Anita Holley, Head of Marketing – EMEA
One of the things that makes Maximizer such a versatile CRM solution is the ease with which it can be customised. By creating custom user-defined fields (UDFs) you can personalise Maximizer to fit the needs of just about any organisation or business unit. Any attribute or tidbit of information you can think of that you’d like to store about your contacts, you can create a UDF for it.
But one piece of this puzzle that has always been missing for me is some way to enforce business rules for your UDFs, by ensuring that they get set for your entries when and only when they need to be, ensuring that relationships between the values in different fields are maintained. Well, thanks to one of the new features in the new Maximizer CRM 12 Summer 2013, you’re able to do just that.
It’s always been possible to make Maximizer UDFs mandatory. If you’ve got a field that you want to ensure always has a value, you just flip on the “mandatory” option for that field and you’ll be forced to enter a value whenever you create or update an entry. But with this new feature, you’ll be able to set up rules that make a given field mandatory only under certain circumstances. In other words, you can make a field be mandatory sometimes and not mandatory at other times, all according to rules that you create.
Let’s say you’ve got a UDF that you use to group your Maximizer Address Book entries into various contact types and for each of those types, you have a different set of UDFs that need to be set, depending on the value that is selected for the “Contact Type”.
Previously, if you wanted to ensure sure that these other UDFs were always assigned a value, you had to make them all mandatory. All of them. But that wouldn’t really make sense, since the UDFs that you use for “Partners” don’t really apply to your “Customer” entries.
With this new feature, you’ll be able to set up rules for each of these dependent UDFs, which basically say “make this UDF mandatory only if this entry has a contact type of X”. If you’ve ever set up a formula UDF in Maximizer, creating a rule for a dependent UDF will be a piece of cake. All you need to do is create a formula that evaluates whether or not the UDF should be mandatory.
So let’s say you have a UDF for your Address Book entries called “Product Interest” and you want to make it mandatory whenever “Prospect” is selected in your “Contact Type” UDF; all you need to do is open up the “Product Interest” UDF in the Set Up User-Defined Fields dialog, select the “Mandatory based on rule” option and enter the formula to use in determining if the field should be mandatory or not. In this case, our formula would look something like this: [Contact Type] == “Prospect”
Now, anytime someone tries to create or modify one of your Address Book entries, if they select “Prospect” for the “Contact Type”, they’ll be required to select a value for the “Product Interest” as well, before they are able to save their changes.
But these rules aren’t limited to just making certain fields mandatory based on the values of other fields. You can use them to enforce all sorts of requirements.
For example, imagine you’ve got some UDFs that you use to record sales figures for your partners and you want to make sure that the amount entered for their domestic sales total doesn’t exceed the amount entered for their worldwide total, you can set up a conditional UDF to do just that.
How? By creating a third UDF, a table UDF called something like “Domestic Sales Exceeds Total Sales” and making that field mandatory if the domestic sales is greater than the total sales.
That way, whenever someone in your office tries to enter invalid data like this, a warning will appear when they try to save the entry.
If you want to ensure that it is impossible to break this rule when creating or updating an entry, don’t create any items for the table UDF; that way, there’ll be nothing for users to select, so they’ll have to fix the original problem itself.
On the other hand, if you want to allow exceptions to the rule, you can create a few items in the table that represent reasons why it might be acceptable to break the rule or when the rule might not apply. You could then create a Dashboard or Workflow Automation event to notify you whenever an entry with one of these values was created so that you could follow-up on it.
Really, the limit to what you can do with this feature is limited only by your imagination! But if you spend a little time setting up some of these rules, you’ll be able to prevent inconsistencies with your Address Book entries and ensure that your Maximizer data is always accurate.