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InterAction® Windows Client Answer Center

Handling Edit Contact Data Tickets

  • Updated

Tickets with the category of Edit are created when a user adds, changes or deletes contact data. This contact data includes the following:

  • Title
  • First Name
  • Goes By
  • Middle Name
  • Last Name
  • Suffix
  • Job Title
  • Company Name
  • Company Common Name
  • Department
  • Assistant Name
  • Addresses & Mailing Address
  • Phone Numbers - including phones, fax numbers, etc.
  • Electronic Addresses

Tickets are only created for these types of changes if the contact that is being changed is governed by a rule set that specifies that the change must be reviewed by or submitted to a data steward for approval.

For example, TeleNorth Industries is a client and has the Client contact type applied. Because the Client contact type specifies that changes to addresses must be submitted, if a user edits the address for TeleNorth, a ticket is submitted to the data steward who is the owner of the Client contact type.

As a contrast, the University of Guam may have the College/University contact type applied. Since that contact type specifies that address changes are accepted, no tickets are submitted to the data steward who owns the College/University contact type when a user makes an address change to the University of Guam.

A ticket can have only one user or group as the owner. If a contact is subject to the rules of several contact types, marketing lists, or rule sets, a hierarchy of rules is used to determine which data steward is the owner of the ticket. For more information, see Managing Rules When Several Rule Sets Control a Contact.

For details on how each type of ticket is handled, see the following sections:

  • Handling Add or Change Contact Information Tickets
  • Handling Delete Contact Information Tickets
  • Handling Reformat Contact Information Tickets
  • Handling Suspect Change Tickets

Handling Add or Change Contact Information Tickets

Users can add or change information for their contacts when working from their PIMs or PDAs, or when they use their user contact lists in InterAction. Users can also add information to firm contacts from the InterAction Web Client. Data Change Management only manages contacts in the firm list, not in each user’s contact list. Therefore, Data Change Management only monitors the following additions or changes users make:

  • Information that users add or change directly for the firm contact
  • Information that users add or change for their own version of the contact, but choose to share with the firm

The rule collection for each contact type, marketing list, or rule set defines whether an addition or change a user makes is automatically applied or if a data steward must review or approve the change.

If your organization has specified that additions or changes users make to contact information must be submitted to data stewards for approval or reviewed by the data steward, then a ticket is automatically generated when a user adds information or changes information for a contact.

Edit tickets indicating that contact information has changed or has been added can be approved or rejected using the Approve and Reject buttons in the ticket review section of the Inbox.

Handling Delete Contact Information Tickets

Users can delete contact information from their contacts when working from their PIMs or PDAs, or when they use their user contact lists in InterAction. Users can also delete information from firm contacts while using the InterAction Web Client. Data Change Management only manages contacts in the firm list, not in each user’s contact list. Therefore, Data Change Management only monitors the following deletes users make:

  • Information that users delete from the firm contact
  • Information that users delete from their own version of the contact, but were sharing with the firm.

For more information on user contact lists and sharing information with the firm, see the Administering InterAction guide.

The rule collection for each contact type, marketing list, or rule set determines if a delete a user makes is automatically applied or if a data steward must review or approve the removal of the information. Most rule collections provided with InterAction specify that when a user deletes contact information, a data steward must review the change or that the change must be submitted to the data steward before it is applied. When this occurs, a ticket is automatically generated for the data steward responsible for the contact.

Edit tickets indicating that contact information has been deleted can be approved or rejected using the Approve and Reject buttons in the ticket review section of the Inbox.

Handling Reformat Contact Information Tickets

Users may make changes to contact information that are not necessarily changes, but slight tweaks or reformats to the information already there.

The following items are identified as a reformat change by the user. These changes are pushed to the user automatically as part of a firm to user update if the user is accepting formatting changes automatically.

Users control whether they accept formatting changes automatically in their My InterAction settings in the Web Client. For more information, see the Using the InterAction Web Client and Desktop Integration guide.

  • Changes in spacing, punctuation, and capitalization for a contact information field
  • Changing the description of an address, phone number, or electronic address
  • Adding 1 in front of a 10-digit phone number, for example changing 888-572-1400 to 1-888-572-1400
  • Adding directions in a street address, for example changing 123 Main Street to 123 South Main Street
  • Changing abbreviations for street and city, for example changing St. to Street
  • Changing the state abbreviation, for example changing Illinois to IL or CAN to Canada
  • Changing noise words in the company name, for example changing Acme to Acme, Inc.
  • Adding http:// in front of a web address
  • Adding ftp:// in front of an ftp address

Tickets that were created by a user formatting information have the summary [Information] Reformatted. For example, if a user reformats a phone number, the ticket has the summary Phone Number Reformatted.

Edit tickets indicating that contact information has been reformatted can be approved or rejected using the Approve and Reject buttons in the ticket review section of the Inbox.

You can also approve or reject several tickets at a time by marking all reformat tickets and choosing Mark > Approve or Mark > Reject.

Handling Suspect Change Tickets

When a user adds information or changes existing information in such a way that the new information seems to be incorrect or incomplete, a suspect change ticket can be created. For example, a suspect ticket can be created when a user adds an address that has an incorrectly formatted postal code.

While InterAction’s data quality tools are used to correct bad or incorrectly formatted data after it has been entered in InterAction, suspect tickets are used to catch these kinds of changes when they are entered. This can save data stewards a lot of time because they no longer need to search for poorly formatted data. Instead, they are automatically notified when it is entered.

Changes that Produce a Suspect Change Ticket

Field Type of Change
Addresses

Any of the following can produce a suspect ticket for an address:

• The address is missing one or more key fields such as postal code or line 1.

• The state entered is not a valid state for the selected country. For example, if a user enters IL as a state and United Kingdom as the country.

• An address line is greater than 85 characters.
Phones

Any of the following can produce a suspect ticket for a phone number:

• A user enters a phone number that does not have the correct number of digits (less than 6 digits or greater than 15 digits long).

Note: Phone numbers that begin with a plus (+) or zero (0) are not flagged as suspect regardless of the number of digits in the phone number.

• A user removes the area code or country code from the phone number.

• The country code for a phone number is changed.
Web Addresses A user enters a web address that is missing a dot (.).
Email Address A user enters an email address that is missing an at (@) symbol.
Company (for person contacts only) A user reassociates a contact to a company with which the contact was previously associated.

All the rule collections provided with InterAction except the Unmanaged rule collection specify that suspect changes made to these fields generate Data Change Management tickets. Even though these changes are marked for review and may be rejected, the changes are immediately propagated. If the changes are rejected, the data will revert back to what it was before the change.

Unlike other tickets that are part of the Edit category, you should not simply choose Approve or Reject when handling a suspect ticket. The information that the user entered may be relevant and just require reformatting or more research, therefore by rejecting the change, you are preventing good information from being added. However, because the information is poorly entered, you do not want to just approve the change without doing some clean-up work. Whenever possible, you should attempt to correct the information that is suspect or incomplete so the user’s change can be properly added to the contact.

In some cases, you may need to contact the user in order to understand exactly what his or her intent was. You can easily do this from the Inbox by selecting the email button next to the name of the user who initiated the change.

[1] To send an email to the user who generated the Data Change Management ticket, choose the Email button.