A related contact data set creates relationships between contacts in InterAction. InterAction relationships can be between two people, two companies, or a person and a company. The following are some examples of relationships:
- Donna Roeser is an Acquaintance of Brad Faulkner
- Brad Faulkner is a Board Member of TeleNorth
- Dharma Industries is a Subsidiary of Guru, Ltd.
Populating InterAction with a robust set of relationships is especially important when using features such as the Relationship Map™ page in the InterAction Web Client. Professionals are more likely to find useful connections between themselves and other contacts if InterAction contains good relationship data.
Relationships in InterAction are organized by relationship type, such as Board Member, Acquaintance, etc. When defining a new related contacts type, you specify the type of relationship to create and the method to use to locate the two contacts to relate.
When transforming a related contact data set, Application Collaboration does the following for each harvested relationship:
- Finds each side of the relationship. In the relationship Brad Faulkner is a Board Member of TeleNorth, the two sides are Brad Faulkner and TeleNorth.
- Creates a relationship of the specified type between the contacts.
You can also configure a related contact data set to handle outdated relationships by either deleting them or setting them to former.