Add and edit customer modifications

Under Manual adjustments > Customer modifications, you create fictitious customer modifications without having to change the real settings of your customers. This makes it possible to recreate scenarios for the territory optimization that involve a potential change to the scheduling parameters (call interval and call duration) or business hours. Following example:

• A customers should be visited at a 30-day interval instead of a 45-day interval.
• The call duration should be reduced from 60 to 30 minutes.

Add new customer modification

1. Click on Add new customer modification.
   
2. Choose whether you want to create a customer modification for All customers or how you want to select the relevant customers: Extended search, External list, Map.
   
3. Perform the appropriate filtering (see Extended customer search, Selection mode and mass editing and Customer map options - the selection mode is already activated).
4. Click on Scheduling parameters or Business hours to select the respective parameter.
   
5. Make the desired change and click Save.
   

After saving, the Interim result tab appears at the top. The interim result shows the concrete effects of the manual adjustments made on the key figures, shown analogously to the optimization result (see Show optimization result).

Edit a customer modification

After having saved a new customer modification it is displayed in the form of a table.

To edit customer modifications, see Add and edit user modifications.

Order of customer modifications

The customer modifications take effect in the specified order. A correct sequence is important if customers are affected by several customer modifications for the same parameter (e.g. scheduling parameters). An example: Customer Miller is an A-customer and affected by the customer modification 'Visit A-customers every 30 days'. In addition, Miller is part of a list of customers to be visited every 45 days. If the customer modification 'A customers every 30 days' is located before 'List customers every 45 days', as in the image above, Miller's call interval is set to 45 days in the optimization scenario. However, if 'A customers every 30 days' is after 'List customers every 45 days', Miller's call interval is calculated as 30 days. The value of the customer modification in the last position is the decisive one.

Further information

• Use customer modifications simultaneously with user modifications, e.g., to simulate the relocation of a field rep, see Add and edit user modifications.
• Click on Start optimization to find out what optimization potential would be available if customers could be assigned to different employees – taking into account the adjusted data (see Show optimization result).