Contact Management and Natural Persons

Posted on 17. Aug, 2012 by Martin Ortgiess in Exact Synergy

External stakeholders are important to a company. We can record these persons in Exact Synergy by creating a contact person linked to a company. But, what if a person is working for multiple companies? Or what if the person is an end-user not associated to a company? We’ve got you covered!

Let’s have a look at these three examples:

• A person can be a purchaser responsible for the purchase departments from 5 of your customers.
• A person can be a system administrator who works part-time at an IT company, but also has its own company.
• A person buys one of your products via the web shop; this person is an end-user and not associated to a company: he is a paying account himself.

As of product update 250 the above scenarios will be supported in Exact Synergy Enterprise: a person can be linked to multiple companies and can also be a debtor or creditor himself (prospect, customer or supplier). You can easily see where a person is working or where he has worked in the past. Any document or request linked to that person can be easily found back, regardless of the company the document is linked to.

This new feature gives you the opportunity to maintain information related to a person in one central place and to have full insight in the relations a person has with your company. This person can be much more important than you thought! You can easily trace back all communication you’ve had with him, regardless of the company it was addressed to.

In this screenshot you see a person called Martin. In the ‘Links’ section at the bottom you can see that he is working for 3 companies (ASG, Brasserie and Martin BV.), but he is also a customer himself (account code: 991153).

This new feature in Synergy comes with the following functions:

• A person can be:
  • Linked to multiple companies (accounts)
  • A debtor or creditor himself (prospect, customer or supplier)
  • Both debtor and creditor
• The person card contains a grid:
  • Showing all companies he is working for, including basic information like job title, mobile phone number and email address
  • Showing his debtor and creditor accounts (in case he is your customer, prospect or supplier)
  • That gives the option to add a new link to a company
  • That gives the option to add a new debtor or creditor account
• The person card has a new monitor section with the following options:
  • Workflow (see screenshot)
  • Documents (see screenshot)
  • Experience: A summary of his current and past job experience
  • When the person is a debtor or creditor, more monitor options are available

Screenshot: For Workflow the user has the option to view requests that are solely linked to the person card you’re looking at or to display all requests linked to the person, independent of the account the requests are linked to. In the screen shot above you can see all requests that are linked to Martin Ortgiess, because at ‘Involvement’ the user selected ‘Contactperson+ Links’. If the user selects ‘Contact person’ he will only see those requests that are solely linked to the person card you are looking at. The same option is available for the monitor section ‘Documents’.

• A person can be linked to an existing person, so in case you currently have 2 contact persons in your system which are in fact the same person, you can link them
• A person has so called ‘fixed fields’ and ‘flexible fields’:
  • Fixed fields: These fields are exactly the same for all person’s links. For example: name, gender, photo and social media links.
  • Flexible fields:
    • These are fields that might be the same, but not necessarily. When creating a new link or linking to an existing person, user can choose to copy over these fields. Some examples of these fields are: mobile phone, email, fax, job title.
    • When updating a flexible field on a person card (example: phone number), the system will check if the same phone number was used in other links of this person. If so, the user is asked if the phone number should be updated for all the links with corresponding phone number.
• In the CRM settings, the administrator can define who is allowed to make a new person account. This can be defined per account type (prospect, customer, supplier)
• The person card is customizable, so you can define which information you want to show and where to show it.

Related posts:

• Natural Persons Add-on
• Looking for Someone? Contact is a Mouse Click Away
• Introduction of the new Word Merge
• Calendar management: Synergy in your Outlook appointment
• Exact introduces E-Risk Management for Exact Globe

Tags: contact persons, external persons, natural persons, persons