A key challenge in supporting existing customers is to ensure that knowledge about the customers with all their specific requirements is not lost when they move from one employee to the next. It is therefore important to be able to transfer customer data including associated entities from one field rep to another when the sales rep changes. This usually happens because of:
- Termination
- Territory allocation
- Promotion of the employee to management
User transfer mode when importing customers in portatour®
portatour® assists with this problem by using the transfer mode when updating customer data:
- If there is a change of field rep for customers and the transfer mode is used when updating customer data, the customers including all call reports, tasks, appointments and call blocks are moved from one employee to another.
- In this way, the information about the customer recorded in portatour® is not lost. The new representative has immediate access to the customer history.
- The transfer mode is available:
- during manual import (see Update customer data in transfer mode)
- on the customer detail page via Actions > Transfer customer (see Transfer customer)
- automated via import using the API with the parameter transferMode (see API Manual)
- If the transfer mode is not used when updating customer data, changing customers are deleted from the old user and newly created at the new field rep. Linked information will be lost.
Requirements and technical explanation
For the transfer of customers via import (manually or via the API) you need a unique number across all customers of all employees, which has to be set as external ID in portatour®. Based on this number, the external IDs of the customers are searched per user during the import. The following steps are done according to the result:
- Number exists → Customer is updated
- Number does not exist → Search the customers of all other users including their recycle bin or in own recycle bin.
- Found in own recycle bin → Customer is restored
- Found in another user's customers → Customer is transferred from the other user to own customers.
- Found in another user's recycle bin→ Customer is restored and transferred from the other user to own customers.
- Not found
- Update mode: Customer remains untouched.
- Update mode including deletion: Move to own recycle bin. The data is stored there for 14 days.