Real-Time Marketing of Services to a Prospect

The following business process flow illustrates how the sales and marketing functionality would be used to market services when a new customer calls.

Warning:

We do not recommend using this business process if your organization's service territory is predefined (i.e., if you've set up the premises and service points for your entire service territory). Why? Because it can result in the creation of new premises and / or service points and you probably don't want this to happen if you've already set everything up. While it is possible to disable the creation of new service points and premises by developing new plug-ins, we'd recommend using the business process described under How To Add A New Customer From Control Central if a new customer calls in and you have predefined premises and service points.

The following points describe the steps in this business process:

  • You look for the customer using Control Central - Search. Because the customer is new, you push the Add Order button on Control Central to transfer to the Order transaction.
  • You then process the order as described above.

In order to take advantage of the above business process, it's important that you understand the following points:

  • When the order page is opened for a new customer, the order's campaign is defaulted from the installation record. The default campaign on the installation record is "generic" because we don't know anything about the customer (they are new) and therefore we cannot default a campaign targeted to their customer class or geography.
  • This default campaign on the installation record must be constructed using one of the following approaches:
    • The default campaign has a package for every potential type of customer who can call up. While this is possible, it's probably not realistic as the data setup burden required to define every type of package could be onerous. However, if you have a limited number of service agreements, this approach is feasible.
    • The default campaign could just be a "dummy" campaign that has no packages. The "real" campaigns will only be shown after basic information about the customer has been recorded on the order and the "show eligibility" button is pressed. These campaigns appear in the order's eligibility tree. The selection of a campaign in this tree will cause the order's campaign to be switched. Note, because the "dummy" campaign has no packages, no packages will appear in the order's eligibility tree when the dummy campaign is referenced on an order.
  • The order is then processed as described above.