Just wondering what other people do when contacts leave a company. I still have a relationship with the “person” and sometimes they go to another company and I have a relationship with the contact but at a different company.
What do most people do?
Delete contacts when they leave a company?
Somehow mark them as “defunct” or “non-active” at their old company?
Mark them “do not contact” or something?
Just looking for some best practise ideas.
Interesting.
What do you do with Contacts who don’t belong to any particular Account? Maybe you can throw these into that bunch.
They can either be stand-alone, not related to any account, or you can put them in a special account which is a mixed bag of people. I’m just thinking out loud here.
I know it’s not a one size fits all answer, I still want all the correspondence, quotes, emails, etc. to stay with the “original” account they were attached to, but if they end up somewhere else, I want to definitely create a new contact for them at the new place of business I think, but I’d also like to know that the old contact record is deactivated in someway that I don’t send them emails or contact them in the future at their “original” account.
how about just adding an asterisk to the name?
Pedro *, meaning: “a guy called Pedro who is no longer with the company”.
Or even
Pedro [Terminated] or something obvious like that.
That’s a good idea! I like the asterix better. I’d hate to send out an email by mistake to someone like " Dear Pedro [Terminated], LOL!
Isn’t that your answer?
We just clear the email address and phone numbers of obsolete contacts. They still appear in a search, so you can see the history, which is particularly important when an employee moves to a competitor.
Why do we need to do this?
What I ended up doing was just create a custom field “inactive” and then display it in the subpanel views. Then when I do email campaigns I just remove “inactive” contacts. I generally use Mautic for email campaigns so it’s super easy. Segment creation is dynamic, so I just add a condition to “not” inactive.
We had a similar problem that went further than that.
So a subset of our clients have contacts that work for multiple companies in a variety of roles, which currently SuiteCRM can’t handle easily, they may have multiple roles at a single company and different roles at different companies.
What I did was add a roles module, this linked contacts through to companies while holding their specific role details. It also included a start and end date and an active/inactive flag.
When editing/updating the role a logic hook also ensures that for active roles (those with active flag and between start/end dates) are also directly linked to the company. When they finish the role the role is marked as inactive and the contact link directly between the contact and company is removed. However the Role itself stays put but is marked as inactive.
Mark
Nice, idea. I could see how that could work, like if you work with consultants that work with different end customers. You could track what they are working on with different end customers. I do something similar when I have clients who work through distribution but also want visibility on the end users.