Two important sections on your BuddyCRM homepage are the Lapsed and Missed activities areas. These will help you to keep on top of the activities for customers & prospects that you need to complete. In this article, we will explore what these two areas do and how they can be used. But first… what do we mean by ‘Activities’?
Activities recap
Activities are something that you are going to do for, or something you are going to do with an account or lead defined as Calls, Appointments and Tasks. We recommend that a user picking up the phone to a record (e.g cold calls, follow up calls etc) are scheduled as a call. Anything that involves an actual meeting with a record, either in-person or remote is best scheduled as an appointment. Finally to cover anything else that is being done for a record (for example creating a tender, preparing for a meeting, reviewing a complaint – the possibilities are limitless) would be best scheduled as a task. All of these can be created using our 3-click create from the ‘plus’ button, or on the BuddyCRM Calendar module.
Lapsed Activities
An activity will appear in the Lapsed area when it’s ‘start on’ date is in the past and it has not yet been marked as completed. The number next to ‘lapsed activities’ shows how many lapsed activities are in the name of the staff member you are viewing (Top tip: you can view activities for other members of staff or your team by changing the name at the top-right of the homepage).
You can click on the phone, globe or sliders icon (depending on the type of activity) to the left to open the details of that particular call, appointment or task.
From here you can update the activity with more details, reschedule for a future date or mark it as completed by using the ‘edit’ function. Or if you wanted to go straight to the lead or account record in question, simply click on the name of the company.
To move an activity out of lapsed, simply re-schedule it for a future date, or mark it as completed.
The lapsed area is great for reminding you of activities you have forgotten to update in the BuddyCRM system, and will help you to never miss a follow up.
Missed Activities
The missed activities section is driven by the Contact Frequency field within the Trading Profile of a lead or account. Within this field the user is selecting the minimum amount of contact that an account should receive from a dropdown list, for example weekly, monthly yearly etc.
BuddyCRM will then look at the activities scheduled in the system and if the minimum contact frequency has not been met, then the account or lead will appear in the missed activities section for the account owner. For example if contact frequency is set to monthly, and an activity hasn’t been scheduled for the account for over a month, then the account will appear in missed activities. This section is really useful for keeping track of the accounts and leads that need particular follow up, driving the user with actions.
The navigation of the list items behaves the same as in lapsed in that you can click on the activity to edit or complete, or click on the account/lead name to open the record. The number to the left this time represents how many days it was since the last activity for the record. The contact frequency is also displayed.
Advanced
If you click on the arrows to the right of the totals for lapsed and missed activities this will open an expanded menu. This gives you the list in a grid view, which may be easier to read if there are lots of activities in the list.
Using the checkboxes to the left (or the ‘select all’ in the column headers) in conjunction with the plus button top right allows the user to create mass call, mass appointment or mass tasks for the selected activities.
This is great for a manager or supervisor creating follow up activities for their team, or for a salesperson looking to get on top of their accounts.
For any advice, feel free to contact the BuddyCRM customer success team at support@buddycrm.com.
