How to use Contact Activities
MyOffice provides functionality to allow you to log events against contacts, both
for historical and future purposes. This can be exceptionally useful if you wish
to keep a record of your relationship with a customer, and ensure you don't forget
to keep in touch with them in the future. Whilst it's certainly possible to keep
this information in the contact notes, it does tend to lead to a somewhat disorganised
mess after a while, whereas recording your contact with customers in as activities
keeps everything in the one place, and keeps it simple to read and manage.
What are Contact Activities?
Contact Activities are records of events, either historic or future, that are linked
to a Contact. Every Contact in your account has their own separate list of Contact
Activities. The Contact Activities for a given Contact can be found by opening the
Contact Details dialog for the Contact in question, and clicking the "Activity"
tab. This tab shows a list of all Activities recorded for the Contact. Initially,
this list will be empty, as shown below.
Creating an Activity
To create an activity for this contact, press the "New" button in the top right
corner, or by selecting "New" from the list's contact menu (right click in the list
to display this menu). You can also create activities by pressing the "Create Activity"
button, which can be accessed from any tab on this dialog, and will take you to
the Activity tab, and open a new activity.
When creating an activity, the "Description" field usually contains what it is that
you have just done with this contact, or what it is you intend to do with them in
the future. The "Type" field is a drop down list that contains common operations
carried out with a contact. In the case of the above example, the event being recorded
is a phonecall received from the customer. When you're happy with the data you've
entered, click "OK" on the Activity dialog, and the activity will appear in the
contact's activity list.
Creating future Activities
We've seen how to record historic events using Contact Activities, such as responses
to customer's phone calls, so now it's time to show how to use Contact Activities
to plan future events, such as follow-up phonecalls. To create a future activity,
open the contact you wish to create the activity for, then click on their Activity
tab, just the same as we did when we created a historic activity.
To make an activity into a future activity, click the "Display in Today window"
checkbox. This will activate the fields in the "Today" panel (i.e. stop them from
being greyed out). Once this checkbox has been checked, you can then select which
of your account's users you wish assign the activity to (I've used 'Admin' here,
as that's the user I'm connected to MyOffice as), and the date on which you want
them to carry out the activity. To set the date on which you want them to carry
out the activity, place a check in the "Date" checkbox (immediately to the left
of the date itself), then select the date you need by clicking the drop-down arrow
in the Date field. If you don't want to set the activity for a specific date, but
merely want it to be done "as soon as possible", then leave the Date checkbox unchecked,
and the activity will be displayed immediately.
Future activities which are assigned to users will appear in that user's Today window
Contact Activities panel from the date specified (or immediately if no date is specified),
and will remain there until the activity is marked as "Done", or otherwise removed.
For a fuller discussion of the Today window, see 'How to use the Today Window'
and 'How to use the Contact Activities panel in the Today Window'.