Customer Contact - Main

Open Customer Management, Customer Contact to maintain a customer contact.

Note: The dashboard. A zone exists in the dashboard that can be used to easily create new customer contacts.

Description of Page

Enter the Person ID of the person associated with the customer contact.

Select a Preferred Contact Method to indicate how the person prefers to be contacted. The following options are available:

  • Email. If this method is selected, the Contact Person's email address appears adjacent.
  • Fax. If this method is selected, the Contact Person's fax number appears (the system knows which of a person's phone numbers is a fax number by the phone type).
  • Not Applicable. If the person doesn't want to be contacted (or the contact method is unusual), use this option. You might want to consider describing the situation in the Contact Instructions.
  • Phone. If this method is selected, the Contact Person's phone number appears.
  • Postal. If this method is selected, the Contact Person's address appears. Refer to Where Does The Address Come From for a description of which address the system displays.
  • SMS. If this method is selected, the Contact Person's short message service (SMS) information displays.

Turn on the Open switch if the event that necessitated the contact hasn't been resolved. For example, if a customer calls with a high bill complaint and you can't resolve it immediately, you would turn on the Open switch and enter an appropriate entry in the Log. Refer to Customer Contacts Can Be Used As Case Files for more information.

Enter the Contact Date and Contact Time.

Note: The current date and time are defaulted.

The User ID of the user who created the contact is displayed adjacent to Contact Date / Time.

Every customer contact has a Contact Type that classifies the record for reporting purposes. Every contact type, in turn, references a Contact Class. The class categorizes customer contacts into larger groupings for reporting purposes.

Note: Adding a customer contact may cause a letter to be generated. You can set up a customer contact type to generate a form letter whenever a customer contact of this type is added. In fact, this is the only way to generate a letter in the system. Refer to Customer Contacts Are Used To Trigger Letters for more information.

Use Comments to describe the contact.

If the customer contact was created by a collection event or a write-off event, the Related Records contains information about the associated record.

If a letter template is associated with the customer contact type / class:

  • Letter Information describes the status of the letter (i.e., whether it has been printed or not).
  • If the letter has been printed and you want to reprint, please turn on the reprint switch (this will cause the letter to be reprinted the next time the respective letter print background process executes).
  • If your implementation team has plugged-in an Online Letter Image algorithm on Installation Options - Algorithms, the Display Letter button appears. When clicked, the image of the letter is rendered in a PDF and displayed in an Adobe reader. Refer to Technical Implementation Of Online Letter Production for a technical description of how letter images are produced.

The grid that follows contains a diary of past (and future) events related to the customer contact. Refer to A Customer Contact May Trigger Reminders and Customer Contacts Can Be Used As Case Files for more information about when you would use this log.

There are two ways to add a row to the log:

  • You can click the + button to add a new row.
  • You can navigate to the Log tab and insert a new row into the scroll.

Regardless of the method used to add a log entry, the following information appears on a log entry:

  • Create Date / Time is the date and time when the log entry was created.
  • Created by identifies the user that created the log entry.
  • Use Comments to describe the reason for the log entry. If you have lengthy comments, we recommend navigating to the Log tab (by clicking the adjacent Go To button) as there is a larger input field on this page.
  • The remaining fields are only used if you want the system to remind you about this customer contact on a future date. If you enter these fields, the system will create a To Do entry to remind you about the customer contact.
    • If the To Do entry should be addressed to a specific user, choose a Reminder type of Send to User and enter the user's User ID.
    • If the To Do entry should be addressed to a group of users, choose a Reminder type of Send to Role and enter the user group's To Do Role.
    • Use Trigger Date to define the latest date on which the To Do entry should be created. The reason we indicated this should be the latest date is because the background process that's responsible for creating these To Do entries has a parameter called "lead time". This parameter is used to define the number of days before the Trigger Date that the To Do entry should be created. Note, the batch control ID of TD-CCCB is used to refer to this background process.
Note: Multiple reminders. You can set up multiple reminders on a customer contact. For example, you can indicate that you want to be reminded every Monday for the next 4 weeks to check on the issue that caused a given customer contact to arise. You'd do this be entering 4 log entries where each as the desired Trigger Date.