Relationship Management

 

 

Comprehensive Standard Data Capture Screens

The SPS Contact Manager utility provides a standard user interface to collect such contact information such as shipping and mailing addresses, company phone numbers, and email addresses.  Data entry follows html standards including text input fields, combination menus for selection of one entry such as state or country of contact.

 

 

Telephone numbers allow format variations based on country codes so each individual contact can have individualized phone numbers based on the country in which they reside.

 

 

 

Expand Database With Attribute Definitions

Beyond the standard data capture screens of the Contact Manager, you can define custom database fields using the Attribute Builder for Contacts.  The creation of custom fields result in a dynamic user-interface used to capture information under Attributes tab of Contact Manager.  For example, you can define “Sales Information” section about a customer, including database fields detailing number of employees (as a whole number input), product sold (as a combination menu), purchasing contact (as a character input), contact phone number (in phone number format), initial contact date (as a standard date entry), and whether the contact responded to an advertisement (as a yes/no checkbox).  The Attribute Builder application allows for the creation of the custom database fields by providing a label and user-input control in the following manner:

 

 

Just choose a label (i.e., “name”), the type of user-input (whole number, drop-down menu, radio button, date…) and press Save.  That is all that is required to build custom database fields and user interfaces!  Of course, you can define any section and field you wish using any of the available Attribute Builder fields.  These fields result in a custom user interface which is accessible through the Contact Manager under the Attributes tab.  The example above would result in an interface that would look like:

 

 

User input is controlled in that the “Number of Employees” field (defined as a whole number) will only accept a numeric entry, the “Product Sold” field is a menu item which allows the user to select one entry from a list, the “Contact Phone Number” only accepts a telephone number (in proper format), and the “Initial Contact Date” only allows entry of a date (by typing in or by using a calendar pop-up to select date).

 

 

Categorization and Data Ownership

The custom database fields defined by the Attributes builder can be applied to one or more specific contact categories.  For example, custom database fields relating to the “employee” category of contacts may capture information such as “Social Security Number”, “Birth Date”, and “Emergency Contact”.  In contrast, your company’s “customer” contact category may need to capture attribute information for individual contacts such as “Nickname”, “Home Phone”, and “Birth Date”.  Category association allows for the creation of separate user interfaces with the appropriate custom fields which appear under the Attributes tab based on whether the data entry represents a “customer” or “employee” category.  Both categories will “share” the “Birth Date” custom database field, buy employee categories will have the “Social Security Number” and “Emergency Contact” fields while individual contact categories will have the “Nickname” and “Home Phone” fields appear on the screen.

 

The SPS data ownership rules allow the various user groups created within the SPS to have access to attributes that are assigned to that owner.  For example, you may wish for your customer service department (perhaps found in a group called “Customer Service”) to be allowed access to an attribute Section titled “Credit History”.  You may further wish to exclude your shipping department from viewing any information regarding your customer’s credit and only allow access to information regarding the customer’s address and phone number.  By applying the ownership principals of attributes, you can specify which group (of the groups which have been created by the administrator) has access to each attribute defined in the Attribute Editor.  In this manner, further customization of user interfaces can be achieved – this time by specifying which users (based on the group they belong to) can access which attributes.

 

 

 

Electronic Form and Event Association Through Ticket Interface

Company relationships stored in the Contact Manager have the ability to be associated with custom electronic forms (“tickets”) created by the Ticket Builder application discussed below.  These tickets may be any document which your company wishes to keep in an electronic format (thus allowing trend analysis and a multitude of reporting options) such as an employee evaluation form to those items which require “action” through a defined approval chain such as a purchase requisition or customer sales order.  In this manner, you can define what the form looks like (using the Attributes builder – this time for tickets) and what happens to that form once it is filled out.  Tickets will be discussed in detail in the following section detailing Business Event Documentation.  For now, it is important to understand that tickets can be associated and “triggered” using the Contact Manager program, thus linking the form to a relationship in your system.  This linking allows for the tracking histories of forms.

 

For example, suppose we have created an electronic form for our “customer” category which collects information about a sales order.  The form can be designed in the Ticket Builder application (discussed below) and can be “triggered” using the “Ticket” button from the Contact Manager.

 

This would open the electronic form to be completed.  If the ticket had been defined with specific actions based on creation (such as requiring an Approval), then the SPS would deliver those notices through the Same Page Mail Server as an email with an “active” link (much like an attachment but would cause the appropriate program user-interface to appear).

 

 

 

Unlimited History Record Through Comment Interface

All relationships defined in the Contact Manager (along with all electronic forms – discussed below) have the ability store formatted comments.  These comments are accessed from the Comments tab of the Contact Manager for each particular contact and can be augmented, added to, printed, or deleted only if the user accessing them has the permission to do so.

 

 

All user interfaces for comments (including those found in other applications) have the SP Editor utility to allow a variety of formatting, including copy, paste, font style, font size, bold, italic, underline, bullets, and font colorizations.  All text entered into the SPS using the SP Editor utility is completely html format, thus allowing you to post any such data to your company web site with relative ease.