Customer-Customer Relations
Introduction to Customer-Customer Relations
ConSol CM provides comprehensive CRM (Customer Relationship Management) functionalities which allow you to create links between your customers. These links are called relations and they can be established between customers of the same customer group and between customers of different customer groups. This way you can structure your customer base in ConSol CM to better reflect your real customers.
Examples for customer-customer relations (for greater readability called customer relations in this section) are:
- You want to map your customer's organizational chart, so you introduce directional relations (supervisor of and supervised by) between his contacts.
- You have two customer groups (resellers and end customers) and you want to reflect which reseller sells products to which end customers. To achieve this, you create directional relations (sells products to and buys products from) between customers from the customer group Reseller and customers from the customer group End customers.
The relations provide additional information about the customer and enable you to quickly access the pages of the related customers. You can create relations based on the relation models which are configured in your CM system. The following is defined for each relation model:
- The relation type determines whether the relation is hierarchical (directional relation) or on the same level (reference relation).
- The customer group which the customer has to belong to.
- The level determines the type of customer used in the relation. This can be:
- Company
- Contact
- Any (either a contact or a company)
- Whether the relation is editable, i.e., whether it can be added, edited, and deleted in the Web Client.
Display of Customer Relations in the Web Client
The customer relations are displayed in the Section for Related Customers of the customer page. There is a table for each relation model. The heading states the name of the relation model, the target customer group, and the type of customer, which can be either company, or contact, or any (1). If no name has been configured for the relation, Related is displayed instead of the relation name.
The table contains the relations which were created for this relation model. You can configure the displayed column using the tool icon (2). The table usually contains a link to open the customer page (3), a link to edit the note of the relation (4) and an icon to delete the relation (5).
You can add a relation by clicking the Add link (6).
Figure 99: Display of available customer relations
If the type of customer is any, i.e., either a company or a contact, there are two tabs: one for relations to contacts and one for relations to companies.
Figure 100: Tabs for customer relations
The relations are displayed on the customer pages of both affected customers. Depending on the relation type, the name may be different on each side:
- Reference relations
The tables on both customer pages have the same name.
Example: A reference relation between two customers could be Partner. Both customers are on the same level and the relations table has the same heading on both customer pages (see example above). - Directional relations
The tables have different names on each customer page.
Example: A directional relation between two contacts could be Buyer and SalesRep. One customer represents the purchaser of goods and the other customer is the sales representative. The headings of the relations tables reflect this, so you can see the role of each customer (see example below).
Configuring the Displayed Columns
Open the context menu next to the wheel icon to configure the table columns. The default columns (Contact/Company, Date, Note, Actions) cannot be removed, but you can add additional columns by entering the column name and selecting one of the suggestions from the Autocomplete Search. You can remove additional columns by clicking the cross next to their name.
Adding a Customer Relation
Please proceed as follows to add a new customer relation.
Figure 101: Adding a customer relation
- Click Add in the header of the Section for Related Customers of the desired customer page (in this example, Luke Skywalker).
- Select the type of relation from the drop-down list.
- Select the target customer using the Autocomplete Search in the field Unassigned. Optionally, you can enter a note in the field below.
- Click Add relation to create the relation to the selected customer. The relation is automatically created for both affected customers, i.e., the current customer and the selected target customer.
The following figures show the resulting relation:
- On the customer page of Luke Skywalker, you can see the relation of type Buyer to the contact Mia Skydiver from the customer group Reseller (1).
- On the customer page of Mia Skydiver, you can see the relation of type Sales Representative to the contact Luke Skywalker from the customer group End customers (2).
Figure 102: Customer relation added
The action of adding or deleting a relation can trigger additional changes, e.g. the value of a data field can be updated. This depends on the individual configuration of your CM system.
Editing the Note of a Customer Relation
Click Edit in the Note column of the relation to add or edit its note. The note is optional.
Switching to the Related Customer
You can switch to the customer page of the related customer by clicking his name in the column named Contact or Company. If you click another column, a preview window is opened where you can choose to open the customer page.
Deleting a Customer Relation
Click the red cross in the Actions column to delete the relation. The relation is now displayed in italics. At this point you can still undo the removal by clicking Undo remove. As soon as you execute any other action, the relation is removed for good. Note that the relation is also removed from the page of the related customer.
The action of adding or deleting a relation can trigger additional changes, e.g. the value of a data field can be updated. This depends on the individual configuration of your CM system.