cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12565350
RE: sales CRMs like salesforce or zoho
Don’t expect much of an audience for this on Lemmy, but:
Maybe it’s just the places I’ve worked, but seems like I’m constantly wading through contacts who are gone - I don’t want to delete them because the history could be helpful, but seems like there should be a quick, native way to mark them. Maybe once marked those names are grayed out or something.
My one company had a custom field that you could check, but then there was no special handling of those contacts in terms of how they’re displayed - just you could use it to exclude results in reports.
If you’re talking about users, Salesforce you toggle active/inactive. You actually can’t delete them, unfortunately. If you’re talking about Contacts, there are probably a number of standard, out of the box fields you could use, but a good setup will have a picklist or a checkbox or whatever you want. You can also delete contacts, but it’s a good policy to keep data around for a while and then archive it instead of just deleting stuff straight up.
Am Salesforce admin. Happy to answer any Salesforce related questions.
Yes, I think all the contacts should be retained, because those interactions are useful information. And at the one company we did have a custom checkbox field for “not at the company anymore”, but I would really like that information to change the way the records are displayed. Like if I’m looking at an account page, and I’m looking at the list of contacts, the ones who are still there should be listed first, and the people who are gone should be grayed out or something. Having to open each record one at a time is cumbersome, and the page load times are so bad.
So in Salesforce that IS possible. An admin, using Lightning App, could for example create a filter on some fields so that they’re shown or hidden depending on the value of other fields. It would only be possible using the Lightning App builder since that gives you the most tools–standard page layouts don’t let you filter viewability of values like that. Alternatively, though, you COULD make an “inactive contact” page layout & corresponding record type and just change the record type either manually or using a Flow (or workflow) whenever the contact is marked ‘inactive’.
EDIT: Your admin can also modify what fields are shown on a Related List. So you can be on Account, looking at related Contacts, and have the Inactive field prominently displayed on that related list, and sortable. Again, this is assuming you operate out of Lightning, not Classic.
Very helpful to know, thank you. Of course now I’m somewhere that uses zoho which is inferior for a variety of reasons.
I do think it’s strange that there’s no native/default accommodation. Every organization has to handle contacts who aren’t with an account anymore.