Every now and then a project comes up that really tests the foundation of Aristo, our DMS product, and exemplifies how this foundation can provide us some very powerful functionality.
Couple weeks back, while working on Aristo Prospecting, we had a wish-list item to have an automatic alert show a sales person whenever one of "their" customers was in the dealership. The idea is that if you make a point of tracking down a customer when they're in for service you'll help to build your relationship with that client and increase the likelihood of them returning to look at a new vehicle in the future.
After reviewing this concept for a couple hours we came to a startling conclusion... our application already allowed for this! The basis of this was the Customer History, a listing of all Open and Closed activity for this customer. You can see it here on the right side of the screen.
Well the idea of a Customer Alert leverages on this really well - instead of grabbing a customer and looking at all their activity, we just need to change our query and grab all Open items for the dealership, and only show them if I have a relationship with that customer! To accomplish this we add the idea of User Roles.
Each customer can have any number of Users associated with them as either a Sales Rep or an Account Manager. These users now need a simple gauge on their desktop to show them when this Open activity applies to them. Enter the Customer Alerts Gauge!
Again, you can click on these items to get right back into that customer activity. We now have a very simple and powerful tool to help our clients build customer relationships. And all this without a huge amount of development effort! Our Aristo Contact Management dealerships will get a general roll-out on this feature in the next few weeks, hopefully this blog entry will give them a sense as to what it can be used for.