I will return to posting about tracking campaigns in BCM, but I ran into something today that I am surprised was not handled in BCM. I have outlined one solution here - please let me know if you have a different\better way of handling this.
I want to keep track of when I start working with a new customer. I want to know when I reach certain customer anniversaries - 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, etc.
As far as I can tell, there is no built in way to flag an account or contact record as being a customer. I can create a "Customer" category and use it to flag contact and\or account records, but I can't report on the date they became a customer.
My solution was to create a user-defined field to record the "customer start date". You can create a user-defined field via the Customize Forms option of the Business Contact Manager menu.
I decided to add the new field to the Account form, which means I will need an Account record for each of my customers. You could decide to add the field to the Contact records (or both) if you prefer.
On the next form select which page of the Account form set where you want to display your new field:
Next click on the Add Field button to bring up the next screen:
Name your field and select the data type and format. Save your work.
Now when you open an Account record and navigate to the user-defined fields page, you have a new field that you can use to record when you started working with this customer
To create a report that shows those customers with a start date anniversary, start with any one of the Account reports. Click on Filter Report and then select the Advanced Filter tab. Use the Customer Start date that you created to filter the report. In this example, I'm filtering to show those customers that have an anniversary date in November:
I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish this, but I think this method gives me the most flexibility for tracking and reporting.
Do you have a different method for tracking this sort of information?
