It answers day-to-day questions, such as:
- What appointments do I have next week?
- When can I arrange a visit to Ms. Smith?
- Who can cover for a sick colleague in external sales?
A sales representative can view the outcome of a telephone call made after an initial customer visit. A sales manager can quickly get an overview of all the activities that have taken place in the department during a certain period of time.
Integration
You can use activity management at any time during the customer management life cycle. Activities such as interaction logs and appointments keep a record of any interaction that has taken place between your company and its customers. Tasks provide a way for your employees to manage their own workload and to record reminders. You can mark appointments, interaction logs and tasks as private. Thus, everything undertaken by employees within a department or company can be managed quickly and easily in one transaction.
Activities can be created as subsequent documents for a wide variety of other business transactions, such as opportunities and leads.
If a contract is approaching its expiry date, you can create a telephone call (activity) as a follow-up document to remind the employee responsible to phone the customer and find out whether they would like to renew the contract. The employee responsible receives the activity automatically in their work list and therefore knows that one of his tasks that day is to ring the customer. Before phoning, the employee can refer to the account fact sheet for information about the customer, such as how many sales orders have been made for the customer, or whether there are any problems, for instance, credit blocks or delivery delays.
Prerequisites
Before you can use Activity Management, you must have completed the following steps:
– You must have entered your employees in the system as business partners (either employees responsible or owners).
– You must also have created your customers as business partners.
– You must have carried out the required settings for activities in Customizing for customer management by choosing Transactions > Settings for Activities.
Process
1. You create a new activity or maintain an existing activity.
Note: You can search for interaction objects, and you can also display them in the interaction history with Activity Management.
2. You can create new activities, for example, appointments, interaction logs, and tasks.
3. Choose the appropriate category and enter other details for the activity.
4. The activities you create automatically appear in the calendar for any employee that you have entered as a partner/attendee in the activity. This means that all involved partners are kept up-to-date with meetings, customer visits and events within your department, where required.
Note: You can also keep track of who has been in touch with a particular business partner, when, and the status of those activities by viewing the fact sheet.
5. You can search for activities and, by choosing appropriate search criteria, manage your workload.
– Activities can be called up at any time by anyone in the system by using appropriate search criteria.
– If an activity is overdue, it appears in the search list with the appropriate flag in the Overdue column.
– You can also set up an archiving program so that activities are deleted and archived at regular intervals.