Chapter at a Glance
In the previous chapter, you learned how to create and manage accounts and contacts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In this chapter, you will learn how to record, manage, and report on the activities and notes related to those records. The word activity is a generic term that Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses to describe business interactions, such as phone calls, tasks, and email messages. Notes are comments or other descriptive text related to a record.
Tracking activities and notes allows you and your company to:
Record the phone calls to and from a particular person or account.
Track customer service calls regarding a product or service.
Assign tasks to ensure that a sales representative follows up with new leads in a timely fashion.
Save copies of the email correspondence on a particular topic.
Understand the marketing activities a prospect or customer participated in during his or her history with your firm.
Think back to a time when you called a company with a question, and each time you called about the same topic the representative acted as though you had never spoken with the company before. This type of situation causes frustration for the customer and for the company. If that company had recorded calls and notes related to your request in a customer relationship management system, the representatives could resolve your subsequent calls more quickly because they could access the complete history of your interactions with the company.
Capturing all of the interactions with your customers and prospects as activities allows you to provide a higher level of customer service, improve sales efficiency, make better business decisions, and market more effectively.
In this chapter, you will learn how to capture the tasks, email messages, faxes, appointments, and other customer interactions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and relate them to customer and other records to gain a full picture of how your organization communicates with its customers.
Note
Practice Files The exercises in this chapter require only records created in earlier chapters; none are supplied with the book’s practice files. For more information about practice files, see Using the Practice Files at the beginning of this book.
Important
The images used in this book reflect the default form and field names in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Because the software offers extensive customization capabilities, it’s possible that some of the record types or fields have been relabeled in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment. If you cannot find the forms, fields, or security roles referenced in this book, contact your system administrator for assistance.
Important
You must know the location of your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website to work the exercises in this book. Check with your system administrator to verify the web address if you don’t know it.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses the term activity to describe several types of interactions. The types of activities are:
Phone Call Use this to record a received or initiated telephone call.
E-mail Use this to record a received or sent email message.
Letter Use this to record the mailing of a physical letter or document.
Appointment Use this to record a meeting or appointment. Many companies use appointments to track conference calls or online meetings, in addition to face-to-face meetings.
Recurring Appointment Use this to record meetings or appointments that occur on a regular, scheduled basis, such as the 15th of each month or every other Tuesday. Recurring appointment activities function the same as appointments except that you can set them up on a recurring schedule.
Service Activity Use this to record a service that you performed for a customer.
Tip
To create and use service activities, you must first make sure that your administrator has set up and configured the services, sites, and resources that your company offers. Service activities do not apply to every type of business; they are best suited to businesses that need to schedule customer services in specific time slots. Your business might not use service activities at all.
Campaign Response Use this to record a customer or prospect response to a marketing campaign. For example, you might create a campaign response to record that a customer registered for a seminar.
Note
See Also Campaign responses offer unique marketing functionality that differs from that of the other activities. See Chapter 9, to learn more about this activity type.
Tracking activities and notes on customer records helps you and others in your organization understand all of the communication your organization has had with each customer. You can also create search queries, views, and reports to track activities by customer or activity type. For example, a sales manager can view information about her team’s phone calls for review during a weekly sales meeting, or a customer service manager can view the open service activities scheduled for an upcoming week to ensure that his team is available.
Note
See Also For more information about analyzing data and creating reports in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, see Chapter 15.
The most commonly used data fields in activity records include those listed in the following table.
Data Field | Description |
|---|---|
Subject | A brief description of the activity |
Regarding | The customer or other record to which the activity is related |
Description | Additional notes or information about the activity |
Status | The status of the activity, such as Active, Completed, or Canceled |
Duration | The estimated time it will take for the activity to be completed |
Actual Duration | The actual time it takes for the activity to be completed |
Scheduled Start | The estimated start date of the activity |
Due Date | The estimated completion date of the activity |
Actual Start | The date the activity was started |
Actual End | The date the activity was completed |
Each activity record also includes data fields specific to the activity type. For example, only phone calls will contain information about the phone number or the call direction.
Tip
Even though the activity forms include category and subcategory fields, Microsoft Dynamics CRM categories are not related to the categories configured in Microsoft Outlook. Consequently, updating an activity’s category in Microsoft Dynamics CRM will not update the activity’s Outlook category. Even though they share the same name, Microsoft Dynamics CRM categories are unrelated to Outlook categories.
You can track to-dos and other follow-up activities as tasks in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, much as you can in Outlook. When you create an activity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can use the Regarding field to specify a customer or other record to which the activity is associated. By entering a value in the Regarding field, you can create a link between the activity and the selected record, so that the activity is displayed from the specified record. Without the Regarding field, you’d be able to tell how many phone calls you made in a week—but by specifying the customer in the Regarding field of each phone call activity, you can also tell what you contacted them about.
By default, you can set an activity to be regarding any of the following records:
Account
Campaign
Campaign Activity
Case
Contact
Contract
Invoice
Lead
Opportunity
Order
Quote
Tip
You might be able to track activities and notes to additional record types if your system administrator has configured additional, custom entities in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment.
By properly setting the Regarding field for activity records, you can more easily look up and reference customer information later. For example, if you set all of your tasks so that they are regarding an account record, it might become cumbersome to find a particular task if you have several hundred activities for that account record. However, if you set activities so that they are regarding certain records related to the account (such as quotes or cases), you can find all of the activities related to those entities without having to sort through hundreds of activities.
Tip
It is a best practice to use the Regarding field to link activities to records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
In this exercise, you will create a task regarding the Sonoma Partners account created in the previous chapter, and then mark it as completed.
Note
SET UP Use the Windows Internet Explorer web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website before beginning this exercise. You need the Sonoma Partners account record you created in Chapter 3. If you cannot locate the Sonoma Partners record in your system, select a different account record for this exercise.
On the ribbon, click the File tab, and then select New Activity.
In the Subject field, enter Send information to customer.
By default, the Subject and Owner fields are the only data fields in which you must enter values before you can create a task.
In the Description field, enter Sample description of the task.
In the Regarding field, click the Look
Up button. A Look Up
Record dialog box appears. Leave Account selected in the Look for field, and enter Sonoma Partners in the Search field. Press the Enter key to submit
your search.Tip
Although only one record can be entered in the Regarding field for each activity, the selected record can be one of many different types, such as Lead, Account, Opportunity, or Case. You can also type in the name of the record you’re looking for in the Regarding field and Microsoft Dynamics CRM will try to automatically find the matching record.
The Look Up dialog box filters the records to show the accounts that match your search phrase.
Click the Sonoma Partners record, and then click OK.
In the Due field, click the Calendar button and select the date by which you want this
task to be completed.After you have selected a date, a list of times is activated on the form so that you can select the specific time of day by which you want the task to be completed. Select 1:00 PM.
Now that you have created the task, let’s
mark the task as completed. There are two different ways to mark
the task as completed. First, in the ribbon, click the Close Task button.In the Close Task dialog box, click the arrow in the Status list to show the possible values.
With this technique, you can mark the task as Completed or Canceled. You would cancel the task if you did not complete the task but want to remove it from your list of open tasks. After you select the value you want, you would click the OK button to close the task.
For this exercise, click the Cancel button to keep the task active. You will use an alternate method to close the task.
On the ribbon, click the Mark Complete button.Microsoft Dynamics CRM marks the task as Completed and closes the task window. Using this technique will save you a few clicks, but you can’t use it to mark a task as Canceled.
Tip
You can also upload attachments to an activity record, which can be useful if you need to reference a specific file. Uploading a file to an activity follows the same process as uploading an attachment to an account, as explained in Chapter 3.
In addition to creating activities from the ribbon, you can create them from customer or other records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Because activities are critical to developing a complete view of each customer’s interactions with your company, you’ll find several locations from which you can quickly create new activities—you can even schedule follow-up activities from an existing activity! For instance, you can enter notes from a phone call with a client contact, and then schedule a follow-up appointment activity based on a time and date discussed with the customer during your call. By doing so, you can save the phone call activity as completed while also ensuring that the dialogue with your customer continues by scheduling the future appointment.
In all record types for which you can create activities, Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the following ways to create a new activity:
Any time an activity is created from a specific record, that record is automatically populated in the new activity’s Regarding field. When you create a new activity from an existing lead, account, or contact, Microsoft Dynamics CRM can also pre-populate other activity fields for a record, such as the phone number for a phone call or the To: recipient for an email message.
In this exercise, you will create a phone call activity from a contact record. When you create a phone call record by using this technique, Microsoft Dynamics CRM automatically populates the mapped fields, such as the call recipient, the phone number, and the phone call’s Regarding value.
Note
SET UP Use the Internet Explorer web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website before beginning this exercise.
Navigate to the Contacts view and open any contact record in your system. Ensure that the contact record includes a phone number in the Business Phone field.
On the ribbon, click the Add tab, and then click the Phone Call button. A phone call record
opens and is populated with data from the contact record.Select Incoming near the top of the form.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM automatically switches the values in the Sender and Recipient fields. This direction field indicates whether you placed the call or the contact called you.
In the Subject field, type Spoke with customer.
On the ribbon, click Save.
On the ribbon, click the Close Phone Call button. A new dialog box appears.In this dialog box, you can select a value to record how you closed out the phone call. Select Made, and then click OK.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM closes the phone call as a completed activity.
Tip
The other types of activities can be created by using processes similar to those you just learned for creating tasks and phone calls; therefore, we won’t repeat the exercises for each activity type. Chapter 5, shows how to create appointments, tasks, and email messages in Outlook that can be saved into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Tip
Certain activity types can be converted to opportunities and cases. You can convert phone calls, tasks, faxes, email messages, appointments, and letters to sales opportunities or service requests by clicking the Convert Activity button on the ribbon. Opportunities are detailed in Chapter 6, and cases are covered in Chapter 10.
When you track activities related to your customers, you and other members of your organization can reference that information to understand the complete history of interactions with those customers. Imagine a scenario in which a customer has been working with one person from your office, but that employee leaves for a week’s vacation. If the customer calls your office when that person is out, you could look up the customer’s record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and read the activity history to get up to speed on the customer.
As you learned earlier in this chapter, all of the activity types share some common data fields. One of the shared data fields across all activity types is the status field. The default status values for activity records are:
Open
Scheduled
Completed
Canceled
When you look up activities related to a customer, you will notice that Microsoft Dynamics CRM splits the activities into two categories: Activities and Closed Activities. The Activities section displays all of the activities related to the record that need to be completed. Only activities with a status of Open or Scheduled appear in the Activities display. The Closed Activities section lists all of the Completed or Canceled activities related to the record.
Tip
If your view contains a large number of records, you can use the Filter On list to show only those activities within a specific date range. You can also sort the columns in the record list just like you can sort the other grids.
In addition to displaying a view of all activities related to the record, Microsoft Dynamics CRM performs an activity rollup so that you can see the activities of records related to the record you’re viewing. For example, in the images shown in this section, the Sonoma Partners account lists 12 different closed activities, but only 6 of those activities are regarding the Sonoma Partners account. The other completed activities are regarding records that are related to the Sonoma Partners account. For example, there is a phone call activity regarding the Gabriele Cannata contact. It appears in this view because Gabriele Cannata’s parent account is Sonoma Partners. In addition, this view lists a completed activity regarding a case opened by Sonoma Partners. If you want to see only the activities regarding the Sonoma Partners account, you can use the Include list to select the This Record Only value. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM activity rollup works on both open and closed activities.
In this exercise, you will create two activities with different Regarding values to see how Microsoft Dynamics CRM displays those records in the Activities and Closed Activities sections.
Note
SET UP Use the Internet Explorer web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website before beginning this exercise. You need the Sonoma Partners and Contoso account records you created in Chapter 3. If you cannot locate the Sonoma Partners and Contoso records in your system, select two different account records for this exercise.
Navigate to the Accounts view and open the Sonoma Partners account record.
On the ribbon, click the Add tab and then click the Phone Call button. A new window opens.
In the Subject field, enter Open Phone Call Due 2 Months from Now.
Note that because you created this phone call from the Sonoma Partners record, Microsoft Dynamics CRM automatically populates the Regarding field with the Sonoma Partners account.
In the Due field, select a date two months from today.
Click the Save and
Close button.The window closes and you are returned to the Sonoma Partners account record.
In the Parent Account field, select the Contoso account record that you created in the Chapter 3 exercises, and then save the Sonoma Partners account. You can also select any other account record if the Contoso account does not exist in your system.
You just created a phone call activity regarding the Sonoma Partners account, and now you will create a task activity on the parent account of Sonoma Partners. Click the account you selected in the Parent Account field to view the details of the parent account record.
On the ribbon, click the Add tab, and then click the Task button. A new window opens. Note that, because you created this task from the parent account record, Microsoft Dynamics CRM automatically populates the Regarding field with the parent account.
In the Subject field, enter Task Regarding Contoso Due Today.
In the Due field, select today’s date.
Click Save and Close.
The window closes, and you are returned to the parent account record.
In the entity navigation pane, click Activities.
The activity list displays the task that you just created, but the phone call record does not appear. By default, Microsoft Dynamics CRM shows activities within the next 30 days for open activities, or the previous 30 days for closed activities. Because you entered a due date two months from today for the phone call, that record doesn’t fit the filter criteria.
To view the phone call, click the arrow in the Filter On list and select All.
The view updates to show the phone call too.
This example shows the activity rollup in action. You created two activities regarding two different records, but you can see them in a single view because the Sonoma Partners record lists Contoso as its parent.
To view only those activities regarding the parent account, click the arrow in the Include list and select This Record Only.
The view updates again to display only the task regarding Contoso.
Double-click the task regarding the parent account to open that record. Click Mark Complete to mark the task as completed.
Click Activities in the entity navigation pane of the parent account record.
The task record does not appear anymore because you just closed it.
To view the closed task, click Closed Activities in the entity navigation pane.
The view shows the task you just completed.
In addition to using activities to capture the interactions with your customers and prospects, you might find that you want to jot down some notes about a record. For example, suppose that you read an article in the newspaper about one of your accounts, and the article includes some important information about the account’s growth plans. You’d like to capture that information in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Because you didn’t interact with the customer or anyone else, the action of recording this data doesn’t fit the “activity” concept. Fortunately, Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to create notes and link those notes to the various records in your system.
Tip
In addition to notes that you add to a record, Microsoft Dynamics CRM also displays file attachments that you upload in the Notes section of the user interface. For more information about attaching files to Microsoft Dynamics CRM records, see Chapter 3.
In this exercise, you will create a note about an account.
Note
SET UP Use the Internet Explorer web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website before beginning this exercise. You need the Sonoma Partners account record you created in Chapter 3. If you cannot locate the Sonoma Partners record in your system, select a different account record for this exercise.
Navigate to the Accounts view and open the Sonoma Partners record.
On the ribbon, click the Add tab and then click the Add Note button. A new window will launch.In the Title field, enter Sonoma Partners in the News.
In the text area under the title, enter Record customer satisfaction scores at Sonoma Partners according to local newspaper article.
To view the note that you just created, along with other notes attached to the record, click the Notes & Activities link in the entity navigation pane of the Sonoma Partners account record.
To delete the note, right-click the Note title.
Important
To delete a note, you need to have a security role that has delete privileges. If you are unable to perform this step, contact your system administrator about deleting the note.
A new menu appears.
Click Delete to delete the note.
Now that you understand how to create and work with activities for a particular record, we’ll review how you can manage your activities on a daily basis. For example, after you arrive at the office and log on to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, where should you start your day? What calls do you need to make? Which tasks do you need to complete? What does your schedule look like? Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes a Workplace that you can use to manage all of your activities.
The Workplace contains many different sub-areas, but the two related to managing activities are the links named Calendar and Activities. The Calendar displays a list of appointments that you can view by day, week, or month.
Important
The Calendar shows only those appointments from Microsoft Dynamics CRM; it does not show activities from your personal Outlook calendar. The Calendar also does not display other activity record types, such as tasks or phone calls. For more information about working with your calendar in Outlook, see Chapter 5.
The Activities area provides a list of all of the activity records you have privileges to view within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can access different views of the activity data in addition to filtering the records by activity type and due date. You can also use Quick Find to search for specific terms or keywords within the activities.
By using a combination of the Calendar and Activities views, you can quickly prioritize your open activities.
In this exercise, you will toggle the filters on the Activities view to see how they dynamically update.
Note
SET UP Use the Internet Explorer web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website before beginning this exercise.
In the application navigation pane, click Activities.
Click the arrow in the view selector to display the list of activity views that apply to all of the activity types.
On the menu, click Phone Call. A submenu with additional phone call views appears. Note that these views are specific to the Phone Call entity. You do not need to click anything.
Now, in the menu, click Task. A new submenu with additional task views appears. These views are specific to the Task entity. Click the My Tasks view.
Now you see a list of all the Tasks you own. To see which tasks are due soon, click the Due filter to see a list of filter options such as Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, and Next 7 Days.
Click Next 7 Days. Microsoft Dynamics CRM updates your task list to show only those tasks with a due date that matches the filter criteria.
Another very important activity type is email. Because Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrates with Outlook, most users write and read email messages within Outlook. However, one feature that many users want to take advantage of is the ability to send an email message to a large list of recipients so that each message is individually addressed (in other words, sending an email message to 500 people generates 500 different email messages). Microsoft Dynamics CRM refers to this mass email generation as direct email, and you can access this features only within the web client.
Sending a direct email message requires you to select an email template. Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes several email templates, so you can use one of those for the exercise in this section. However, you will probably want to create new email templates specific to your business and use those for your email communications.
To send a direct email message, navigate to a view that supports direct email (such as accounts, contacts, leads, and so on), select one or more records in a view and click the Send Direct E-Mail button on the ribbon. Microsoft Dynamics CRM will open a dialog box that allows you to select an email template. If you selected a view with several pages of records, you can choose to send the direct email message to just the selected records, all the records on the page, or all the records on all of the pages. Finally, you can send the email message from someone other than yourself. You might want to do this if you want the email to come from a generic address, such as [email protected], instead of a person.
Tip
The Direct E-Mail feature will not send messages to records if your recipients’ Bulk E-Mail preference is set to Do Not Allow. Direct E-Mail will simply exclude those records from the mailing list.
In this exercise, you will send a direct email message to contacts by using one of the out-of-the-box email templates.
Note
SET UP Use the Internet Explorer web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website before beginning this exercise.
Navigate to the Contacts view.
Select one or more records in the view, making sure to select records with sample or test email addresses instead of real addresses.
On the ribbon, click the Send Direct E-mail button.A new window opens.
Select the Contact Reconnect template. Leave the other options set to the defaults.
Click Send.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM submits the email message for immediate delivery. If you view the closed activities of the contact records you selected, you will see the email message you just sent.
Activities are used to track interactions with customers, prospects, vendors, and other record types.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to track many different kinds of activities, including tasks, phone calls, faxes, letters, email messages, appointments, service activities, and campaign responses. In addition to the default activity types, your system administrator can create custom activity types.
You can create an activity from the ribbon or from an individual record. Creating the activity from the individual record maps the Regarding field to the corresponding record.
You can view the activities associated with a record by clicking Activities or Completed Activities in the navigation pane. The Activities link displays open or scheduled activity records, and the Closed Activities link shows completed or canceled records.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM automatically rolls up activities between related records so that you can view related activities in a single view. You can toggle the activity rollup while you are working with an activity view.
In addition to activities, you can view notes about the records in your system. Microsoft Dynamics CRM displays notes attached to a record in the same place that it displays files attached to that record.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes a Calendar view and an Activity view to allow you to manage a large list of activities.
You can use the web client and the direct email feature to send mass email messages to leads, contacts, and accounts in your system.