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Reminders and Contacts

Reminders and the Contact log are used to help manage your customers, accounts and suppliers. While these two things are similar, they are fundamentally serving different purposes.

A reminder is a future event that will show on your calendar to remind you to do something.

A contact log (aka "contacts") is a system to record when you last had some form of interaction with the customer (account, supplier etc).

For example, a customer comes into your store and makes a purchase (1 Sept). They forgot their wallet, so you let them take the goods and enter a reminder to check payment received in 10 days time. If the customer did not pay within 10 days, you might email them, which you would record as a direct contact. This happens on the 10th Sept.

Assume this customer might be marked as "contact every 30 days" in their customer definition. Since a direct contact was made on the 10th of Sept, they will not appear on the Contacts due report until 30 days later, or roughly the 10th October.

If however, the customer made another sale on the 20th September, AND their customer definition is marked "sales are contacts", then they will not appear on the Contacts due report until around the 20th of October

Customer Setup

Any customer can use the reminders log. However the contacts log will only show for customers that you have specifically selected. This is because the contact system is intended to be used as pro active tool for selected customers.

On the customer definition page there are several options you can change

  • Contact Interval. How many days from last contact before the customer appears on the due list.
  • Sales are contacts. Do you consider a sale to this customer as a contact, or is a contact a direct interaction such as account management? If you have a dedicated account management team, you will typically leave this off; if you are more owner-operator in scale then you may want this on.
  • Contact date. You can see and edit the last contact date directly. The last contact date will automatically change as you use other areas, but this allows you to override directly if needed


Using Contact Due List

The contact due list has several columns

  • Name, Company, Phone, Email. These are direct copies from the customer record. Tip. Hover your mouse over the "phone" field and it will be drawn in a bigger font - can be easier to read if you are calling or messaging them
  • Last Sale - The date of the last completed sale, or any current orders in the picking list. A pending picking order counts as a sale as they have placed the order, it is waiting for you to dispatch.
  • Last Direct Contact - The date you last deliberately entered a contact message or updated their date.
  • Direct Contact Due - the calulcated date that a contact was due, based on the contact interval set for this customer.
  • Contact Comment - Also taken directly from the customer record. Contact Comment in this column contains static comments about the customers preferences when being contacted, eg "email dont phone", or "shift worker, call after 1pm"
  • Last Comments - the last contact log comment. Typically a brief description of what happened on last contact. eg "Cust said is away until October, call then". Tip. Hover you mouse over this column to see a brief summary of previous comments recorded. The full list of all historicak comments is viewed by looking at the customer (click the customer name to open that page)
Technical Note. The contact due list has an overall limit of 18,000 customers. Contact us if you have an active need for more.

FAQ

Can I use contact log as a report to show customers that haven't bought anything recently?
You could, but contact log is designed for proactive management of key customers. If you simply want all customers, then the customer list has some options for this directly. When on the customer list, add the following columns
  • Last Sale date - the actual date of the last sale
  • Last Sale age - How many days have elapsed since the last sale. This number can be easier to sort and use
  • Expected next sale - Date of next expected sale, based on the frequency of previous sales
or, if you are planning a marketing campaign, you might like to use the "Identify Groups" options on the customers menu page.
Why do I see dates like 1-Feb-1970 in direct contact due?
If you have never directly contacted a customer, then we set an internal date of last direct contact as 1-jan-1970. This ensures that records sort correctly in date order. So basically, these dates mean "never"