If your organization is located in a region where multiple languages are spoken, you may find it valuable to enable language-specific contact information in InterAction. This feature helps you store data such as name formats and salutations in a format that is familiar to contacts that speak other languages.
For example, if your organization supports the Dutch (Netherlands) language, enabling language-specific contact information lets you store the following information for an Ellen van Dijk, whose preferred language is Dutch:
- The Dutch job title “Adviseur” for “Consultant”
- The Dutch title “Mevrouw” for “Ms.”
- The Dutch salutation “mevrouw Van Dijk” for “Ms. Van Dijk”
- The Dutch letter greeting “Geatche mevrouw Van Dijk” for “Dear Ms. Van Dijk”
This information is stored in out-of-the-box and custom additional fields. There is no limit to the number of fields you can add or what text values you can assign to them. These fields are used as “building blocks” in export, reporting, and mail merge to create any type of correspondence in a language that your firm supports.
When used in conjunction with the Preferred Language and Gender fields, your marketing team can use language-specific contact information to create mailings in different languages, and be confident that the mailings are sent to the correct contacts.
Web Client users can also take advantage of the language-specific data when using the Microsoft® Word® integration for mail merges. However, note that the data for the fields must be entered in the Windows Client.
To set up language-specific contact information, you need to enable the feature and do some configuration steps. The following table summarizes the steps to set up this feature.
High-level Steps to Configure Language-Specific Information
| Step | Comment | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Enable the language-specific contact information feature. | See Enabling Language-Specific Contact Information. |
| 2. | Configure the Gender field. This field is used to record the gender of each person. Filtering on gender can be useful when setting up language-specific mailings. | See Configuring the Gender Field. |
| 3. | Review the new Preferred Correspondence Language field. This field is used to store each person’s preferred language. Users can then filter based on this field and create mailings using the correct language. If you stored this information in a different additional field before, you may need to migrate that information to the new field. | See About the Preferred Correspondence Language Field. |
| 4. | Set up the list of supported languages for your organization. These languages become list items in the Preferred Correspondence Language field. | See Configuring the List of Languages. |
| 5. | Create any fields you need for storing language-specific information. InterAction provides some out-of-the-box fields such as Language-Specific Job Title. You can create as many additional fields as you need. | See Creating and Editing Language-Specific Custom Fields. |
| 6. | Have users enter data in the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language fields for your organization’s contacts. | For an overview, see About Entering Data in the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language Fields. |
| 7. | Use the Windows Client to enter data in new language-specific fields for your organization’s contacts. |