Client contact roles are a way for you to assign tasks to different client contacts according to what they do.
Many clients will have only one contact, which is fine if that contact can deal with everything you give them. But some clients might have more than one point of contact... each with specific roles. For example, you may find that your clients have a primary contact for most interactions with you, but also have a person who deals just with payroll, say.
We can use the email task as an example; Senta will usually send emails or assign tasks to the client's primary contact, that is, the first contact listed on the client's Contacts tab. But Senta can also send or assign them to someone more appropriate, by using contact roles.
You define a number of roles that the client's contact might have: payroll, management accounts, billing, etc. and then tell Senta which emails or tasks should go to which types of client contact.
Once you've done that, it's just a question of making sure that your contacts have the correct roles ticked. Senta will take of everything else: sending emails and assigning tasks to the right people at the right time.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Setting up roles
The are two steps to setting up roles on your Senta workspace. The first is to add roles to your Contact details form. This will give you the actual roles to tick for your contacts.
Then, you'll edit Jobs to make use of the roles. Once you've added the roles, you can now send emails to contacts with a particular role.
Step 1: Setting up the Contact details form
Go to Settings > Forms > Contact details to access the Contact details form. We recommend adding a Roles tab that will hold the various role tick boxes. Once you've done that, it's a simple matter of adding a new field for each role you want.
Click Add field to add the role.
For each field, you'll need to add a Field description (e.g. Payroll contact) and to set the Field type to "Client role". You might like to add a tooltip (e.g. "Tick if this contact deals with payroll").
You can add as many roles as you like.
Click Save when you're done, to save your form
Step 2: Using the roles in Jobs
Go to Settings > Jobs and choose the Job in question. For example, suppose you've set up a "Payroll contact" role and now want to send an email to the payroll contacts. Click on the "Payroll" Job.
Go to the Tasks tab to see all the Tasks that are in this Job.
In our standard Jobs, the first Task is to send an email to the client asking about payroll changes. Click the Task to expand it and select the Email tab.
The email recipient is normally set to "Client primary contact". Click on this drop down and instead choose your new role: "Client Payroll contact".
Now you can click Save. If you have existing payroll Jobs, Senta will ask you if you wish to update them. From now on, that email will go not to the primary contact, but to the payroll contact.
Similarly, if you want to assign a fill in a form task according to client contact role, all you need to do is locate the task in the job template, then select the assignee from the "Assign task to" drop down.
Using roles day-to-day
All you need to do is make sure that individuals have the correct roles ticked on the "Contacts" tab. You will need to edit the client to update the contacts.
If multiple contacts within the client record have been selected as a "Payroll contact", the primary contact will be the main recipient and the other contacts will be CC'd into the email.
If a contact with a required role isn't available, Senta will send the email to the primary contact regardless of whether the contact role has been selected.
Referencing in placeholders
If you have provided a field reference for your created role, you can use this within a placeholder. We will use the example of the Payroll role from above which has the field reference payrollrole.
To use this in a placeholder, I will use the client prefix, followed by the client contact role field reference (payrollrole), followed by the field reference from a field from the Contact details form. Here are some examples:
{client.payrollrole.firstname}
{client.payrollrole.utr}
{client.payrollrole.mobile}