Contact types are one of the primary means for organizing and categorizing firm contacts. A contact type typically does one of the following for a contact:
- Defines the relationship between your organization and the contact, such as Client or Prospect. Similarly, a contact type might also identify the relationship between the contact and a particular department or practice group.
- Identifies the purpose of the contact in the Firm List. An example of this would be College / University.
- Identifies the status of the contact – for example, a person may be identified with the Deceased contact type, while a company might be assigned Out of Business.
Web Client users can view the types assigned to contacts and add and remove contact types for contacts. For any page displayed for a contact, such as the Overview or Contact Details page, the types applied to the contact appear in the page header next to the contact name. Therefore, users can see how your organization has categorized the contact from many locations in the Web Client.
Users can also view a contact type as a list – for example, users can see the list of all the contacts with the Client Personnel contact type.
Contact types are organized into contact type groups. These help Web Client users organize their view of the information.
In the Windows Client, contact types appear as folders with the Contact Type class.
You can change the term used for contact types. This changes the text shown in the Web Client, although it does not change the wording used in the Windows Client. For details, see Change Terms Used for Contact Types, Working Lists, Marketing Lists.
You can use the Windows Client to “push” a contact type list out to the Frequently Used Contact Types for end users. For details, see Adding Folders to Users' Frequently Used Lists.
InterAction provides several out-of-the-box contact types such as Client, Prospect, Our Personnel and Alumni among others. For a detailed list, see Out-of-the-Box Contact Types.
Determining the contact types you need is an important step in implementing InterAction. Contact types normally represent organization-wide categorizations of contacts. For example, if your organization is highly structured around practice groups or departments, you might have a contact type for clients in each department.
Contact Types Appear Next to the Contact Names
[A] Web Client users can select the contact types that apply to a contact...
[B] The contact types appear in the contact header next to the person or company name.