Tips on using activities

You can use the Report Manager (print function) to create a report of the due activities of internal per­sons either using the “My Data” form, on the form of an internal person, or from the Entry Portal (print button and context menu).

In this report, you can specify the activity type and maturity as search conditions. Alternatively, you can also specify the period of time to be taken account of (Today, Today + Tomorrow, This week, This week + Next week, This month, This month + Next month). This is useful if you are close to the end of a period.

You can create activities from various forms. On all case and contact forms, you will find in the function bar the Activity (New) function for creating a specific activity by means of the activity assistant. You can also find all functions for creating new activities at the New button of the Entry Portal. There, you need to create the specific relations of the activity, while with cases and contacts the relation is automatically created. The functions for creating activities are the same in all module forms.

To set a task or follow-up activity to a specific day in the future, change the date in the date fields of the activity concerned. It is important to log the time of implementation with the timestamp in the Comment field and to provide corresponding information for another agent. If you schedule an activity using the date fields, it will appear at the correct time in the respective Entry Portal so that you can always see when it starts. If necessary, leave a sufficiently large time window between the Beginning and the Deadline so that the activity does not immediately appear as Escalated at the start.

You can set a point in time for almost every activity (Remind) at which you are reminded before the activity begin­s.

When importing external appointments or emails via the Groupware connector, the participant or recipient list can contain unknown contacts (pseudo data record with an email address in the Email and Save contact as columns).

In the lists of appointment participants or email recipients, a function is available on the hyperlink in the Save as field that can be used to assign a contact to an email address. This function is the equivalent of the hyperlink to a red email address in the appointment and email connector.

The system checks whether contacts from the system can now be assigned to the email address in Save as. If this is the case, these are presented in the contact selection that can be opened using the hyperlink so that a contact can be assigned.

Otherwise, the contact selection appears, which can be used to select the appointment contacts. You can also create a new contact there, to which the email address is then assigned. Relationships to contacts can no longer be changed in this way.

The email address assigned to a contact can also be automatically transferred to its master data. For this, a merge dialog opens (Update contact information) after the contact has been assigned. It contains the Email, Email 2, and Email 3 fields. If a master email exists, it is suggested to place the "new" (preselected) email address in the Email 2 field.

You can distribute information to other agents about a phone call or a data record using the Message function. You can select a person or a team as the recipient. If, for example, all sales staff members have been assigned to the sales team, all its members will receive the message distributed to the team.

Please use also the call statuses (Not available, Busy...) that represent important pieces of information for all follow-up activities and other agents.

If there is an active case for a contact, the system asks you when creating and saving an activity for this contact whether this activity should also be assigned to one of these cases (the system offers only these cases). This ensures that activities for the contact are also visible under the case, and an assignment is created.

With activities, special fields (multi hyperlink fields) replace a large number of sublists (Save as tab). You can assign the activity here to other objects or procedures, next to the assignments originating from the CRM standard. The activity can be assigned to additional contacts, cases and products. You can create multiple assignments here. The attributes can alternatively be displayed as a list (click the gray arrow in the field).

An activity can be created for several contacts at the same time by selecting these contacts in the master list of the respective contact form and using the corresponding form function for the activity. Only one activity is created, to which all selected contacts are assigned. Internal contacts who are assigned here as clients will not see this activity under My data.

Depending on whether an activity is created from a contact or from a case, the direct relation with the relevant record is always created automatically, but not automatically with other relations. Activities from a contact  must be assigned a specific case as needed, and activities from a case must be assigned a specific contact.

You can create the relation with cases in all activities via the Project field in the header form of the activity. The relation with contacts is usually created in tasks via the For contact ... tab or the Attendee list of appointments, with phone calls under Talk with....

A default format (TXT, HTM, RTF) is available to you for the email body, phone remark, appointment remark, task remark, and memo remark, adjustable on a per-user basis via the PSA_DEF_CTT_FMT_% variables (HTM, TXT). The format is automatically used when an activity is created. It remains in effect until the user manually changes the format in the activity or uses a template. This feature supports users who want to start writing immediately in the desired format without a template.

To display and print correspondences (letters, emails) and for all other activities, simply click on the entry in the Subject field. This opens the text in the linked application (e.g. MS Word or Internet Explorer) and you can use the program's standard print function. Emails can also be printed directly from the text field of the email form. For all other activities (tasks, appointments, phone calls and memos), you can display and print the text from the Notice field in this way.

You can use the visit report wizard to create the visit report and finalize and distribute the appointment at the same time. You also have the option of using a questionnaire in the visit report wizard.

The easiest way is to record the most important information about an appointment in the Notice field. It has an unlimited character capacity and all formatting options. You can then use the standard print command to create a document containing all the information and assign it to the appointment as a document.

When you create emails or a letter or fax, it is best to always select a template that is used in your company for these purposes. You can define a standard template for each of these purposes, i.e. the type of correspondence.

• Change to the My data form.
• In the function bar, click Configuration / Correspondence templates.
• By clicking on the respective button, email, letter or fax, the selection dialog opens in which you can select your preferred correspondence template. Note that the template must sup­port the correspondence type. If necessary, contact your administrator if you have not created your own template.
• Select a printer from your network or a local printer for resource-saving printing of serial letters. This printer will be used automatically when printing a serial letter via the Generate and print function. See also:  Creating a serial letter

• Click the Set button to use the template by default for the respective activity from now on. As soon as you create an email, a letter or a fax, the template you have set is always used automatically.

The template to be used can be changed individually at any time in the activity form.