Data Change Management handles changes to contact data made by users in the InterAction Web Client. Any time a user adds or edits information for a contact that is in the firm’s list or creates a new contact, Data Change Management may be used to process the change.
Data Change Management can handle the following types of user actions:
- When a User Changes Information for a User Contact
- When a User Adds a Contact Type to a Contact
- When a User Changes Information for a Firm Contact
- When a User Adds a Contact to a Marketing List
- When a User Adds a Company as a Person Contact
- When a User Creates a New Contact
- When a User Submits a Change Request
When a User Changes Information for a User Contact
Each user can maintain contacts in his or her own contact list. The contacts in this list are called user contacts. For each of the user contacts, users can maintain their own versions of the contact’s name, phones, and addresses. If the contact in the user’s contact list is connected to a contact in the firm’s contact list, the firm contact is updated when the user updates his or her information, provided it is not a confidential field. For example, Ed Roberts can have a contact, Jane Tarnoff, in his user contact list that is connected to the contact for Jane Tarnoff in the firm’s contact list. When Ed changes Jane’s business phone number, that change is also made to the firm’s version of Jane’s business phone number. Then, Data Change Management rules determine whether Ed’s update is automatically applied to the firm’s data for Jane or if his change must first be reviewed by a data steward before it is applied.
For a list of the user contact fields that can be sent to the firm and managed by Data Change Management rules, see Contact Information Changes That Can Be Sent to Data Change Management.
When a User Adds a Contact Type to a Contact
Contact types are used to categorize contacts. Some contact types provided with InterAction include Our Personnel, Alumni, Client, and Prospect. Users can apply contact types to contacts in the InterAction Web Client when they create new contacts or edit existing contacts.
Depending on which contact type the user applies to the contact, Data Change Management rules determine whether the change is automatically applied or if it must be reviewed by a data steward. For example, Ed Roberts applies the Client contact type to Jane Tarnoff. Because your organization wants to maintain careful watch over the contacts categorized as clients, instead of immediately applying the Client contact type to Jane, a Data Change Management ticket is created. This lets the data stewards responsible for monitoring clients verify that Jane should really be designated as a client.
When a User Changes Information for a Firm Contact
In addition to changing the contact information they maintain in their own contact lists, users can change the contact data maintained on the firm version of a contact. For example, Ed Roberts can edit the organization’s business phone number for Jane Tarnoff instead of updating his own information for her. When Ed attempts to edit the phone, Data Change Management rules determine whether his change is automatically applied or if it must be reviewed by a data steward first.
When a User Adds a Contact to a Marketing List
Users can easily add contacts to marketing lists from InterAction Web Client. You can manage the addition of contacts to a folder or marketing list through Data Change Management. For example, if your organization maintains a marketing list for all clients that receive a holiday gift, you may be very selective about the contacts that are added to this list. When a user attempts to add a contact to the Holiday Gift marketing list, a Data Change Management ticket is submitted to the data steward responsible for the folder. The data steward can then decide whether or not the contact should be added to the marketing list.
Data Change Management cannot be applied to Working Lists.
When a User Adds a Company as a Person Contact
When a new contact is added to Microsoft® Outlook® and synchronized with InterAction, InterAction looks at the contact fields to determine if the contact is a person or a company. If a contact has any information entered in the Last Name or First Name fields in Outlook, the contact is identified as a person in InterAction.
Users may inadvertently complete the first and last name fields with company information. These contacts are then added to InterAction as people and cannot be used for company association and other features of InterAction.
When a person contact that may be a company contact is added to the firm list, a ticket is sent to Data Change Management. For more information, see Handling Possible Company Tickets.
When a User Creates a New Contact
New Contact Rules for Data Change Management determine how a new contact is treated.
When a user creates a new contact from within the Web Client, there are four scenarios that could require Data Change Management intervention, depending on your configuration:
A User Creates a Potential Duplicate
Users may accidentally add duplicate contacts to the firm list. This occurs most often when users are working from their PIMs or PDAs.
In some cases, InterAction will handle the duplicate contact automatically. For example, if a contact is added to the firm list when User to Firm Contact Sync runs, the process attempts to automatically match up duplicates. However, if several potential duplicates exist, InterAction may not be able to identify which contact should be used. Through Data Change Management, by default, a ticket is sent to a data steward to resolve duplicate contacts. You can configure InterAction to not generate a ticket if you wish.
A User Creates a Data Conflict
When a field in a user contact is different from the firm contact and InterAction cannot determine which contact is correct, the user field is marked as suspect and a data conflict ticket is generated. For every field within a contact that has conflict, a separate ticket is generated.
This occurs most commonly when initially populating a user collection in bulk. Since InterAction cannot determine which information has been updated recently and which information is out-of-date, the information is considered questionable and InterAction marks it as suspect.
A User Creates a New Contact
The administrator can configure InterAction to create a New Contact notification ticket for the following scenarios:
- The new contact is designated to be added to the firm list, and during the processing, the system did not find any exact matches in the firm list.
- The new person contact is connected with a contact in the firm list, and during the processing, the system did not find any associated company match in the firm list.
A User Creates a New Person Contact with an Unassociated Company
The administrator can configure InterAction to create an Unassociated Company notification ticket when a new person contact is designated to be added to the firm list and the system did not find an exact company match.
This ticket is only generated if the administrator selects the Do not create a new company contact option in Administrator.
Can You Limit the Amount of Changes Managed by Data Change Management?
Just because Data Change Management can handle most changes that users make to contact information in the Web Client does not mean it always should handle all these changes. Setting up InterAction so all changes must be managed by Data Change Management may inundate the data steward’s inboxes with hundreds of tickets a day. Most of these changes probably do not need to be reviewed because the information entered is correct or the contact is not important enough to your organization’s business to worry about a minor change made by a user. Instead, you need to decide which contacts are most important to your organization and then set up rules based on these types of contacts and dedicate resources to manage them.
In most cases, these groups of contacts that you want to maintain will correspond with the out-of-the-box contact types provided with InterAction. Among the several provided contact types you will find the following:
- Clients
- Top Clients
- Our Personnel
- Alumni
- Prospects
For each of these contact types, a set of Data Change Management rules is defined out of the box to determine which changes should be reviewed by a data steward and which changes can automatically be applied without review. You can modify the rules for these contact types to better meet the needs of your organization.
When a User Submits a Change Request
If a user wants to make a change to a contact, but is unsure of how to make the change, he or she can submit a change request for the contact.
Using this dialog box, users can submit any type of change that either cannot be made from the Web Client or the user does not know how to make from the Web Client. InterAction determines which data steward receives the user request based on the contact for which the user request was submitted. For more information, see Handling User Request Tickets.