alerts to designated contacts --

[raymond]

One thing we used to be able to do with our previous (and very basic) CRM system was categorize contacts into groups such as "Alerts", "Marketing" or "Management" (etc.). These could be assigned to any contact and each contact could be assigned multiple categories (we had over 20 categories).

Using this system, we could then send email announcements and alerts to these designated persons as needed. For instance, when a highly contagious and damaging virus was released or for marketing or if we just wanted to make a general company announcement. Note that we could communicate via mailing address or email (and with email, we could use the To, the CC or the Bcc fields accordingly). CommitCRM does not allow us to do this at all and we are finding this a major problem -- we need to be able to quickly and efficiently communicate with our clients!

How can CommitCRM help us accomplish this?

Thanks!

//ray

[Support Team]

Using the Batch Group Email or Export feature of a filtered Accounts/Contacts lists you can email your clients or mail merge them from Excel to Word, for example, and contact them. Not everything that you described is supported though. The number of classification fields of Secondary Contacts is limited and actually you probably need to be using the Sub-Code field. There you can either enter a classification value, like 'Management', or better type in a single and unique letter that represents this classification, e.g. 'M'. When allocating a unique letter to each category you can then use the filtering option to find contacts that are included in this group/category by filtering 'Sub-Contact Code' field - Includes - 'M', for example. This will list all secondary contacts that are categories in group M, e.g. - Management.
It's not perfect but it may work well. I already have an idea from this for a new feature and I'll have it logged. Thanks for asking.

[raymond]

I will look at the batch group email function as it sounds like something we could use but we are already using the sub-code to try to track contact assingment codes (this is what we use to try to categorize what types of requests a contact can make of the helpdesk).

The lack of contact fields and flexibility is killing us... WE NEED MORE FIELDS FOR CONTACTS AND WE NEED THE ABILITY TO MULTI SELECT DEFINED CATEGORIES! This is a database, why can't we get more fields included?!?

//ray