We work together as a team, so often we are chasing/calling separate contacts under the same account. We need a way so that our users know when another employee has ‘engaged’ one of the contacts at that account. From the account view, this is relatively simple, since any activities or emails done by a user on a contact will show on the account. The issue is more to do with when a user is looking at a contact, and has no idea that his teammate has engaged another contact at that account.
I do not want to lock the other users out of the account or prevent them from seeing any contacts when this happens. I simply want there to be a way for my users to be aware that another user has engaged someone at that account. I suspect this is is a fairly common need for other zoho users, but I can’t find anything in the community message board. When I chatted with Zoho Support, they told me I could "write a note." (looking for a little more sophisticated solution than that).
I have a halfway formed idea, though not sure if it could work, but I will explain my idea:
- I could create a custom user field on the contact named 'Engaged by' [USER]
- When a contact becomes engaged (based on our definition), the user would update this field to their name
- The field would map across all the contacts, but with a different field name. I was thinking this field name could be something like 'Other Contact Engaged By' [USER]. **(is this what's called a dependent field?)
- I'd make the field appear at the top of the contact view page, and my users would have instructions to check that field periodically
Please let me know if the above solution is possible. Of course open to other suggestions as well. Ideally I would also want this field (if not empty) to appear or interact on the account as well, though that is a lesser issue. I am also considering tying the 'Engaged By' field to certain logic, for ex. if a deal is created related to that account it automatically gets populated.
Thank you in advance for your help. - Joe