InterAction stores a firm list of contacts. This is a “central collection” of contacts available across the organization. Contacts in the firm list are called firm contacts.
Deciding how to structure your organization’s contacts is a key step in implementing InterAction. Effectively organizing the contacts in the firm list gives professionals and other users in your organization powerful tools for leveraging the data.
You can customize the terms for “firm” and “firm list.” For details, see Other Settings.
- For example, a well-organized collection makes it easy for professionals to answer questions like the following;
- What is our organization’s relationship with a contact?
- Who are our clients?
- Who are our most important clients?
- Which of my contacts or clients do I want to market to?
- Who do I need to contact this day or week?
- Who are our most promising prospects for new business?
This also benefits the marketing department, as they can answer questions like the following:
- What contacts do professionals want to send mailings to?
- Who are we sending mailings to?
The firm list contains a single version of each contact. This database can then be “sliced” in three key ways:
- What is the relationship between your organization and the contact? For example, is the contact a client, an employee, a prospect, etc. Keep in mind the same contact might have several different relationships with your organization.
- What marketing mailings are we sending to the contacts? What events have they been invited to?
- What day-to-day work does an individual user need to do with that contact?
To accomplish this, InterAction organizes contacts with folders. Folders fall into folder classes that correspond to the key ways individuals in your organization use the contacts:
Note that the term folders is primarily used in the Windows Client; the Web Client presents “lists” instead.
- Contact types identify the relationship between your organization and the contact, the purpose of the contact in the firm list, or the status of the contact.
- Marketing lists are used for mailings and events.
- Working lists are temporary collections of contacts associated with a particular task, such as a list of people that someone in a particular department needs to call in a week, a list of recruiting candidates, or a departmental event. End users can create working lists in the Web Client for these purposes and to manage personal projects.
The figure below illustrates this overall organization.
The diagram shows some additional marketing lists and working lists that are not provided out of the box. InterAction provides a limited number of marketing lists and no working lists out of the box.
A fourth folder class, Administrative Folders, is used behind the scenes to store information. These folders are never presented in the Web Client as “lists” the way the other folders are.
The folder classes are important because they determine the behavior and characteristics of the individual folders. Although all folders share common characteristics, there are significant differences between the classes. For example, Web Client users can create new working lists, but they cannot create new contact types.
Folder classes are further subdivided by folder types. Each class has a set of valid folder types to organize the folders within the class. For example, contact types are organized into five groups out of the box:
- Clients and Prospects
- Organizations
- Other Contact Types
- Personnel
- Status
Folders provide security for the information stored in them. You can set access rights on folders to control which users have access to work with the contacts within the folder. Access rights are very detailed and allow you to control a wide variety of adds, deletes, and edits. For details about folder security, see Configuring Folder Security.
Not all security is provided by folders – Data Change Management also controls the changes users can make in the Web Client. For details, see Access Rights and Data Change Management.
Folders can also be dependent on one another in a variety of ways. For example, the Client Personnel folder is intended to contain all of the people in InterAction who work at one of your clients. InterAction includes automated processes that look at all the companies in the Clients folder and automatically link their associated people into the Client Personnel folder. These folder dependency rules are covered in Defining Dependencies Between Folders.
For details about creating and editing folders, see General Folder Management.