CRM – Activities and contacts

With the add-on module CRM you see everything that happens with a customer in one place: your own entries such as notes, calls, emails and meetings – and, shown automatically, all quotes, orders, invoices, credit notes, delivery notes, shipments, returns, sent emails and marketplace messages. The area is then called Sales, and the group CRM sits at the bottom of the left sidebar.

#A customer’s timeline

1. Open the customer (double-click in Sales → Customers).
2. Choose the tab Activities at the bottom. With the Timeline | Tasks switch you change to the customer’s open tasks.
3. The newest entries are at the top. As you scroll down, allverto loads older ones.
4. Double-click opens the matching window: the order, the document, the return, the marketplace message – or your own entry for editing.

Above the table you filter by Type (e.g. only calls or only invoices) and Period. As in every table, you can move, show and hide the columns.

#Log activity

1. In the tab Activities, click Log activity … – or choose Log activity … or Log call … in the right-click menu of a customer or contact. From anywhere, use Ctrl+K → “Log activity”.
2. Choose the type: Note, Call, Email or Meeting/visit.
3. Choose the Customer (already set in the customer window) and optionally the Contact.
4. Enter Subject and Text. Date and time are prefilled with now – for a conversation from yesterday, simply change them.
5. For a Call, choose the direction (outgoing/incoming), the Outcome (e.g. reached, voicemail, callback arranged), the Duration and the Phone number – it is prefilled when you choose the contact. For a Meeting, the duration.
6. The Owner is initially you; you can choose another person.
7. Save.

You change or delete your own entries by double-click or right-click. Entries created when a task was completed can only be changed in their text and contact.

#All activities

Sales → Activities shows the timeline of all customers – handy for “What did the team do with customers today?”. In the left sidebar you choose My entries, Calls, Notes, Meetings, Emails or Transactions. Above the table you additionally filter by type, period and Owner; the search finds customers (number, name, email) and text in your own entries.

#Contacts

Business customers have the tab Contacts in the customer window (even without CRM). For each contact you maintain:

• Name, Position and Department
• Phone, Mobile and Direct dial – the direct dial is a full number or just the extension (e.g. 56), which allverto appends to the phone number
• Email and Note
• Primary contact – at most one per customer; it is always at the top

Double-click opens the contact for editing; the right-click menu also offers Make primary contact, Write email and, with CRM, Log call … and Create task ….

#Phone numbers for caller identification

allverto also stores every phone number of customers, contacts and suppliers in international format (E.164, e.g. +493012345678). This way, incoming calls can later be assigned unambiguously to a customer or contact – no matter how the number was entered:

Without a country code, the country of the customer or supplier applies, otherwise the country from your company details. A number without an area code (e.g. just 123456) is not unique – it stays saved but is highlighted in yellow in the contacts table. Hover over a number to see the stored format.

#Data protection

When anonymising a customer, allverto replaces the subject, text and phone numbers of the customer’s activities and tasks, deletes the contacts and cleans up the change log. The data access report contains the contacts and a separate section CRM: activities and tasks.