Practical Business Rules for Contact Management in TDF CRM

Overview

The practical business rules and policies outlined in this document give companies and users a basic understanding in regards to why entering and maintaining Contact records in Tour de Force is valuable.  All the business rules and policies discussed are related to the key fields associated with the Tour de Force Contact form.  

When the key fields associated with Contact records are populated and maintained, users have the information needed to help manage Contact records associated with Suspects, Prospects, Customers, and Vendors. These key fields are important because the Contact Management views associated with the Manager’s Console are based on these key fields.

Practical Business Rules for Contact Management

1. Tour de Force does not recommend deleting Contacts records in the Tour de Force Contact form. If items such as Appointment, Tasks, Activities, Documents, and Email are associated with the Contact record, these items are not deleted from the database, and become orphan records.  Orphan records may cause implementation and upgrade issues in the future.

2. If Contact records need to be deleted from an Account record, use the Tour de Force Administration Console utility.  In the Date Clean Up Utilities section, a Move/Delete Contact utility exists that allows Contact records to be deleted.  Using the Move/Delete Account utility to delete Contact records also deletes all of the items linked to the Contact records.  

Note:  The Move/Delete Account utility is an administrative utility and is performed by the Administrative User of Tour de Force.

3. Since only the Administrator users of Tour de Force have the appropriate permissions to delete Contact records, type DELETE in the Name field associated with the Contact record.  For example, if John Smith is the Name associated with the Contact record, type DELETE – John Smith.

4. Specifying DELETE in the Name field allows the Administrator user of Tour de Force to apply a filter in the Move/Delete Account utility to make deleting Contact records quick and efficient.

5. Setting a Contact record to Inactive is an alternative to deleting the Contact record.  A Contact record can be set to Inactive by setting the Active field to False in the Tour de Force Contact window.

6. By default, the Global Search utility only displays Contact records that are Active or where the Active field is set to True in the Tour de Force Contact form.

7. When a Contact record needs to be deleted, also uncheck the Active field in the Tour de Force Contact form to False.

8. If Contact records need to be moved to another Account record, use the Tour de Force Administration Console utility.  In the Date Clean Up Utilities section, a Move/Delete Contact utility exists that allows Contact records to be moved from one Account record to another Account record. Using the Move/Delete Account utility to move a Contact record also moves all of the items linked to the Contact record to the destination Account record.

9. Before setting up a Contact record in Tour de Force, verify that the Contact record does not exist in Tour de Force.

10. Use the Global Search utility to exhaust all possible options to search for and to locate a Contact record.

For example, search for a Contact record using the Name, Address, Email, and Phone Number.