Use Case Corner—Expediting Activity Record Creation

As we mentioned earlier, Activities, not Notes, are what we will use to track our ongoing conversations with our prospects and customers. Let's take a look at how we can properly use these in our daily interactions.

In our first example, let's assume the role of a Customer Service representative who has just taken a call from a customer with an open Service Case. In this example, the company providing the service does business at the B2B level, so an Account record parents the Case record.

Upon finding the proper Case record, the user takes the call and documents the details in a Phone Activity, shown in Figure 4.16.

We will set the Activity's “direction” field to Incoming and we'll make sure we have the correct values for call initiator and call recipient. We'll give the Activity a brief description and enter the notes related to our conversation. Then, we will need to save the call record and select Close Phone Call from the Activity's Action menu to move the Activity to the History tab.

If these steps seem like altogether too much work for us we can expedite the process with some relatively simple code level customization. Because we have the entire Microsoft CRM object model at our disposal, we can create a button on the Case record to automatically create a Phone Activity record. Refer to Figure 4.17.

Imagine that clicking the Quick Call button pops a simple screen with only a place for notes and a save button. The code behind the save button would take care of defaulting the other fields to some predetermined values as well as saving and closing out the Activity. This customization would save time by allowing us to skip over fields that we did not want to enter.

We'll go into more detail on these types of customizations in Chapter 14. For now, just be aware that if there are processes in the system you would like to modify or expedite, there are options to do so.