Contacts

In CRM, contacts are the people who work for, or are associated with, an account.

User permission: CRM

During your Phocas implementation, we often import your Contacts and Leads as a one-time process. However, you might want to re-import these items occasionally, for example, to update custom fields in bulk. You can’t do this task yourself, but you can contact your Customer Success Consultant to arrange for our Professional Services team to do it for you.

A contact can't exist in isolation; it must be linked to an account. A contact is independent. It can be an employee of a prospective customer (lead), an employee of a customer, or a consultant who has many of their own customers that could be converted to customers of the business.

View a list of all contacts

Click the Phocas menu button > Contacts.

The Contacts screen displays a list of all the contacts you have permission to view. You can view, edit and delete individual contacts from here.

Find a contact

On the Contacts screen, you can find a particular contact using the filter and search options above the grid or by sorting the list.

• Use the Active filter to switch between viewing active and inactive accounts in the list.

• Use the Owner filter to display only your contacts or contacts that belong to another user (that you have permissions to view).

• Use the Team filter to display contacts allocated to a specific team to which you belong.

• Use the Search box to search for a specific contact by name. This performs an is like search on the name column.

• Click a column heading to sort data into ascending or descending order.

Filters remain active until you turn them off, so if you apply a filter and move away from the screen and then return, the filter will remain. To clear any filter you have applied, select All from the dropdown list.

Learn more about filtering and searching in CRM.

View or edit a contact

1. On the Contacts screen, click the contact name (blue link) to open the contact record.

2. On the campaign record:

   • Contact tab - View and edit the contact details, such as its name, owner and address. The contact owner is the Phocas CRM user responsible for communicating with that contact.

   • Activities tab - View and edit the activities relating to the contact, or delete (remove) activities from the contact. Parent account activities (activities relating directly to the account) do not display here. See View and edit activities.

     
3. Click Save > Close.

Add a contact to an account

Watch this Phocas Academy video: CRM: Create a contact

Open the account record, click the Contacts tab, and click New. Then enter the contact details and click Save > Close. The new contact displays in the list of contacts.

Set a primary contact for an account

Open the account record, click the Contacts tab, select the contact row (it turns blue), then click Set Primary.

Delete a contact

If you do not have delete permissions, the Delete button might not display or you might see a message at the top of the screen indicating you do not have permission to delete. Talk to your administrator about your permissions. Deleted items can be restored by administrators.

1. Click the Phocas menu button > Contacts to open the Contacts screen.

2. Select the rows of the accounts you want to delete (they turn blue) and click Delete.

In older versions of Phocas, deleting a contact also deletes activities associated with it, so you are deleting the entire history of that contact. An alternative is to mark the contact as inactive.

Export contacts

You can't export your contacts directly from within CRM, but you can do it from your CRM Analysis database.

1. Open your CRM Analysis database.

2. Click the Entity Type dimension, then select and focus on the Contact entity type.

3. Click the Entities dimension.

4. Switch to Search mode to view the full list of contacts (no period range is applied).

5. Add more properties to the grid, if required.

6. Export the data. Note that there's a limit to the number of records you can export at a time, so you might need to export the data in batches (using an advanced search filter on the Code property).