A 360° vision of your contacts
The contact file is where all the information relative to a contact is in Secutix. All the information linked to a contact can be accessed from this file. A vertical menu list is displayed to the left: each section’s content is displayed on the right side and can be organized in multiple horizontal tabs.
At the end of this page you'll find two links to know more about the structure contact file and the inner workings of the contact files.
First, we are going to go through an individual contact file:
The “Summary” tab, within the vertical information menu, displays a quick and complete view of the contact’s information.
The other tabs of the information menu complete the information more thoroughly.
Within the information menu, there are a few fields in the different tabs that can be particularly interesting:
- In the general tab you’ll find:
- Confidential level (Free / Restricted / Confidential): All contacts are set to free by default. This function would limit the operators that would be able to see a particular contact within the database, depending on their rights. This could be useful if the contact were a very famous person.
- Reference code: This code can be used to search for a contact. It's usually used to reference the number of a previous CRM contact file.
- Validity end date: A contact can be invalidated at any time, so no action whatsoever can be carried out: no internet account, no purchased, doesn’t appear in targets… However, they can be found through the advanced contact search when enabling the “With invalid contacts” case, and revalidated anytime. This use can be particularly interesting when a relay contact stops working for a particular institution and thus will probably never use again that particular professional account.
- Disability type (None / Sitting at row end / Seating near the stage / Wheelchair / Without wheelchair): These types are determined by the type of accommodations an individual might need, they do not specify the nature of the disability to comply with data protection policies. They cannot be modified as they have been approved by the CNIL (France).
- Passport/ID: It can be used for security reasons to identify individuals that have been banned to access the events of an institution, usually those that manage sport matches.
- In the marketing tab you’ll find:
- Campaign: If the contact has not been targeted for a specific campaign but they should be included, you can add them here.
- Bounce status: … of emails sent to the contact’s email.
- Hard bounce: Whenever the email is invalid or non-existent.
- Soft bounce: When an automatic email reply is sent from that account, Secutix cannot interpret it. This could be, for example, an out of office notification.
- Communication and Legal Information sections: This fields are concerned by Secutix' authorization management and thus are the way to ensure compliance with the GDPR.
- In the management tab you’ll find:
- Alias: When making a purchase through an online sales channel, a user might choose to register their credit card information. This information is not stored within Secutix, it’s part of the data the bank is responsible for. However, to be able to make the right information request to the bank, an alias is stored within Secutix.
- In the administration tab you’ll find:
- Contact status: When the blocked case is selected, the contact will not be allowed to make any purchases within the institution. Its use is usually correlated with the Passport/ID information input (see above).
NOTES: It is important to be careful in the input of the free text notes as they are not SecuTix’ responsibility and they could be subject to data protection investigations carried out by data protection authorities (CNIL in France), and thus deemed not conforming. Besides, as they are free text, its information cannot be used when targeting from SAM (SecuTix Audience Management). This applies not only to the notes tab, but also to other free text fields such as the remarks field within the general tab, the remarks or the interactions.
When one or more notes are created within a contact file, the tab name will appear in red and this symbol will be displayed next to the name when a contact search is made from the Sales module (Cart menu: Sales-reservation and exchange-cancellation) in the Sales Channel context. You'll be able to explore it during the Quick sales training, but here's a list of all the symbols you might see linked to a contact.
Other vertical menu items:
- Addresses: You can input up to three addresses (main, delivery, or invoice). You can learn here about our partner Loqate, that enables the autocompletion of addresses, and here some recommendations regarding the French La Poste on how to fill out the addresses.
- Criteria: Manual classification of the contacts according to the criteria defined at the beginning of the project with the organization. The available criteria list can be different for individuals and structures. These can be used later to segment the contact base and create targets within SAM. To know more about all the potential of criterion and discover how they could help you segment your contact base, click here.
- Indicators: They are automatically calculated based on the activity of the contact in the organization. These can be used later to segment the contact base and create targets within SAM. To know more about all the potential of indicators and discover how they could help you segment your contact base, click here.
- Connections: Click here to explore all the connections that can be established between contacts.
- Interactions: You can register here any additional interaction with the contact, such as phone calls, emails... You'll be able to define a status (open, close, archived...), the communication medium and whether you were the one contacting the contact ("direction out") or the contact reached out to you ("direction in"). You can also assign them to an operator. Please remember that there are no notifications or reminders of the interactions that are imputed to be done in the future.
- Audit contact: Detailed log of all the modifications of the contact file. You need to input a time frame to see them.
Within the vertical menu, you can also find the four main records of a contact:
- Shipment list: All the documents that have been sent to the contact will automatically appear here: quotations, emails, marketing campaigns...
- Purchase history: Set of orders made by the contact.
- Cultural history: Set of products (events, passes, matches…) which the contact has a ticket for. It can be a ticket under their name that they haven't purchased personally, but that someone else has purchased for them.
- Attendance history: Tickets that have been controlled at the access of the venue (museum, concert, opera...).
- Financial history: Set of payments made by the contact.
Here are two examples of how an order could be linked to several contacts and thus appear in different records:
A teacher calls a museum to make a reservation for a small group of students:
- The teacher would be the relay of a school and he would be visiting the museum: the visit would appear in the cultural history of his relay contact file... and in his purchase history, as he made the order for the reservation.
- The students, if they were to have a contact file each and the tickets were attributed nominatively, the visit would appear in their cultural history.
- There would be no attendance history until the tickets are scanned at the entrance of the museum. So if one of the students finally doesn't come, they'd have the ticket in their cultural history, but not in the attendance one.
- The payment for the visit would be made by the school, so the visit would appear in the financial history of the school structure contact file.
A secretary calls the Opera to make a reservation for a the Executive Committee of the Pear Company:
- The secretary would be the relay of the Pear Company: the tickets to the Opera would appear in the their purchase history, as they made the order for the reservation.
- The members of the Executive Committee would have a contact file each, and the tickets would be nominative: the visit would appear in their cultural history.
- There would be no attendance history until the tickets are scanned at the entrance of the Opera. So if one of the members of the Executive Committee finally doesn't go to the event, they'd have the ticket in their cultural history, but not in the attendance history.
- The payment of the tickets would be made by the Pear Company, so the visit would appear only in the financial history of the Pear Company's structure contact file.
Remember that in order to see most of these records you need to select a timeframe.
Second, you can check its differences with a structure contact file here.
If you want to know more about how the contact file is laid out and its internal logic, click here.
And finally, you can go on and test your knowledge here: SAM 1 - Concepts and basic principles: Exercices