Activities in CRM

An essential part of the customer relations management functionality is the ability to create activities to schedule for business objects (business partners, contacts, opportunities, or other activities), and to track the progress of these activities.

An activity is an appointment, call, task, mailing, or email that must be created or executed by a user and that is registered in LN. Activities include, for example, phone calls, mailings, visits, and surveys. Optionally, tasks, appointments, and calls can be synchronized with Microsoft Exchange.

In the Activities (tccom6100m000) session, activities can be created and linked to business objects. Activities can be manually created or automatically generated.

Manual creation of activities

In the Activities (tccom6100m000) session, you can manually create these activities:

Note

The Activities (tccom6100m000) session can be started stand-alone, but also appears as a tab in these sessions:

  • Business Partner (tccom4100s000)
  • Opportunity (tdsmi1610m000)
  • Contact (tccom1640m000)
  • Activities (tccom6100m000)
Automatic generation of activities

In the Global Addition of Activities (tdsmi2210m100) session, you can globally add activities to multiple business partners, opportunities, etc.

Based on an activity template, which you can define in the Activity Templates (tdsmi0155m000) session, you can automatically generate these activities:

Note

Appointments can also be generated from assignments in Service and from inspection order lines or non-conformance material and corrective action plan (CAP) tasks in Quality.

Follow-up activities

An activity can also result in another activity. Therefore, from an appointment, call, task, mailing, or email, follow-up activities can be created of the types Call, Task, Appointment, and Email.

In the activity sessions, you can manually create these follow-up activities:

Note

If an activity is generated from another activity:

  • The Contact, Business Partner, and Business Object references are copied to the new activity.
  • A reference to the original activity is specified in the new activity. You can update all references in the follow-up activity, except for the reference to the original activity.
  • The attendees or recipients of the original activity are copied to the new activity.
Additional functionality
  • Attributes
    You can link attributes to an activity in the Attributes by Activity (tdsmi2101m000) session, which appears as a tab in most activity sessions. For example, the activity is a survey, and the questions to be asked to the business partner are created as attributes and linked to the activity. When employees perform this activity, they open the attributes fields and enter the answers to the survey in the attributes fields as they obtain the information over the phone.
  • Notes
    You can link notes to an activity in the Notes (tcstl1550m000) session, which appears as a tab in all activity sessions.
  • References
    You can link references to an activity in the References by Activity (tccom6115m000) session, which appears as a tab in all activity sessions.
  • Attendees
    You can invite attendees to a call or an appointment using the Attendee (tccom6105m000) session, which is displayed as a tab in the Call (tccom6600m200) and Appointment (tccom6600m100) sessions. If the Synchronize check box is selected in these sessions, calls and appointments are synchronized with an attendee's calendar events in Microsoft Exchange.
  • Recipients
    You can select recipients for an email in the Recipients (tccom6600m900) session, which can be started from the Email (tccom6600m500) session.
  • Attachments
    You can link attachments to an email in the Attachments (tccom6110m000) session, which can be started from the Email (tccom6600m500) session.