In InterAction or Microsoft® Outlook®, users maintain their information about contacts. This information typically includes the following:
- Name
- Company
- Job title and department
- Phones and addresses - this includes business, home, and other information
- Notes
- Activities
- Four custom fields - these can be used to maintain additional information about the contact
- Categories
Your organization also maintains information about contacts. Users want to leverage the organization’s information for certain contacts. They want to see information contributed to the firm list by other users (such as a new address for a contact) and to apply the information to their own list of contacts, if appropriate. They may also want to contribute certain information about their contacts to other users to ensure that the entire organization provides good service to their most important contacts. To facilitate this communication of information between the user lists and the firm list, InterAction lets users “connect” any of their user contacts with the single version of the contact in the firm list.
To connect a user’s contact with a contact in the firm list, the user must choose to contribute the contact to the firm list. When a user contributes a contact to the firm list, the user can choose which information is contributed for the contract and how the user wants to have updates applied to his or her contact.
For more information on how InterAction adds contacts to the firm list and manages updates sent between the user’s contact list and the firm list, see the following sections:
- Loading and Contributing User Contact Information
- How Are User Contacts Matched with Firm Contacts?
- How Is Contact Information Matched When Contributing Contacts?
- Managing Updates Between User Contacts and Firm Contacts