Skip to main content
seth
seth
Expert ⭐️
September 20, 2017

In Timeline, add external contacts who don't exist as Contacts

  • September 20, 2017
  • 12 replies
  • 185 views
Our CSMs can never be quite sure when someone's going to end up on a customer phone call who they've never spoken with before. If that person doesn't exist as a Contact on the Account, they'd like to still be able to save the name in the External Contacts field. The process of adding a contact is far too bothersome to do on the fly.

Consider tagging people in a picture on Facebook, where it autocompletes with the names of people you know, but, if you type something that doesn't match any of your friends, you can still hit 'enter' and that tag will remain in the photo.

I would be wary of having a [i]separate plaintext field for people-who-are-not-Contacts, since some CSMs may not bother with the search functionality, and just jot down names in that field, and then we would have lost [i]structured data that we should have. It would be best to have one field that does live search, but also accepts text as-is.

      12 replies

      Show previous replies
      angela_domenichelli
      angela_domenichelli
      Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
      May 1, 2018
      Thanks, Dan.  One example is when our CSMs need to track non-athenaNet users who are not in Salesforce at all and never should be.  These might include an insurance company representative that might join client meetings to help resolve issues with claim submissions.  It will be important to note that person attended the meetings and be able to filter for meeting when this person attended, but we would never add this person to Salesforce since their relationship is with the client and not with us directly.  Salesforce is used by all departments at athenahealth and we would not want to create any confusion about who we can speak to.
      Angela Domenichelli (She/Her/Hers)
      mara_leal
      mara_leal
      Contributor ⭐️⭐️
      June 15, 2018
      I'm with @Angela Domenichelli - Please don't add.  SFDC should house only those contacts/clients we have direct contact with at the Account level.  As she states above, "It will be important to note that person attended the meetings and be
      able to filter for meeting when this person attended, but we would never
      add this person to Salesforce since their relationship is with the
      client and not with us directly."  Makes or better data hygiene. 
      
      Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement