An integral part of growing and maintaining your business is to keep open lines of communication with your clients and prospects. Your professionals need to spend time creating and nurturing relationships that breed further opportunities in order to generate revenue, retain their positions, and to advance in your organization.
With so many people connections and so much work, it is often difficult to stay on top of these relationships. Nevertheless, your professionals need to contact people on a timely, regular basis.
It is not enough just to talk to someone without being prepared. Your professionals need to know:
- When was the last communication?
- What was the conversation about?
- What is new in this contact’s business?
- What is new for this contact?
InterAction Reminders are a great way for professionals to get quick, easy value out of InterAction. With just a little bit of setup, your professionals can begin receiving regular reminders that include relevant information from within your organization and possibly from leading sources outside of your organization. Professionals can use that information to keep in touch with their clients and prospects.
Reminders help professionals because they:
- Prompt professionals to keep in touch with key people and find areas to expand your business
- Set up regularly scheduled messages that remind users when to communicate with these contacts again
- Provide key details to show clients/prospects how much they are valued
- Grant easy access to more detailed information to help strengthen relationships
- Allow recording of information to use in future communications through InterAction activities
See the following topics:
- What is the Reminders Feature?
- What Reminders Are Not Designed to Do
- How Reminders Work
- Where Users Can Create Reminders in InterAction
- How InterAction Harvests and Delivers Reminders
- Before You Deploy Reminders
- Steps to Implement Reminders in InterAction
What is the Reminders Feature?
The Reminders feature lets:
- Users set up email messages for themselves so they remember to communicate with key contacts
- Client Team Managers set up email messages for members of the client team to ensure important clients are being contacted by the right people while not being inundated with calls
The Reminders feature consists of both a reminder and a reminder message.
A Client Team Manager manages client teams or groups of professionals dedicated to building relationships with and getting more business from specific clients. These individuals can assign and manage reminders for members of the client team. For more information, see “Client Team Manager Access to Reminders” in Security for Reminders.
Reminders
A reminder is where users set up the reminder message they want to receive. Users can configure reminders from a PIM, the Web Client, or the Windows Client.
A reminder is a configuration of:
- User - the professional requesting to be reminded to contact a person
- Contact - the person or company about whom the user wants to be reminded
- Frequency - the rate of recurrence with which a user wants to be reminded (daily or weekly) or if it should be one-time
- Date - the day on which the next message is sent to the user
- Description - notes that display on the reminder and explain why the user is getting in touch with the contact
Reminders follow these rules:
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Each reminder can only have one contact.
Users cannot put multiple contacts on the same reminder.
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Reminders are limited to one user.
Multiple users cannot share the same reminder. However, different users can have their own individual reminders for the same contacts.
- Only users, their proxies, or a Client Team Manager can see a reminder.
There are no limits to the number of reminders a user can have in general or for a particular contact.
Reminder Messages
A message is the actual email message sent to the user. Users can choose how and when to act on the message. The message includes:
- Information to support a meeting or call
- Contact information to conduct the communication
- A link or URL to add an activity
- A summary of the user’s last activity regarding this contact
- A link or URL to view a report or send it
- A menu item to edit the next reminder
The message’s formatting and content is defined by site templates designed by your organization. For more information, see Configuring Reminder Message Settings.
What Reminders Are Not Designed to Do
Reminders are intended to help users build and strengthen their relationships. They are not designed for:
- Advanced tasking
- Advanced calendaring
-
Deal management actions
If your organization needs this functionality, contact your LexisNexis InterAction sales representative about InterAction Opportunities.
- Advanced workflow
Where Users Can Create Reminders in InterAction
Users can create reminders from where they are most comfortable working in InterAction, including:
- The InterAction Home page on the Web Client (under the Add a new heading)
- A Person Overview page in the Web Client (Actions > Add Reminder)
- Most lists of contacts in the Web Client (Actions > Add Reminder)
- Contact Details in the Windows Client
- My Reminders dialog in the Windows Client
- Reminders for Other Users dialog box in the Windows Client
- Contact Details in a PIM
- The Reminders dialog in a PIM
- InterAction for Microsoft® Outlook® (IMO)
How Reminders Work
Once the Reminders feature is configured (see Configuring Reminders for more information), reminders work as follows:
- The user (or his or her proxy or Client Team Manager) sets up a reminder from a PIM, the Web Client, or the Windows Client, including:
- How often to be reminded
- The first day to receive a reminder
- Some notes about why this reminder was created
- The InterAction database stores the newly created reminder.
- The Reminder Harvest process (scheduled from the Process Manager) checks the database to determine the reminders that are due and puts them in a queue for delivery.
- The Reminder Delivery process (scheduled from the Process Manager) builds the message by:
- Gathering the contents of the message based on the information in the database
- Identifying the user’s preferences for reminders - text vs. HTML, recurring vs. one-time, weekly vs. daily
- Formatting the reminder message
- The Reminder Delivery process (scheduled from the Process Manager) sends the message to the user using the:
- To address - the business email address in the user’s associated contact record
- Sent From/Reply To address - the address defined in InterAction Administrator
- The message arrives in the user’s inbox with other email messages and it is:
- Available from the user’s PDA device if it is configured to receive corporate email there
- Delivered with normal priority and clearly identified as a message from InterAction
- The user opens the reminder message and handles it any of these ways:
- Calls the contact right away without further research
- Sends the contact an email immediately without gathering more information
- Opens InterAction to view more information about the contact
- Requests a report containing more information about the contact
- Chooses not to communicate with the contact at this time, possibly changes the next delivery date, and deletes the message
- Adds the reminder to a “To Do” list by flagging the message, dragging it to the calendar to create an appointment, or dragging it to the task list to create a task, for example
- Deletes the reminder for the contact to prevent receiving future reminder messages
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If the user chooses to communicate with the contact, he or she should create an activity right from the reminder message regarding that communication that includes details of the conversation or email string.
These activity details can be included in the next reminder message for the contact.
- The user can modify the frequency of the reminder or set up another reminder for the contact based on this communication, for example, to follow up after the wedding of the contact’s daughter.
How InterAction Harvests and Delivers Reminders
Processing reminders is composed of two parts:
- Finding the reminders that are due in the database (Harvesting)
- Creating and sending reminder messages (Delivery)
Harvesting Reminders
The harvesting process includes support for:
- Determining that reminders should be delivered
- Following the user’s delivery preferences: daily or weekly
- Handling Saturday and Sunday reminders on Friday (since messages are not delivered on weekend days)
- Dealing with time zone issues - messages are delivered based on the user’s time of day, not the organization’s
- Disaster recovery - all reminders are collected including recovered reminders from missed executions, for example:
- An error occurred and a user’s reminders were not harvested on Monday as scheduled
- Someone shut down the Process Manager workstation and reminders were turned off for 3 days - including days when some users received their weekly reminders
- Not missing reminder deliveries - users receive messages before they are due even when they change their delivery preferences
Delivering Reminder Messages
After the Reminder Harvester process completes, the Reminder Delivery process ensures the reminder messages are generated and sent.
Reminder messages are email messages that are created using templates defined by the user or organization, including:
- Format - either HTML or text
- Global business email address - from the user’s associated contact record
- If the user does not have an associated contact record, InterAction records an error in the log and does not process the user’s reminders
- If the user does not have a global business email address, InterAction records an error in the log and does not process the user’s reminders
- If the user’s email address is invalid, a bounce back message is returned to the sent from/reply to email address used for the user’s process set
- Sent From/Reply To email addresses - it is strongly recommended that you use addresses that are connected to monitored inboxes so you can process bounce backs and questions from users
- Tokens/Retrieved data - the contents of the subject and body of the email message are specified by InterAction Administrator using tokens
- When retrieving all data, if the contact is both a user and a firm contact, the user data is used (even if the user version is blank and the firm version has data for that field)
- If the contact is not a user contact, InterAction uses the organization’s information
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Fields that do not apply, for example, the Job Title field for a company contact, are not output
For more information on tokens, see “Available Tokens” in Configuring Reminder Message Settings.
Before You Deploy Reminders
There are some things to consider before you deploy reminders:
- Load balancing - this is designed to be geographical or by time zone so each zone is harvested at least once a day during off-hours. Messages should be delivered in the morning in the user’s time zone, so you need to set up your harvest for early in the morning.
- When messages are delivered - 2 AM is usually a good time for harvesting reminders in each time zone. After reminders are harvested, they are subsequently delivered.
- There are no default reminders - it is up to the users to create reminders because:
- They are more likely to make the communication if they set up the reminder.
- The reminders are then based on first-hand knowledge of their clients.
- Set up just the fee earners during the initial roll out - ones who will appreciate the reminders feature and reflect positively on it.
- It might be best to have the Client Development Team work with users regarding who they should call:
- This makes it a coordinated effort to contact key clients and prospects.
- It limits the number of individuals reaching out to the most important contacts.