Managing Customer Interactions

As we mentioned in the introduction, it is often the case that the biggest problem for a growing business, and the key management challenge, proves to be getting the whole team to do the right thing consistently (while the business developers are not too distracted with daily problems). No part of this is more important than consistently good performance in your customer interactions.

Teamwork and coordination, especially the good orchestration of your interactions with customers, is the focus on this section of the User Manual. In opentaps good teamwork and coordination are facilitated along three key dimensions:

1 Context of the business processes and real-time status.
2 Communications among the parties involved in doing business.
3 Actions planned and taken relative to ongoing situations.

In the section What the Teamwork and Coordination Vehicle Does we discuss how opentaps functions along these dimensions.

In this section we will provide information about four teamwork applications in the CRM subsystem itself:

• Activities are both tasks and events relating to customer management that you schedule using the calendar.
• Calenders are used to schedule and manage Activities in CRM and other application areas.
• Cases are used to capture and track customer initiated correspondence such as a call for help or 
expression of a need.
• Notes are the correspondence that your teams engage in throughout the customer management process, 
and these are created and stored in context with the customer engagements and activities that they relate to.  

Notes are different from other functions in one key respect, they are made visible in the context that makes them significant and valuable to you and your Customer. Notes have such a strong contextual character that there is no separate Notes tab. They are always located where they are most relevant. Notes are private correspondence for the team members.