 'where have we seen this person' and give the name. It looks through calls, emails and tickets and links the same person across records, so you can see the history before you ring them.
- Jess FerrandThat worked. It found them on the old client and on a new one, so I know they've moved and who they were dealing with here. That's an introduction waiting to happen.
- Callie BrennanExactly. A former contact at a new company is a relationship, not a cold call. Right, saved questions next. Click the star next to any question you've asked.
- Jess FerrandStarred five. They're all in a list on the side. This is quite handy, I won't lie.
- Callie BrennanGood. Now, honest check on where we are. Is there anything you wanted from today that we haven't touched? Because we've got a fair bit of time left.
- Jess FerrandYes, actually. Admin stuff. I keep getting asked by colleagues how to be added, and I don't know whether I'm allowed to do it or whether I have to go through IT. And someone asked me about connecting something else, a new source.
- Callie BrennanTwo different answers. Adding users is an admin task on your side, so that's your systems team again, not you, not us. We'll make sure the right person knows how. Connectors, you've got room on Growth for more than you've connected, but I'd rather not promise a particular one until I've looked at what it is and had written access. I never start a connector without it.
- Jess FerrandRight. It was the shared drive, I think. People keep their client notes in documents instead of the CRM, which drives me mad.
- Callie BrennanThat's a very common one, and the fix is usually the connector rather than a lecture. If you can send me which drive and who owns it, I'll check what it needs and come back to you with a short list. Not a promise on timing, just a proper answer.
- Jess FerrandOkay. I'll find out who owns it and send both names, the systems person and the drive owner.
- Callie BrennanPerfect. Then let me make sure I've got the list of what I owe you. One, your wording on the stale-answer warning goes to the product team. Two, a setup note for your systems team once I have the name. Three, a short answer on the shared drive connector. Anything I've missed?
- Jess FerrandNo, that's it. Oh, actually, one thing. Is there anything the others should do before I send that page round? Like, should I warn them about the refresh thing?
- Callie BrennanYes, I'd put one line at the top of the page. Something like: check the last refreshed line before you quote anything from today. That's the whole lesson of this morning, really. If they do only that, they'll be fine.
- Jess FerrandI'll write that in. Right, can I try one more thing while you're here? I want to ask it something harder, because I want to know where it falls over.
- Callie BrennanPlease do. That's the best use of me. Try something vague and see what it does.
- Jess FerrandOkay, I asked which clients are unhappy. It gave me a list but it's hedging a lot. It says it's based on complaints and a couple of tickets and it can't really tell sentiment.
- Callie BrennanThat's the right behaviour, to be honest. It's telling you what it's got, which is complaints and tickets, and not pretending to read minds. If you want a better answer, ask for something it can count: complaints in the last quarter, invoices overdue, no contact in a while. Then you decide who's unhappy.
- Jess FerrandYes, that's fair. I'd rather it was honest. I'll go with counting things.
- Callie BrennanAnd I'll say, the tickets you've raised with us, two of them, were both the sort of thing that's easy to fix and easy to repeat: a name that didn't match and a refresh that hadn't landed yet. Now you know both, you'll probably not need to raise either again.
- Jess FerrandHopefully. Although I'll raise a ticket for anything that looks off, you know me, I'd rather say.
- Callie BrennanPlease do. Silence is the thing I'd worry about, not tickets. Right, I'll have a look at the clock. We've got a bit of time. Shall we do a rehearsal? You tell me what you're going to say in your review and I'll play the client, ask you the awkward question, and you answer using the page.
- Jess FerrandHa, go on then. I hate this but go on.
- Callie BrennanOkay. I'm the client. Jess, have you sorted out the complaint about the late shortlist, and what are you going to do about the invoice you sent last month?
- Jess FerrandRight. So, the complaint is still open. Our delivery team have agreed to ring you this week, and I'll make sure that happens before we meet. On the invoice, it's been paid, thank you, and there's a credit on the account from earlier in the year which I can walk you through. Is that, um, is that okay?
- Callie BrennanThat was very good. Specific, and you didn't flinch. And notice you didn't say anything you hadn't checked. That's the whole thing.
- Jess FerrandI feel quite smug. Okay, thank you. This was more useful than I expected, and I was a bit grumpy about booking an hour and a half for it.
- Callie BrennanHa, I did notice. We came in under, really, there's a few minutes spare. Let me recap what I'd like you to do between now and your next review. Use the pre-read page for one client, build it in ten minutes, and open every source for the money and the complaints. Put that one line at the top of the shared page. And send me the names.
- Jess FerrandNames, page, line. Got it. Do you want me to tell you how the review goes?
- Callie BrennanI'd love that. A line in an email is plenty. If it works, I'll use it as the example for the next customer, without your name on it.
- Jess FerrandFine by me. Actually, you can use my name, I'm not shy.
- Callie BrennanNoted, I'll ask you properly before I do. Right, anything else before I let you go?
- Jess FerrandNo, I don't think so. Oh, the recording. Is this recorded? Can I get the video, for the others?
- Callie BrennanIt is recorded, and I'll send the link with my follow-up note today, along with the list of what I owe you, so you've got it in writing. Please do share it round.
- Jess FerrandBrilliant. Thank you, Callie, that was really good.
- Callie BrennanMy pleasure, Jess. Good luck with the review. Speak soon, and have a good afternoon.
- Jess FerrandYou too, cheers. Bye.