Can I generate a list of contact persons that we've done work for recently?
For holiday card purposes, I would like to have the names (and, why not, the addresses) of our recent customer contacts. By definition that would be the ones we did projects (or tasks) for during 2017. I can't see ways to filter contacts by date of work provided for them. Or by any other date or time fields, or project related fields. Has anyone been coping with the same issue, and would you have any suggestions?
Answer
Hi, Wouter, you can add a filter "Last Project Date" and use it to filter the contacts for whom you did the projects in a specific period of time. At least we work this way when we send the customers' satisfaction surveys, greetings cards, etc.
I think something like that has been requested as a development idea: http://xtrf.userecho.com/forums/1-product-development-ideas/topics/186-number-of-jobs-per-client-contact-person/. If that is right, you may want to upvote that topic.
No too many options to filter, though. Is there any option to use similar filters as in smart views or simply import selection from smart view ?
Hi Asta, quite right! I found that one, but either I'm doing something wrong, or you are less choosy when sending cards. ;-)
The trouble is, that the Last Project Date appears to be associated with the customer rather than with the contact. At least, the list that I generated contained all contact persons of customers for whom we worked this year. Not just the contact persons we actually worked with, which should be considerably less - perhaps just one fifth of the total now listed.
But hopefully I missed something?
Update: based on a sample of customers and contact persons I'm sure of, in our case one out of three contact persons per customer was active this year. So while it would be a useful first filter, we would still have to do a lot of (error prone) manual removing.
Also, as we would like to export the list in order to print address labels, it would be great if the customer address could be added to the view, but I don't see a possibility for that.
Update: it is possible to choose and edit a Smart View, mark filtered contacts and use the Send CRM button, which I have noticed just now.
Sorry for spam if that was obvious :)
Yes Wouter, you are right, unfortynatley "last project date" is associated with the customer. So far we didn't find a solution how to filter the contacts per the projects done and we are sending our greetings to everybody :) However, definitely we would be happy to have the solution.
If you are interested in a built-in solution/feature, please go to the link mentioned by me above and vote it up :)
Thank you all for your feedback! As we ordered considerably fewer New Year's cards than we have contact persons, I'll have some manual selecting to do then. ;-)
Łukasz, I just upvoted your link. I trust the two issues are related and will all be resolved in one new feature. ;-)
Ha, found a workaround I'd like to share with you:
In Projects, create a new view, adding columns for Client, Contact Person Display Name (or First Name and Last Name or whatever you like), as well the address fields. Yes, they're all there! Filter by project start date or any other time indicator.
Of course, you'll have many duplicates, as for most clients and contacts you will have multiple projects. But once exported to Excel, you can easily remove duplicates (this is done in the Data ribbon; click Remove Duplicats and choose the select contact person and customer columns). Of course, you also want to remove columns with fields that are not relevant for your mailing, such as project ID or whatever you had in your view.
And voilà, an Excel list with recent contacts with their company name and addresses, that you can use to print labels with Word or a dedicated program.
@XTRF
Not sure whether you want me to open a new thread for this, but I had some more observations on this topic that might be considered a Development Idea. You decide.
I followed the workaround suggestion posted by Wouter. The end result is a list of client contacts that have recently ordered projects. The problem is how to make use of this list if you want to send out a message using the CRM module of XTRF. I tried copy and paste, comma-separated, etc. into the recipient address field of a new e-mail in XTRF CRM. Nothing worked to get the addresses imported from the Excel spreadsheet to the email recipients in XTRF. Do you have another suggestion for this?
To round off this topic, I really do like the CRM module in XTRF for such purposes, e.g. end-of-year mail to all client contacts that have requested a quote or ordered a project over the last 12 months. The problem is that this filter criteria is currently not available in XTRF, not in the Client Contacts section nor in the CRM section of XTRF (see screenshot of the filter popup where the criteria should be available: Client Contact Person for projects started between x and y). Could you please add such criteria to make full use of the CRM module? It seems like a logical feature for CRM purposes.
Wouter suggested a workaround, which only works within that limited scope of projects.
Having an actual filter in XTRF's contact persons smart views would likely enable having that same filter on the CRM view.
Anyway, I added that need to the list of requirements should the feature be added to our development roadmap at some point.
Sancho, such a filter will be available in Client Contacts browse view from version 8.6 on.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Ha, found a workaround I'd like to share with you:
In Projects, create a new view, adding columns for Client, Contact Person Display Name (or First Name and Last Name or whatever you like), as well the address fields. Yes, they're all there! Filter by project start date or any other time indicator.
Of course, you'll have many duplicates, as for most clients and contacts you will have multiple projects. But once exported to Excel, you can easily remove duplicates (this is done in the Data ribbon; click Remove Duplicats and choose the select contact person and customer columns). Of course, you also want to remove columns with fields that are not relevant for your mailing, such as project ID or whatever you had in your view.
And voilà, an Excel list with recent contacts with their company name and addresses, that you can use to print labels with Word or a dedicated program.