Manage customers day to day

Log customer activity

Keep the phone calls, visits and decisions on the customer record instead of in someone's inbox.

The customer phones about the overdue invoice, you agree they will pay by Friday, and on Monday a colleague who never heard of the call answers the next question from scratch. The timeline is where that call belongs.

Every customer record carries a timeline. It holds both the decisions the system made and the notes your people write, in one list, in the order things happened.

Before you start: an activity always belongs to a person. Even the company timeline requires the contact you dealt with; a call is with a person, and the record follows that person.

Why bother

Most B2B customer knowledge lives in an Innendienst colleague's head and their Outlook folder. That works until they are on holiday, leave, or the customer phones a different extension. The timeline is the cheap version of a CRM: the record of what was said, without a sales process around it.

It also matters because the system writes to the same timeline. Registration decisions land there, so "who approved this account and why" is answered on the customer's own page rather than in an audit export.

Log an activity

From the person:

Go to CRM › Contacts and open the contact.
Select Log activity.
Choose a Type — note, call, email, meeting, visit or task.
Write a Subject. It is required and it is what shows in the timeline, so make it a sentence, Framework agreement discussed — quote by Friday rather than Call.
Add a Note for the detail: what was said and what happens next.
Set When if it happened earlier than today.
Save to the timeline.

From the company:

Go to CRM › Organizations and open the company.
Select Log activity.
Pick the Contact you dealt with. They must belong to this company.
Fill in the same fields and save.

"When" and "logged" are different.occurred_at is when it happened; the created timestamp is when it was typed in. A call on Friday written up on Monday should say Friday, or the timeline sorts wrongly and the next person reads the wrong story.

What ends up on the timeline

Kind	Written by	Example
`system`	The registration routes, and only them	Registration submitted, approved or rejected
`note` `call` `email` `meeting` `visit` `task`	A person, through Log activity	A phone call, a site visit, a follow-up task

Nobody can file a system entry by hand; that would be forging the audit trail. Everything else is yours.

Read a timeline

On a contact, the Activity tab shows that person's entries.
On an organization, the Activity tab shows every entry for every person at the company, which is usually the view you want. Registration entries are tinted as warnings and contact entries as information, so the decisions stand out from the conversation.
There is also a cross-customer Activity list for everything at once.

Maintain the types

The kinds of activity you can log are a value list you own.

Go to Configuration › Value lists › Activity types.
Select New activity type, or open one to edit it.
Give it a code, a title, labels per locale, a position and a tone for the badge colour.

Keep the list short. A timeline with fourteen activity types is one where people pick the first entry in the dropdown every time.

What to write

The useful convention is one line that would make sense to a colleague in six months:

What happened — "Called about the overdue invoice 4711".
What was agreed — "They will pay by Friday".
What happens next — "Lift the delivery block once it lands".

Do not write what is already a field. The payment terms are on the company; a note saying "they are on net 30" is a second copy that will be wrong eventually.

What to check

Open the Activity tab. Your entry is at the top, or in the right place by date if you backdated it.
The entry shows the actor, so it is clear who logged it.
On the company timeline, the entry appears even though you logged it against one person.

When it does not work

The contact is refused. The organization route only accepts a contact that belongs to that company. Check which company the person is attached to.

The subject is missing. It is required. An activity with no subject is a row nobody can read in a list.

A registration decision is not on the timeline. In open registration mode nothing is submitted for approval, so there is no decision to record. See Self-registration.

Customer data hygiene — find the customers nobody has spoken to.
Approve a registration — the decisions that write themselves onto the timeline.

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Cost centres and budgets

Carry the customer's accounting bucket through to the order line — and what a budget would need beyond that.

Troubleshoot

Stop customer data rotting, and work out why a customer cannot order.