Associating a Follow-up with a Contact
Contacts are people and organizations that matter to your team. TeemWork allows you to associate a follow-up with a Contact. This new follow-up will appear on your follow-up list, just like regular follow-ups, but it can also be found on the Contact's Card, along with the other follow-ups associated to that Contact.
This feature is very convenient, as you can quickly see what kind of relationship your team has had with any Contact by looking at past follow-ups.
Even if you have access to a Contact's Card, you do not automatically have the right to associate a follow-up with him. Your Administrator must check the appropriate checkbox in the Access to Contact Types tab.
If you do not know what follow-ups are, or how to create a follow-up, please read 'Introduction to follow-ups' and 'How to write a simple follow-up'.
The list of follow-ups associated to a Contact
Let's say that you are working for your team's technical support department, and an angry client calls you because his printer is not compatible with your company's software.
Whenever you are dealing with a client, the first thing to do is to open up his Contact Card from the Contact List. Then, click on the 'Show Follow-ups' button. If this button is not visible, then your Administrator hasn't authorized you to view the Follow-ups associated to Contacts of this type.
The list of active follow-ups for this Contact will be displayed. If the angry client had spoken to another technician yesterday, a follow-up about the problem would already be there, and you could open it to see how the situation was handled.
But this is not the case, so you'll want to create a new follow-up. However, before doing that, you should check this client's history of follow-ups by clicking on the 'include closed follow-ups containing' check box:
The previous slide shows that the client has already had a problem with Windows 98. We could click on it to see how it was solved.
Now, let's create a new follow-up to deal with his printer problem, by clicking on the 'Add a Follow Up Topic' button:
The created follow-up is quite similar to a follow-up that is not associated to a Contact. The only major difference is the 'Contact' button, which opens up the Contact's Card. Otherwise, it works in the same way as a normal follow-up.
When you have entered the message and the title, click on the 'Refer' button to save it.
The follow-up will appear in your follow-up list, and in the Contact's follow-up list.
As with normal follow-ups, you can write reminders, and close the follow-up.
Related topics
See also 'Referring a follow-up' and 'Managing follow-ups effectively'.