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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / Tracking Email With Mu...
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
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Tracking Email With Multiple Accounts and/or Contacts

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Posted on by Gurs 50

I am trying to find a solution that will allow us to associate a single email thread with multiple accounts and/or contacts.  Here is the use case:

Sally, a salesperson at a company using D365, sends an email to Rob, a potential referral source, regarding a sales opportunity at BigCo.  Rob doesn't work at BigCo, but he is a friend of Chris', and Chris is an executive at BigCo.  In Sally's D365 tenant, Rob & Chris are both Contacts and BigCo is an Account.  Sally sends that email using Outlook, and with the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, tracks the email and makes Rob the "Set-Regarding" record.  Now when Sally views Rob's Contact card, her outbound email will show up in the Timeline, along with all replies.  But Sally also wants the email thread to show up in the Timeline for Bigco, and for Chris.  How can she accomplish this?

Can anyone point me in the right direction on this?  Seems like such simple functionality.  I found a bunch of posts from 2010-2012 indicating that this wasn't possible, but I'm hoping that shortcoming has been remedied by MSFT in the past decade.  Our previous CRM (Hubspot) made this extremely easy: you just started typing a name in the "Associated" box and selected the match, repeating for as many related contacts/companies as you wanted to add.

Thanks for the help!

  • Gurs Profile Picture
    Gurs 50 on at
    RE: Tracking Email With Multiple Accounts and/or Contacts

    Thanks Gary.  I set out to document my experience with some screenshots, and lo-and-behold: it works now!  Somehow the problem solved itself.  Maybe the settings just needed to sync in overnight ;-).  Anyway, now when I send an email to Rob (from my example above), it shows up in Rob's timeline, even if Tracking was not manually enabled and there was no Regarding set.  This is the behavior I expected.

    As for your response regarding the rest of my request (multiple Regarding entries), it looks like I am SOL on that one.  Disappointing that this is not OOB functionality for D365.  My desire to add multiple Regardings comes from a bigger goal of figuring out how to use D365 to track outreaches to potential customers/connections via unrelated intermediaries.  I put up a separate post on that - maybe you can take a look?  You can find it here: community.dynamics.com/.../set-up-track-networking-outreach-effort

    Thanks again!

  • Verified answer
    Gary Letter Profile Picture
    Gary Letter 1,267 on at
    RE: Tracking Email With Multiple Accounts and/or Contacts

    Hi Gurs,

    I was unable to replicate the problem you're describing in a sandbox. In my test, when Rob is in the Recipient field and Chris is in the Regarding field, the email shows up in Rob's timeline (see images below), which is the behavior I expected. I think the question to answer is, "Why isn't this happening in your instance?" Is it possible, for example, that there are duplicate Contact records for Rob, or that there is a discrepancy in the email addresses?  Can you post some screenshots of the test records?

    As for the scenario where there is an introduction to two different accounts, I don't think you will be able to accomplish this with a single email message and out-of-the-box functionality. You can only put one record in the Regarding field. The email will be shown on timelines where the record is a party to the email, where the record is in the Regarding field, or where the email is rolled up from a child record. Possible workarounds include creating another record, such as a post, task, or second email, and setting the Regarding field to the second Account. 

    This is the email message with Rob in the To: field and Chris in the Regarding field.

    pastedimage1582239524922v6.png

    This is the result in Rob's timeline.

    pastedimage1582239267482v4.png

    Gary Letter
    NextLevel Business Systems

    If you find the answer useful, please click "Yes" to mark it as verified.

  • Gurs Profile Picture
    Gurs 50 on at
    RE: Tracking Email With Multiple Accounts and/or Contacts

    Thanks Brandon.  I played around with the Relationships on some test emails.  Besides the fact that it took around 10 clicks to add each relationship, I couldn't figure out what to do with those relationships once created.  For example, I added a connection type called Referral Request and Connected a few Contacts and Accounts to an email.  If I look at one of those Accounts, click Related, then Connections, then change the view to Active Connections, it lists the email, which I can click through and view.  But it doesn't show the email in the timeline for that account.  And it doesn't pick up the full email thread, only the single inbound or outbound email that I tagged.  So I would need to add all those connections manually to every outbound and received email.  

    That isn't workable.  Is there a better way to leverage Relationships?

  • Gurs Profile Picture
    Gurs 50 on at
    RE: Tracking Email With Multiple Accounts and/or Contacts

    Thanks for the reply Gary.  For some reason, if Sally doesn't set Rob in the Regarding field, the email does not show up in Rob's timeline (even though Rob is shown in the D365 app window as a Recipient).  I had an open support ticket with MSFT on this, and the result was that they told me I had to Set-Regarding even if the recipient of the email is already a Contact and is listed in the D365 app window as a Recipient.  Seems bizarre to me, but that's what they told me.

    If it weren't for that, I think your solution would work for the single-account scenario I outlined above.  But what if Sally's email is requesting an introduction to 2 different accounts?  How could I get the email to show up in the timeline for both target companies?

  • Brandon Sambat Profile Picture
    Brandon Sambat on at
    RE: Tracking Email With Multiple Accounts and/or Contacts

    Hi Gurs,

    Thank you for using the Dynamics Communities.  In addition to what Gary posted, I would also suggest using "Relationships" docs.microsoft.com/.../create-and-edit-1n-relationships.  This will allow you to customize how different entities can interact.

  • Verified answer
    Gary Letter Profile Picture
    Gary Letter 1,267 on at
    RE: Tracking Email With Multiple Accounts and/or Contacts

    If Sally sent the email to Rob, it will show up in his timeline, because he is a party (To, From, CC or BCC) to the email. It's not necessary to put Rob in the Regarding field. We want to leave this field available for a record that is not a party to the email, which in this case is Chris.

    If the Regarding field is set to Chris's contact, then it will show up in his timeline. Since activities from child records roll up to the Account, it should also show up in BigCo's timeline, as long as BigCo is entered as the parent account on Chris's contact record.

    Gary Letter
    NextLevel Business Systems

    If you find the answer useful, please click "Yes" to mark it as verified.

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