Leads module - where to store enquiry details?

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In SuiteCRM, I understand that a lead (in the majority of cases), refers to a contact.

I also understand that it’s good practice to only have one instance of a contact within the leads module.

When using web to lead forms, I have a multi-line “Enquiry Details” field so a customer can free-type any supporting information relating to their enquiry.

If the same person submits a different enquiry sometime later, this writes to the database as a 2nd lead for the same contact.

I could merge the duplicates, but this loses one of the enquiries.

I wondered what the ‘best practice’ would be to store all these enquiries.

For example, is it best to take the enquiry information and place it in (either) a note, a task etc?

I would be interested to know how other users have solved this!

Thanks

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It really depends on how often this happens. If you get duplicate leads like a few times a year, I’d just put the inquiry details into the description and copy and paste if I happened to get a duplicate. If this happens all the time, might be a good idea to create a note with the inquiry details as you suggest that way it won’ t be lost on merge. However, unless you do some development you’re not automatically going to be able to create a note attachment from your web form (well maybe with workflow you could?). So if this situation doesn’t happen all that often its alot of extra work to manage the notes. Another thing to consider is that because a lead had an inquiry some time ago (lets say over a year) and didn’t become a customer, it’s probably not super relevant to their new query and it might make more sense to handle the new query as a new lead.

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There are two options to manage the things,

  1. Instead of using the Note or Task Module, you can create one new custom module for storing the Enquiry Details. Create One to Many Relationship between Leads/Contacts and Custom Modules. So whenever anyone submits the webform, Enquiry Details store in the Custom Module against the Leads/Contacts.

  2. Once anyone submits the webform, Check in the Leads/Contact Module using unique identification like Email Address if it’s already added or not. If not then Add Leads/Contacts with Enquiry Details. If it’s already added then retrieve the Enquiry Details from the matching record and combine with newly added Enquiry Details. After that update that Record.

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