What to do in CRM when a Contact Changes Companies

What to do in CRM when a Contact Changes Companies
Judy Brown
Judy BrownMay 25, 2022 12:12 PM
What do you do at your companies with a contact in CRM that changes companies? Is there a best practice? …
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SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
Judy Brown
Posted May 25, 2022 12:12 PM
What do you do at your companies with a contact in CRM that changes companies? Is there a best practice? We don’t want to lose any history, so I don’t just want to change the Account name the contact is associated with. Thanks!

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Mary Lauren Hughes
CRM Administrator
InfoWorks, Inc.
Nashville, TN
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2.

GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
Peter Hale
Posted May 26, 2022 12:55 AM
Hi Mary

Not a lot of choice I’m afraid.

Best option I’ve found – and it gets discussed often – is the rename the current contact by add the first company in brackets to their surname to distinguish it from the new contact.

Then create a new contact and connect to the new company. Obviously , Will have new email address so tracking should be okay. May delete the contact phones numbers as well for the old contact.

Also, I would also mark the old contact either as deactivated or if you don’t want to do that as you may accidentally delete it is to add a custom field or use a description field saying don’t use in CAPITALS.

Pete

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Peter Hale
Naish Pty Ltd
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3.

TOP CONTRIBUTOR
Donal McCarthy
Posted May 26, 2022 02:36 AM
Edited by Donal McCarthy May 27, 2022 03:45 AM
99% of the time we deactivate the contact and create a new one if we know where they are going.

Contacts are functions of accounts.

You can add links to the old Contact row if you need to.

4.

Gabriella Simpson
Posted May 26, 2022 11:43 AM
Hi Donal,

When the contact is deactivated does their related activity history remain visible on the Timeline?

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Gabriella Simpson
OpenTech Alliance
Phoenix
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5.

SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
Judy Brown
Posted May 26, 2022 03:04 PM
@Donal McCarthy, I have Gabriella’s same question. When the contact is deactivated, does their related activity history remain visable on the Timeline?​

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Mary Lauren Hughes
CRM Administrator
InfoWorks, Inc.
Nashville, TN
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6.

SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
Rick Jarvis
Posted May 26, 2022 03:17 PM
Yes

The timeline on the inactive contact remains intact and continues to displays on the account timeline. This ensures continuity!
this is easy to check in your development system or test system

Thanks

Rick Jarvis
Manager – Sales Operations
Kraton Chemical
Mobile: +1 904 687 3202

7.

GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
Sophie Marsh
Posted May 26, 2022 06:09 AM
Hi Mary
We have a Membership offering which means some contacts have additional benefits/discounts over others, so it’s important to have clear business rules for when a Contact tells anyone in the business they are moving to another company to ensure they get the correct benefits and discounts.

We have an Employment status section on the Contact, users are trained to change Employment Status from “in post” to “moved on” then Deactivate the Contact record

They then need to create the New Contact from the Account they are moving to (if you know it!) and then on the New Contact they link the former/old company Contact record in the Previous Post field on the New Contact form

Doing it this way also enables to have some workflows to alert say the Membership team that Contact X is moving to Company Y (non-members) do you want to contact them about Membership. Also enables users to look at previous quotes/enquries/engagement of when the Contact was at the former company.

Seems to work well for us and we’ve also added to the Employment Status additional options such as Mat/Pat Leave, Deceased and Duplicate and periodically mop up any contacts that are tagged as duplicate (drop in the ocean but also helps a bit)

Hope helpful – Sophie

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Sophie Marsh
Campden BRI
Chipping Campden
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8.

Jeff Rath
Posted May 26, 2022 08:16 AM
Our team uses the First Name, Last Name and email address to create a unique identifier, therefore we would set the old record to Inactive and then create a new record for this user with there new email address. We only service companies and try not to accept email address that are not part of an organization.

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Jeff Rath
Sr. System Analyst
Okuma America Corporation
Charlotte NC
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