Key highlights
- A dedicated screen for managing personal information
- Create a new contact with or without a company connection
- Link to a company and align values automatically
- Move or disconnect a contact from a company
- Keep track of duplicate contacts with Relations
- A new Privacy report
- Delete contacts
- Use SAINT to monitor contacts
- Look up single contacts in SuperOffice Service
- Stop the automatic creation of new contacts
- Pricing and availability
A dedicated screen for managing personal information
SuperOffice 8.3 opens up a lot of new opportunities for you to manage your contacts more efficiently.
In the newest version of SuperOffice CRM, you are able to access all your contacts directly from the Navigator menu, as the Contact card has its own screen, just like Company, Diary, Sale and Project.
You can search for and manage all contacts in your SuperOffice CRM database in the same way. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Service, Sales or Marketing user.
Every user of SuperOffice CRM has the same information available about companies and contacts. You can see how and why a contact has been created on all the Contact cards in SuperOffice. This makes it even easier for you to know that you comply with the GDPR requirements.
It has also become easier to find and access contact information because you don’t have to go through the Company card first.
Simply click on the Contact button in the Navigator menu on the left-hand side, and you’ll immediately have access to lots of information in a dedicated Contact screen, instead of the smaller Contact dialog you used before.
Searching for contacts in the Navigator is also easy. Just like in all other sections in SuperOffice CRM, you can save your favorite contacts, check the list of recently opened contacts and search for the contact you are looking for.
To learn more about how you can manage your contact’s private information, watch this demo video about the new Contact card.
The Company card is just a click away
The Company card remains the heart of your CRM solution, as it allows you to get that important 360° overview of all your activities with your business relations. This has not changed.
The Company card shows you which of your colleagues have been in touch with a company, as well as when and what was discussed.
Returning to the Company card from the Contact card is just as easy as a click with your mouse. You can either click on the company name underneath the name of your contact, which actually is a hyperlink to the Company card, or you can click on Company in the Navigation menu to open the Company card.
Create a new contact with or without a company connection
In SuperOffice 8.3 it’s possible to save contacts that are not connected to a Company card. This is useful when you want to register a new prospect, for instance, before you know what company the person works for. Or when you are dealing with a private person.
Just because it is possible to save a contact by itself, doesn’t mean you have to. Your company can decide whether or not your users are allowed to save contacts without linking them to a company. When your company only works business-to-business, for example, you may want to ensure that all the contacts in your database are always connected to a Company card.
This requirement of linking a contact to a company is the default setting of SuperOffice CRM. You can, however, change this preference inside the Settings and maintenance screen.
New contacts are created by clicking the New button in the top left of your screen and choosing Contact from the drop-down menu.
When you create a new contact, you can register all the important information you have on a person.
SuperOffice automatically uses your default settings for the Category and Business values, as well as defines the legal basis for processing personal information. The system will also assume that the creator of the contact is the owner of the contact, but you may change any of these details to fit your needs.
Just note that the default setting after the upgrade to SuperOffice 8.3 is that all contacts need to be connected to a customer card in order to save them. This is how it has always worked in standard SuperOffice CRM. You can change this setting on the Functions page in the Preferences screen in the Settings and maintenance module.
Link a contact to a company align values automatically
Let’s say you have just added a new contact, without linking it to a Company card. After some research, you find out which company this contact belongs to, and you want to add the company to the Contact card. By clicking the Edit button, you can search your database to find and connect the contact to the right Company card.
When you link the Company card to the Contact card, SuperOffice CRM will automatically update the following fields: Our contact, Category and Business to avoid inconsistencies in how a Company contact is handled. This automatic alignment means you don’t have to remember to update this information manually and can be assured that the quality of this CRM data is correct.
Move or disconnect a contact from a company
People switch jobs and chase new opportunities all the time. And sometimes you can make an honest mistake and accidentally link a contact with the wrong company.
When either of this happens you want to update your CRM database and move your contact to the new company.
With the feature “Move contact”, you can connect your contact to a new company or disconnect it from an existing company. To find this feature, click on the Task menu on the Contact screen and choose “Manage contacts” in the menu that appears.
Before you move a contact from one company card to another, you should think about whether you want to save the contact’s activities and sales on the existing company card or whether you want to transfer them to the new company card.
When you transfer a contact to a new company card you can decide to:
- Leave all activities and sales on the current company card
- Move all activities and sales to the new company card and
- Move all activities and sales after a certain date (This could be the date your contact starts his/her new job at the new company, for example).
Keep track of duplicate contacts with Relations
It’s not uncommon to save a single contact in your database multiple times.
For example, your contact can be a former employee of company A; but he/she may also be a current user of your product and work for company B; while at the same time he/she may be the owner of company C which is your prospect.
To make sure you separate all these associations and distinguish between roles of the same contact, you can use the Relations tab.
The Relations tab isn’t new to SuperOffice, but now you can also use it to define relations between two or more contacts.
The Relations tab allows you to store the relation between:
- Two companies
- A company and a contact, or
- Two contacts
To add a new relation, just click the Add button in the bottom left of the Relations tab and add all the details of the person and companies involved.
With Relations, you will be able to keep track of all the Contact cards you save on a single contact person and easily navigate between the cards by clicking on the contact (or company) name.
A new Privacy report
Under the GDPR law, every person has the right to ask a company what information they store on them. The people may also then ask to have their information corrected or deleted.
You can now easily generate a Privacy report in the Contact card and send it to your contacts. This report will specify what personal information you store on this person in your CRM solution.
If you have the functional right to access this report, you can simply go to the Task menu in the Contact card, click on the report and it will open the Privacy section in the Settings and maintenance module.
There you can perform a search for all duplicate entries of the contact and generate a summary report containing all personal information you have stored on the person.
This report may then be saved and sent as a PDF attachment to the person. If the person asks to have their personal details corrected, you can also use this report to confirm that their information has been successfully corrected.
Delete contacts
In line with the GDPR, every person stored in your database has the right to ask to be forgotten and removed from your systems.
When you receive this request, you can delete the contact from your SuperOffice CRM database using the Task menu on the Contact card.
When you delete a contact, all the activities, sales, documents, etc. will be automatically anonymized. This means that activities linked to a Company, Project or Sales cards will not disappear, you just won’t be able to see the name of the contact in question.
By not completely deleting all records of activities performed, you save the information that you need to maintain your business, while still respecting the wishes of the people who ask to be forgotten by you.
It is also possible to use a selection to delete a large(r) number of Contact cards all at once, for example from a selection that you have created with "ready-to-be-deleted" contacts. In the Task menu, you can choose to delete companies including associated contacts or just delete all contacts.
What if you have deleted one or more contacts by mistake? Don't worry. It is possible to restore a contact or a company card back again.
All deleted contacts and companies are held in a recycle bin for fifteen days before they are permanently deleted. During this time, you can restore deleted contact and company data quite easily. Note that this feature does not apply to a deleted Project or document.
Use SAINT to monitor contacts
SAINT stands for SAles INTelligence and adds a touch of artificial intelligence (AI) to your CRM solution.
Simply put, SuperOffice SAINT monitors the data you have stored in your CRM solution and alerts you to different statuses or action requests that you have defined as important. This may be anything from actions that have not yet happened in a given time, to values that are met or not met, and that you want to be alerted to so you can take the action required.
You can configure SAINT by setting up different rules and criteria that are important to you. SuperOffice SAINT then monitors these criteria and warns you when it’s time to follow up on a company, sale or project in your database, based on the information you save inside SuperOffice CRM.
In SuperOffice 8.3, SAINT can also be used to monitor contact information.
This means that you can, for example, use SAINT to identify contacts that you have had no contact with at all over a given period. This would give you a list of contacts that you may want to remove from you CRM database or treat in a certain way, dependent upon your company’s GDPR policies.
Before you get started with SuperOffice SAINT we advise you to contact your local SuperOffice contact. They will be able to help and advise you on the best way to use and set up SuperOffice SAINT.
You can learn more about SuperOffice Saint here.
Look up "free-standing" contacts from SuperOffice Service
If you are a SuperOffice Service user you’ll know that it was already possible to create and save single contacts inside SuperOffice Service.
In SuperOffice 8.3 contacts get their own screen. This way you can handle and manage all of them in the same way and have access to the same information.
The Contact card now displays three extra fields that previously were only available inside SuperOffice Service. They are: a contact’s preferred language, their service priority level and their customer service contact.
You can find these fields on the Details tab on the Contact card.
To be able to use the new Service fields on your Contact card, your database needs to have at least one SuperOffice Service license.
A similar change was made in SuperOffice Service. The Contact card there now contains three extra fields: Our contact, Category and Business.
Stop the automatic creation of new contacts
New to SuperOffice 8.3 is the opportunity to stop SuperOffice Service from automatically creating new contacts whenever an incoming request arrives from an unknown email address.
This new setting will help you keep your CRM database clean.
Don’t worry, SuperOffice Service users will still be able to handle the requests immediately, as the speed of response remains an important service criterion.
In the new version of SuperOffice CRM, whenever you get a request from an unidentified sender, you will be able to search and identify whether the incoming request came from an already existing contact who was just using a different email address. If this is the case, the request can be then added to the existing contact and you’ll avoid creating a duplicate.
Another benefit is that in a situation like this you may choose to create a new contact or to avoid creating a new contact at all. For example, when an incoming request is clearly spam, not adding contacts automatically means you will keep your CRM data cleaner and reduce the time you spend on cleaning up bogus entries afterward.
Just note that the default setting after the upgrade to SuperOffice 8.3 is that SuperOffice Service will automatically create new contacts when an email address is unknown. But you can change this setting in the Systems menu in SuperOffice Service.
Pricing and availability
The users of SuperOffice CRM Online and SuperOffice 8.3 web or windows versions get the latest features available free-of-charge and included in all user plans.
The new version will be available later in May, 2018.
If you are a CRM Online user, you are automatically upgraded, and you can begin using these new features immediately.
If you have SuperOffice installed on your premises, your organization must run the 8.3 version of SuperOffice CRM to have access to the new contact features.
Please note, that if you are using an earlier version of SuperOffice CRM, you’ll need to upgrade in order to get access to the new Contact card, as well as the other features in SuperOffice CRM 8.3.
If you have any further questions please feel free to contact us.