There are many ways and reasons for customer communication. For example, a company may have a business rule to copy account managers on all communications with customers. To setup and automate those communication rules, a communication templates can pull email addresses and phone numbers from Customer and Contact user defined fields or UDFs.
There are several options to setup rules for which email address and phone number to use within the communication templates for email, text or voice.
A summary of these options include:
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Primary Contact option
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Include in email option for a Contact
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Invoice Contacts
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Voice Contacts
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Text Contacts
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Customer UDFs
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Contact UDFs
Click here for a complete list and description of contact options that can be used with communication templates.
Customer UDFs can store an email address or phone number that can be used with the communication templates. For example:
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Customer UDF1 could be used to store the customers' salesperson email address which then can be used within an email template to copy the salesperson on any emails for their customers (@CustUDF1).
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Customer UDF2 could be used to store the owners' cell phone number for sending TEXT or VOICE messages (@CustUDF2).
Contact UDFs can be used in a similar manner as customer UDFs but expands this functionality for each contact, providing multiples for email address and phone number support for the customer on the communication templates. For example:
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The Contact can have a primary email address and phone number, but also have additional email addresses and phone numbers within the Contact UDFs, such as a personal email address, direct phone number, cell phone number
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These Contact UDFs can be included within the communication templates for different types of communication with these contacts, i.e. Contact UDF1 (@ContactUDF1) can contain the cell phone used for TEXT communications to the contact while Contact UDF2 (@ContactUDF2) can contain a direct phone number for VOICE message communications for the contact.