Marketing communication with clients and prospects is a great place to utilize InterAction. It has all of the functionality you need to properly integrate all of your outside marketing systems with your centralized database.
However, although InterAction provides the foundation to make this happen, it is up to the firm to ensure that the integration and protocols are implemented correctly. Otherwise, you run the risk of compromising the firm’s data.
For instance, lets say our firm has a website where prospects can download case studies and whitepapers in return for submitting their contact information. The information includes their name, company, some industry details, etc. That data is then stored in the website database, which is regularly synced to InterAction, via the Application Collaboration.
But now, the question arises: What is to be done with the unqualified leads coming into InterAction?
Here is where detailed planning and protocols come into play. We have to prevent suspect data from being added to the firm database, following the synchronization with Application Collaboration. Imagine if tons of inaccurate contacts continually showed up in InterAction. Your professionals would begin to distrust the system, and your whole CRM initiative would collapse.
The leads need to be qualified. The extent of this qualification will vary from firm to firm, but nonetheless, we need to provide an effective system for our internal marketing department (or whomever is responsible for qualifying the leads) to analyze the incoming leads within InterAction.
That is where proper access rights and Data Cleansing Tools come in. Although I wont discuss all the protocols for a successful integration, this is an important aspect. With Windows Client rights, you can provide the marketing department with specific securities and rights to qualify all of the leads coming in from external systems, without giving them access to all Data Steward rights. Then, the marketing department will utilize Data Quality Tools or Data Quality Searches, to merge duplicate contacts, address, phones, and assign contact types.
Lets revisit our example above to conceptualize this process. Once Application Collaboration performs the synchronization with the website database, one possible way this could be done is to have:
- The contacts placed in their own unique folder
- Signify where the leads originate from in the folder name, and
- Make sure the contacts are sourced into the folder by default, upon being uploaded from application collaboration
This provides the data storage foundation to create specific access rights for the marketing department users.
Through the InterAction Administrator, we must then establish the access rights for our new marketing department users/group.
The exact permissions will vary, but the goal is to allow teams of qualifiers to get in there and verify the leads, without inadvertently tarnishing overall firm data. Now, all of the tools have been provided for them to use Windows Client to associate leads with companies, merge duplicates, run reports, assign leads, etc.
If you have any questions on this, let me know. Good luck!
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