Can I use Capsule to store all information and history about people and organisations we have a relationship with?
We have designed Capsule to hold many different relationships and allow you to hold information about each type of relationship that is relevant to that relationship. So you do not get a bunch of irrelevant information for a relationship or worry that you have to find out something about a supplier when the information need only be stored for a staff member or customer. We have called these different relationships,contacts.
Examples include customer, supplier, consultant, sponsor, staff member, partner, affiliate, associate and potential customer and many more that are relevant to your business.
It is often the case that some parties have many different relationships with you.
An example is a customer may be a supplier, or a staff member, or a potential lead for further business.
The contact may be a person (B2C), or an organisation or company (B2B).
You can store many different members/employees against an organisation or company.
All the notes, files and emails you store against the employees also show on the organisation or company record
Is there a quick way to enter people and the companies they belong to?
When entering a new company you can add one or many people to the company at the same time. This automatically creates a new individual record for each of these people.
If you enter a person and add their company; if this company does not already exist a new company record will be created automatically.
If you send an email via the dropbox to Capsule and the person does not already exist, Capsule automatically creates a new contact record for you, and also automatically creates a task for you to check this record and add all other relevant information.
Importing your Outlook, Gmail or Excel contacts to Capsule?
There are two steps to import your contacts
export your contacts from your current file to a CSV file
Check contact records for consistency and then follow these instructions for importing into Capsule
What happens if the data is not right?
You can either correct this when it is in your original file or you can import it into Capsule and then correct the data.
How do I hold different information about different relationships?
We expect that you want to hold different information about the different relationships you hold in Capsule. We also do not expect you to have to key through fields that are not useful to you so we expect you will customise Capsule to meet your exact requirements. To give you some ideas of different types of information you want to hold we have included a few examples:
Customer information - whether the customer is known, email contact.
Staff member information - identification numbers (eg NI number), date joined, equipment held, birthday, date departed.
Sponsor information - preferred date of payment, lead time to decide, proposed sponsorship amount, actual sponsorship amount.
Partner information - type of services, assignment numbers, assignment term, assignment start date and key relationships.
Information relevant to your contacts is stored in different ways. You can add to these over time if you want to store additional different information. These are:
Custom fields - Custom fields will already have been added by your administrator. You will see these as you add a new contact. If you want further information held about different contacts that is not already held you can ask your administrator to add this new custom field, or if more appropriate a new tag or datatag. Discuss your requirements with your administrator.
Tags - you can tag contacts with one or more tags. Tags can be added and removed from parties, opportunities or cases. There is no limit to the number of tags you add on any contact. As you enter a tag name you will be prompted with tags already entered in Capsule with the same spelling. If you enter a new tag name, this will be saved and made available to all users in the future.
Datatags - these are tags with a real bonus. Your administrator is able to turn tags into datatags. If a tag has been enhanced to be datatags, when you tag the party, you are immediately prompted to add the information that is relevant to that tag. If you do not have all the necessary information at the time do not worry, you can add this information as it becomes available.
Are there any limitations to information held for each contact?
No. You are able to store as much information as you wish against each contact, however there are the usual limitations around exceeding the capacity the memory of your machine and the storage offered in Capsule. The maximum storage for any one file is limited to 10mB.
Can I change the type of information held on a contact?
Over time you can add, amend or reduce type of information held for each contact. Your administrator is responsible for able to delete tags, custom fields and datatags if these have become irrelevant. If you are wanting to change a tag or datatag name to something more topical, your administrator can also do this.
How do datatags, custom fields and tags work?
If you have a few minutes here is a quick introduction to custom fields, tags and datatags:
How can I hold a history of different communications with a contacts?
There are likely to be many different ways you communicate with different contacts.
telephone calls can be summarised in a note
emails can be attached to contacts via the dropbox
files such as documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be attached to contacts
tasks that are completed show in a contact’s history
How do I view the communications history?
All history is shown in reverse date order. History is held on the dashboard, with the last 20 history items created by all users, in the contact’s history, and against the company which is attached to the person.
How do I create a list of contacts and what can I do with this list?
You can create a list by deciding what condition(s) the list will have. You can select one or many different conditions. As you add new tags, datatags and custom fields to Capsule these also become available to select the list you want
After you have selected the list, you can email these contacts, export the list to excel or as a CSV file, and add new tags or datatags, and save this list by giving it a name to select the same list in the future. When this list is selected in the future it will use the conditions to create a current list of all contacts who relate.
What happens if I decide that the relationship type or information held is redundant?
There is no commitment to continue to collect information that becomes irrelevant over time. Capsule CRM is designed so you determine the information you wish to store.
If the field you created now holds useless information you can either:
stop collecting the information and leave the current information in place
delete the field so your users no longer think they should add or update the information. Where information is already held, you will be warned when you delete the field. If you continue you will not be able to retrieve the information lost.
authored by Wendy.Rule, last updated on 2010-01-31