Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 : Understanding Activity Types & Understanding Activity Types

6/18/2011 11:26:26 AM

1. Understanding Activity Types

Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses the term activity to describe several types of interactions. The types of activities are:

Phone Call Use this to record a received or initiated telephone call.
Task Use this to record a to-do or follow-up item.
E-mail Use this to record a received or sent email message.
Letter Use this to record the mailing of a physical letter or document.
Fax Use this to record a received or sent facsimile.
Appointment Use this to record a meeting or appointment. Many companies use appointments to track conference calls or online meetings, in addition to face-to-face meetings.
Recurring Appointment Use this to record meetings or appointments that occur on a regular, scheduled basis, such as the 15th of each month or every other Tuesday. Recurring appointment activities function the same as appointments except that you can set them up on a recurring schedule.
Service Activity Use this to record a service that you performed for a customer.
Tip:

To create and use service activities, you must first make sure that your administrator has set up and configured the services, sites, and resources that your company offers. Service activities do not apply to every type of business; they are best suited to businesses that need to schedule customer services in specific time slots. Your business might not use service activities at all.
Campaign Response Use this to record a customer or prospect response to a marketing campaign. For example, you might create a campaign response to record that a customer registered for a seminar.

Custom Activity Types

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 includes new functionality that allows your system administrator to set up and configure custom activity types that match your company’s specific business needs. Some potential custom activity types might include a sales demonstration or a visit to your website. How you use custom activity types is up to your organization to decide.

Tracking activities and notes on customer records helps you and others in your organization understand all of the communication your organization has had with each customer. You can also create search queries, views, and reports to track activities by customer or activity type. For example, a sales manager can view information about her team’s phone calls for review during a weekly sales meeting, or a customer service manager can view the open service activities scheduled for an upcoming week to ensure that his team is available.

The most commonly used data fields in activity records include those listed in the following table.

Data Field	Description
Subject	A brief description of the activity
Regarding	The customer or other record to which the activity is related
Description	Additional notes or information about the activity
Status	The status of the activity, such as Active, Completed, or Canceled
Duration	The estimated time it will take for the activity to be completed
Actual Duration	The actual time it takes for the activity to be completed
Scheduled Start	The estimated start date of the activity
Due Date	The estimated completion date of the activity
Actual Start	The date the activity was started
Actual End	The date the activity was completed

Each activity record also includes data fields specific to the activity type. For example, only phone calls will contain information about the phone number or the call direction.

Tip:

Even though the activity forms include category and subcategory fields, Microsoft Dynamics CRM categories are not related to the categories configured in Microsoft Outlook. Consequently, updating an activity’s category in Microsoft Dynamics CRM will not update the activity’s Outlook category. Even though they share the same name, Microsoft Dynamics CRM categories are unrelated to Outlook categories.

2. Understanding the Regarding Field

You can track to-dos and other follow-up activities as tasks in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, much as you can in Outlook. When you create an activity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can use the Regarding field to specify a customer or other record to which the activity is associated. By entering a value in the Regarding field, you can create a link between the activity and the selected record, so that the activity is displayed from the specified record. Without the Regarding field, you’d be able to tell how many phone calls you made in a week—but by specifying the customer in the Regarding field of each phone call activity, you can also tell what you contacted them about.

By default, you can set an activity to be regarding any of the following records:

Account
Campaign
Campaign Activity
Case
Contact
Contract
Invoice
Lead
Opportunity
Order
Quote

Tip:

You might be able to track activities and notes to additional record types if your system administrator has configured additional, custom entities in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment.

By properly setting the Regarding field for activity records, you can more easily look up and reference customer information later. For example, if you set all of your tasks so that they are regarding an account record, it might become cumbersome to find a particular task if you have several hundred activities for that account record. However, if you set activities so that they are regarding certain records related to the account (such as quotes or cases), you can find all of the activities related to those entities without having to sort through hundreds of activities.

Tip:

It is a best practice to use the Regarding field to link activities to records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

In this exercise, you will create a task regarding the Sonoma Partners account created in the previous chapter, and then mark it as completed.

Note:

SET UP Use the Windows Internet Explorer web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM website before beginning this exercise.

On the ribbon, click the File tab, and then select New Activity.
Click Task to launch the New Task form.
In the Subject field, enter Send information to customer.
By default, the Subject and Owner fields are the only data fields in which you must enter values before you can create a task.
In the Description field, enter Sample description of the task.
In the Regarding field, click the Look Up button. A Look Up Record dialog box appears. Leave Account selected in the Look for field, and enter Sonoma Partners in the Search field. Press the Enter key to submit your search.
Tip:

Although only one record can be entered in the Regarding field for each activity, the selected record can be one of many different types, such as Lead, Account, Opportunity, or Case. You can also type in the name of the record you’re looking for in the Regarding field and Microsoft Dynamics CRM will try to automatically find the matching record.

The Look Up dialog box filters the records to show the accounts that match your search phrase.
Click the Sonoma Partners record, and then click OK.
In the Due field, click the Calendar button and select the date by which you want this task to be completed.
After you have selected a date, a list of times is activated on the form so that you can select the specific time of day by which you want the task to be completed. Select 1:00 PM.
Click the Save button to create the task.
Now that you have created the task, let’s mark the task as completed. There are two different ways to mark the task as completed. First, in the ribbon, click the Close Task button.
The Close Task dialog box launches.
In the Close Task dialog box, click the arrow in the Status list to show the possible values.

With this technique, you can mark the task as Completed or Canceled. You would cancel the task if you did not complete the task but want to remove it from your list of open tasks. After you select the value you want, you would click the OK button to close the task.
For this exercise, click the Cancel button to keep the task active. You will use an alternate method to close the task.
On the ribbon, click the Mark Complete button.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM marks the task as Completed and closes the task window. Using this technique will save you a few clicks, but you can’t use it to mark a task as Canceled.