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About Managing Contacts

Contacts are entities or individuals with whom the company does business with or with whom it expects to do business with in the future. Contacts includes employees of other companies, independent consultants, vendors, or personal acquaintances. Contacts can belong to only one company, but they can be part of many opportunities, including opportunities that do not involve their companies. Within Siebel Finance, contacts are presented in a single view of the customer and your relationship with the customer.

CAUTION:  This chapter assumes you have renamed Siebel Account objects to Companies. By default, Siebel Finance installs using the term Accounts. For more information on renaming Siebel Account objects, see the Upgrade Guide for your operating system.

End users can:

• Enter and track information about contacts, which includes products bought, details of signed agreements or contracts, and products previously recommended to the customer.
• Document marketing campaigns and details of each customer's response.
• Maintain a complete history of service requests and product applications that the customer has made in the past.
• Analyze a customer's financial health as well as a customer's needs.

The Contacts screen provides an alternative view of data that is available in other screens. Many tasks that can be performed in the Contacts views can also be performed in other screens. For example, users can create activities for a contact either in the Contact Activities view, or they can go to the My Activities view to enter a new activity, and then associate it with the contact.

For more information on basic contact functionality and administration, see Siebel Applications Administration Guide.

You can save time and reduce keystrokes by using a workflow to automate steps that are repeatedly performed by end users. For more information, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.