1 CRM Overview

A Customer Relationship Management system or CRM is a central repository of all customer (or potential customer) and organization records as well as their associated attributes. This repository is used to capture and store customer and organization data in a central place to ensure customer and organization data is managed efficiently, kept up to date, prevents duplication as well as enabling custom business attributes to be leveraged for transaction and strategic initiatives.

Thinx! is pleased to offer its CRM module, with full integration into the Thinx! Platform Framework. Benefits of the CRM module include tracking loyalty, enabling email campaigns, and linking customers with associated organizations.

The Thinx! CRM module leverages several cross-framework modules available within the Thinx Platform. In most cases, these modules are required for the full feature set available in CRM and are included within your Thinx! Platform Framework account free of charge. The prerequisite modules are:

• Entity
• Task
• Notes
• Messaging

Additionally, CRM has strong integration with the Thinx! Case Management Module. Users are able to create cases on behalf of customers and/or link cases to customers.

To get started with the CRM Module, it first must be enabled. Currently, CRM cannot be enabled using the Add Module feature available within the My Account site area within the Thinx! Platform. To enable the CRM module, email Thinx! Support at support@thinxsoftware.com and a team member will reach out to you to enable CRM.

One of the critical setup components which will be configured upon enabling CRM is the custom Entity schema for the unstructured data for Contact and Organizations. The schemas will be created and configured empty. Thinx! Platform users will have the ability to fully customize these schemas once the module is fully enabled. If you need to switch the initial contact or organization schemas, reach out to Thinx! Support for help.

Note
When changing the contact or organization schemas, be careful to patch any existing unstructured data or be sure to make your schema changes backwards compatible.

Once enabled, the following menu components will become available:

• Desktop – The main landing page for the CRM Module, with strong integration points for the Thinx! Case Management module.
• Contacts – The main landing page for viewing, creating and maintaining contacts within the CRM module.
• Organization - The main landing page for viewing, creating and maintaining organizations within the CRM module.

Using the Navigation links in the Navigation Menu section, provision the Navigation Items with any appropriate permissions as required. Next add the CRM Navigation Items to the appropriate Navigation Source and publish the resulting menu. Users will need to logout and back in to see the menu. See the Platform Menu Maintenance documentation for more information.

Like all functionality within the Thinx! Platform, the CRM Management module utilizes permissions for access control. Permissions are grouped together in roles and then assigned to users and/or groups. See the available Permissions within CRM Management in section 5.1.

Note
By default, the system creates the CRM Admin role when CRM Module is enabled. The CRM Admin role has CRM_ALL permission, and therefore may take any action in the system.

Administrators may customize or create new roles as needed. After any customizations are made, be sure to provision the necessary users with the appropriate CRM role(s).

Like all CRMs, the Thinx! CRM utilizes classifies entities into different types of objects. The core objects available in the Thinx! CRM module are Contacts and Organizations.

Contact
The Thinx! CRM module is a contact centric CRM. Like a contact in your favorite address book app, a contact is a person. CRM enables the storage of pertinent information for the contact and any interactions or activities between your business and the contact. If your organization currently has a business relationship with the contact, then the contact is considered a customer.

Organization
An organization in the Thinx! CRM module is a business entity on which pertinent information is stored and any interactions between your business and the organization are logged. Conceptually, an organization can represent a company that your organization does business with (or hopes to do business with), a high-level account (or potential account), or simply just a grouping of contacts.

Connections
Objects within CRM can have connections or relationships to other objects. There are three types of connections available in the module:

• Affiliations
• Key Relationships
• Hierarchal Relationships

Note
Contacts and organizations can exist standalone or without any type of connections between the two. Additionally, you may choose to use only contacts in your CRM implementation, without any organizations. Conversely, organizations may be used without any contacts.

Affiliation
Contact and organization objects may be connected to each other by an affiliation: they have a close relationship with each other. Contacts may be affiliated with one or more organizations and an organization may be affiliated with one or more contacts. An affiliation is a many to many relationship amongst different object types and is bi-directional. If a contact has an affiliation with an organization, then the organization has an affiliation with that contact.

Affiliations cannot be made between the same object type. In other words, a contact cannot be affiliated with another contact. The Thinx! CRM module supports this type of connection. See the Hierarchy Relationship below.

Consider the following affiliation illustration:

Example
Company A (organization) is affiliated with the following users (contacts): User 1 User 2 User 3 User 2 (contact) is affiliated with the following companies (organizations): Company A Company B Company C User 3 (contact) is affiliated with Company A (organization).

Key Relationships
Key relationships are a special type of affiliation connection used to indicate that this connection has a greater importance. Typically, the key relationship is used to indicate an account manager or higher-level contact/customer/user within a CRM organization. The CRM module quickly highlights these key relationships via the UI and API.

Like affiliations, key relationships are bi-directional and are placed between contacts and organization. From an organization perspective, contacts connected to the organization with a key relationship are said to be key contacts of the organization. Conversely from a contact perspective, organizations connected to the contact with a key relationship are said to be key organizations of the contact.

Consider the following illustration:

Example
User 2 (contact) has a key relationship with Company A (organization): User 2 is a key contact for Company A Company A is a key organization for User 2 However, User 2 still has a regular affiliation relationship with Company B and Company C.

Hierarchy Relationships
A hierarchy relationship within the Thinx! CRM module is a parent-child relationship between objects of the same type. An organization can have a connection to child organizations and a contact can have a connection to child contacts. Currently, the hierarchy relationship is unidirectional: from parent to child.

Example
User 1 (contact) is a parent of User 2 and User 3

The Thinx! CRM module captures data in both a structured and unstructured way. Structured data fields are available by default upon activation of the module whereas the unstructured data fields must be configured client specific data.

The Activity, Information and Documents tabs appear on both the Contact and Organization forms. These tabs contain fields which are considered structured attributes: they are relevant to contacts/organization across many different functional domains. The following sections contain fields which are considered structured attributes:

• Contact Information (Contacts only): available on all tabs
• Organization Information (Organizations only): available on all tabs
• Comments: available on Activity tab
• Contact Details: available on Information tab
• Contacts: available on Information tab
• Organizations: available on Information tab
• Addresses: available on Information tab
• Web/Social: available on Information tab
• Dates to Remember: available on Information tab
• Permissions: available on Information tab
• Documents: available on Documents tab

The Extended tab allows for custom fields to be created and managed in CRM. Client specific contact and organization attributes can be created such as key account information, memberships, affiliations, VIP status etc. These fields are considered unstructured field since they are client specific and may or may not be required, depending on the configuration. The extended section is managed through the metadata framework within the Thinx! platform, which is flexible to support future business needs and processes as they arise.

The Thinx! CRM module integrates tightly with the Thinx! Platform Search Engine. All contacts and organizations entered into the CRM ultimately flow to the Platform Search Engine within a few minutes of the creation or update. Likewise, when contacts and organizations are removed from CRM, they will be removed from the Platform Search Engine within a few minutes.

There is no additional setup required to utilize the Thinx! Platform Search Engine. Both the structured and unstructured data flow automatically into the Search Engine without any transformations and are available for search operations. If custom or complex transformations are required, please reach out to the Thinx! Support team (support@thinxsoftware.com) to start the conversation.

The Platform Search Engine is utilized in Search widget on the Desktop Page. See section 3.1 for a full explanation of the Search widget.