AN INDIVIDUAL PERSON AS AN ACCOUNT??

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Member

In CRM the definition of an ACCOUNT is an organisation, I believe.

1. Is there ever a situation when an individual person who is not otherwise associated with an ACCOUNT/organisation in the context of this definition could/should also be an ACCOUNT in his/her own right?? (It would seem that if the answer is YES, then you end up with two strata of ACCOUNTS: organisations and individual persons.)

2. Is any loss of functionality or analytic potential the result of this duality??

thank you

*This post is locked for comments

I have the same question (0)

All responses (3)

Answers (0)

SyedHussain 1,820 on at

Like (0)

Report

An Account can be an organisation or a single person/multiple people (any entity) that requires the additional components of the CRM. In any scenario you are associating products or services to that account, and or managing the events/processes of that account individually.

Most CRM systems, try to stay true to the academic definition of CRM; by default, Microsoft CRM tries to stay very close to that academic definition; you have a Lead, convert to an Account; any time an opportunity arises - you create opportunities and sell products. You'll find that most organisations take CRM, strip it down to an XRM platform and re-build based on their requirements. Having stated that, if your business logic is correct and if you have the right relationships set in place there are no problems to worry about.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Karth on at

Like (0)

Report

If its an individual, you create them as contacts in CRM. When you create them as contacts within CRM, you don't tie them up with a Parent Account. There's no loss of functionality here. But you gotto think on the lines of reporting and list creation - If you need a report of all your customer accounts, then the individual wouldn't show up in your report as the data source will be the Account entity and not the contact entity. So, you will have to tweak your reports to also include contact which do not have a parent account associated with it. As far as Marketing List creation is concerned, you will have to create two lists - one for accounts and one for contacts.

HTH

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Member on at

Like (0)

Report

They key is to retain your level of customers in one entity - it sounds for you, like you might be selling a products or service that is purchased by both individual consumers, and businesses.

You might like to consider for an individual person setup as both - don't worry about duplication you can have a workflow create the alternate record based on your primary record.

This would allow you to retain a clear list of companies, and people, even when the people were listed as companies. Note, you'd want to classify the accounts that you created for people in some manner that splits them away from real companies.

this will allow you to keep your address data, contact data, correspondence tracking etc in their natural places.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No