CRM Activities - Activity Purpose and Result

Activities are the action items that need to take place, by someone, on a particular due date. They are also those activities that have been marked as completed task (historical view of closed actions). Each activity can be one of the following types:

• Phone Call
• Task
• Appointment
• Email
• Letter
• Fax
• Customer activity defined specific to your requirements

Within CRM, each activity has an Owner, or the user responsible for performing the activity.  The activity is also associated with a Regarding item.  The Regarding link associates the activity to that item, so that a comprehensive listing of all open and closed activities that have occurred is available.  In addition, if a Regarding item is a child record of a parent (such as a contact is a child record of a Parent Account), a rollup of all Open or Closed activities is displayed by default at the parent level.

Regarding items can be, for the most part, any type of entity within CRM.  The most commonly used are:

• Contact
• Opportunity
• Case
• Account

Phone Calls and Appointments allow for multiple participants per activity.

Purposes

InfoGrow has extended the functionality of each of the activity types with a field to track the purpose of the activity.  This purpose is used to establish the business reason for performing the activity, or to put it another way, the Purpose allows for the classification of all Activities into common categories.  Some examples of Purposes are below.

• Customer Service Issue
• Sales Prosepcting
• Quote Follow Up
• Lead Inquiry Follow Up

There are a number of benefits for this functionality across all areas of the CRM environment.  First, CRM users will have the ability to better manage their daily activity list by grouping the same Purposed activities together.   This allows them to filter a possibly lengthy activity list into a very focused list of the same purposed activities.  

Measurements are available to monitor possible bottle necks for business critical activities.  In addition to having a count of open phone calls assigned to a user, managers will have another layer of understanding to what those activities are (125 open phone calls, comprised of 18 Sales Prospecting, 35 Lead Follow Up and 72 Quote Follow Up).

Escalation rules can be applied to specific Purpose activities.  Past-due Lead Qualification calls may have a different sensitivity to time than Quote Follow Up Purposes. 

Each Purpose has a series of check boxes to indicate which activity types it is used.

1. Phone Call
2. Task
3. Appointment 
4. Letter
5. Fax
6. Email

Results

Along with the Purpose field, there is a data field designed to track the Result, or outcome, of each activity.  The Result is the ending state of the activity.  Examples of Results are below.

• Received Order
• Order Lost
• Issue Resolved
• Qualified Lead
• Disqualified Lead
• Left Message
• No Answer

The Result generally has three types of outcomes to measure, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  Good results of course are those that produced the favorable outcome, such as the Received Order.  Bad results are just as valuable, even if they aren’t what we want.  The Ugly Results, the Left Messages and No Answers of the world, force us to be in a state of uncertainty. 

The default functionality of CRM’s Activities is that a user must indicate that the activity is Complete.  Another default function of the activity form is do a Save and New, which opens a second activity window for the user to fill in.  Unfortunately, the original activity needs to be revisited and closed out, and the new one needs to have all of the data fields to get populated.

Triggering Next Steps

InfoGrow’s enhancements will automatically create follow up next steps when certain Results are selected.  As one activity is completed, another should be planned.  Using a combination of the Purpose and Result values, the CRM system will be configured via the Processes to create a new Activity.

For example, whenever a Result of “Left Message, 7 day auto callback” is selected, a new phone call is created (automatically) for a due date of today + 7.  All of the details of the phone call are copied from the original source phone call (today’s call that was just made) and this one will be placed in the Closed Activity section of CRM.

To properly plan the next steps, the combination of Purpose + Result can be used to determine the newly created Activity for some point in the future.  The details of the next step can vary, including the owner of the activity, subject, details, etc.  Use the table below to aid you in the mapping of the next steps.

For more assistance with making your CRM work for you, please call 800-897-9807.