Contact Planning

Introduction

Contact planning is used to help ensure that customer contacts are done in a planned, active way, and at regular intervals. Contact planning can be used for order inquiries to customers or for other contacts, for example, market research. If a certain group of customers should be contacted twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a contact plan can be created containing only these customers. If one person is responsible for this group, the contact plan can be connected to this user.

Before you start

This process can be started when the following prerequisites are met:

To enter a customer order in connection with contact planning, the prerequisites for customer order entry must also be met.

• Customers are entered in the customer file.
• Contact information per customer is updated in 'Contact Plan. Enter Contact Info/Cust' (OIS054).

Outcome

As a result of using this process,

• a contact plan is entered,
• an active contact plan is created,
• customer contacts are made based on an active contact plan and any resulting customer orders are entered, and
• the results of contacts or attempted contacts are registered in the contact plan.

Flowchart

This flowchart illustrates the process of creating active contact plans.

This flowchart illustrates the process of contacting the customer.

Follow these steps

These activities are included in the process:

1. Define contact plan in 'Contact Plan. Open' (OIS052)

   A contact plan should be created first. A contact plan contains general information, for example, which day to contact a customer, or the departure to use if the contact results in a customer order.

2. Optionally, define exceptions

   Any exceptions to the plan is specified in 'Contact Plan. Enter Exceptions' (OIS053).

3. Define contact information

   Connect customer to the contact plan. Specify specific contact information, for example, phone number, and contact time, for the customer through 'Contact Plan. Enter Contact Info/Cust' (OIS054).

4. Optionally, define non-active periods

   Any periods of non-activity is defined in 'Customer. Connect Nonactivity Period' (OIS051).

5. Create active contact plan

   Generate active contact plans through a batch job in 'Contact Plan. Create Active' (OIS057). The active plans can also be created manually in 'Contact Plan. Open Active' (OIS056).

   When an active plan is created through a batch job, the customers or customer categories for which records are created can be specified. When records are created for future contacts, records for previous contacts can be deleted from the active contact plan table.

   Two checks are made automatically when a contact plan is created using a batch job. At first, any exceptions to the plan are checked. Secondly, any periods of non-activity, for example, times of the year when a customer should not be contacted, is checked.

6. Contacting the customer

   When the batch job is completed, the records can be accessed in 'Contact Plan. Open Active' (OIS056). Whenever a customer wants to make an order during a contact, the order can be entered immediately from contact planning.

7. Customer order entry

   This activity is only used when the contact plan is used for order inquiries and the customer makes an order. When this happens, 'Customer Order. Open' (OIS100) is started to enter the order. When the customer order is entered, the customer contacts processing can be continued, using the contact plan.

   During customer order entry, a check is made to see if an order has already been made for the customer for the delivery date set in the contact plan. If so, that order can be supplemented with the current order. Otherwise, a new customer order can be created for the same customer.

8. Check completed contact

   The result of every customer contact is registered in the plan by changing the status of the scheduled contact. The status reflects the result achieved, such as completed, contact unavailable, phone busy, or contact customer later. When a customer order has been entered as the result of a contact, the status is set by default. This status can be used later as a selection ID when working with active contact plans.