We regularly find customers using the Contacts area of Act! to manage jobs, (projects, sales and quotes).
This has been done historically due to the inadequacies of the Act! Opportunities area, not least in the ability to extract data from the opportunity into documents for example quotes. With Seamless Opportunities the problem in the Opportunity’s area is resolved.
By using the Contact area to manage jobs, users end up duplicating Contact details many times over. This has the effect of creating disparate contact data vis-à-vis historical interactions and “muddies the waters” for users trying to find information about a customer.
Customers are therefore left with historically muddled Contact data sets. At Seamless CRM, we are able to manipulate this data to move the job information from the Contact record to new Opportunities. In doing so we create Opportunities, give them new unique reference numbers, take information from fields in the Contact record and create products and services and link deduplicated Contacts to their new Opportunities.
The deduplicated Contacts information can be recorded on the history tab off the resultant single contact. We normally use the last Contact edited as the key target record
The criteria for merging can be discussed for each individual customer’s needs, who may have a unique identifier such as an account number or it may be an address.
There is sometimes, additional work that is required to be done due to data entry errors in e.g. address information or a lack of a unique common identifier.
Contact us to discuss how we can help.
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