Contacts Business Features

Create and manage contacts

Contact is the central process of the software, representing the customer of the business. Contacts can be created in 3 ways:

• Created as part of an import and using the back office API

• Created via UI backend

• Imported via Import Data utility in the back-end

• Self Service Registration

Contact identity

• Self Service sign up identity and authentication

  • email & OTP

  • Phone & OTP

  • email & password

  • Facebook

  • Google

  • OpenID Connect

• The ability to set up contact authentication for all or specific app types

• The ability for an existing contact to sign up by verifying their existing data

Marketing Authorisation settings

Through these settings, Contacts have the ability to specify whether they want to receive marketing-related material via email or SMS from the business.

These settings can be changed at any time from the contacts (opt-in/out).

The communication channels that the Contact can opt in/out of are:

• The contact mobile app/portal (self-service API)

• The backend system - manually changed by a system user

• Links in a communication sent to the Contact

Note that the marketing communication settings can be overridden by the business for important communications through the configuration of a communication plan and are also ignored for mandatory system communications, such as a verification communication sent during the Contact registration process.

Privacy Management and GDPR

CRM.COM complies with GDPR through the following processes

• Contact Consent

• KYC Profiles

• Anonymised Contacts

• Deleting Contacts

CIM

A Customer Identification Medium is an attribute which uniquely identifies a contact during its transactions between the CRM.COM Platform and other external systems.

It is important to point out that CIM is not an authentication service (authentication assumed established).

A very common use of CIMs is when a purchase event is submitted to CRM.COM from an external POS, where CIM is used to identify the Contact who made the purchase.

CIMs can include:

• Card ( bank cards in hashed format)

• Phone

• Email

• Gift Pass (gift passes redeemed by the Contact)

• Loyalty Identifier

Contact Registry

This is a repository that holds the personal details of all Contacts registered in the CRM.COM Platform.

A contact registry is set up by the service owner, and its purpose is to maintain a registry of contacts that can be shared with the businesses that opt-in to use the contact registry. The contact registry maintains contact details like first name, middle name, last name, email, phone, and CIMs.

If a business opts into a contact registry, it will use the contacts of the registry and the common details of these contacts. Contacts can only be created/updated by the service owner.

Businesses are able to create and maintain additional personal information for each Contact, such as date of birth, name day and address.

Name-day management

Name days are usually used in reward offer configurations to award contacts on their special day.

A predefined list of Christian Orthodox name days can be imported into the CRM.COM Platform for this purpose.

A Contact's name day can be set:

• By the Contact using a consumer mobile app/portal (self-service API)

• By a user through the CRM.COM backend system

KYC profiles verification and engagement

roadmap

• Know-Your-Customer (or KYC): is the process through which a company identifies and verifies the real identity of its customers by collecting reliable and valid contact details and documents. KYC process/flow allows the company to assign its customers with a KYC Profile based on which the company monitors and applies restrictions on a customer's tasks and transactions throughout CRM.COM.

• Verification: Indicate whether a Contact's identity has been verified by the system or not. Verification is performed during the registration process (e.g. activation link, OTP sent to the Contact). Unverified contacts have no restrictions to the type of actions which can be performed via the backend system. However, for front-end applications, it's possible to force Contact to verify their email (using the email/password registration option) prior to using a front-end system.

• Engagement: When Contacts are first created, they automatically assume a state of Never Engaged. They become Engaged only if a business transaction (financial, reward) takes place for that Contact.

Activity feed

The Activity Feed tab provides a log of all business events performed for the Contact (e.g. communications, financial actions), which may have various statuses (e.g., draft) in ascending chronological order.

By using the filter option, the user can preview activities of a specific type or select the link to see the actual transaction.

Contact Statement

View and send either individually via email (on request) or through a Communication Plan. A statement for various periods can be sent and includes both Account and CRM.COM Wallet transactions, opening and running balance for both of them.

Tags

Tags provide a way of labelling Contacts with one or more custom terms so that they can be categorised.

Tags can be used as a filtering option on summary screens to return only the required records.

Contact Communities

Contact Communities are created by Contacts for collaboration purposes. A contact can be a member of multiple communities and can perform actions for the community through front-end systems by switching between community group profiles.

Adding Contacts: can be performed by back-end users (mostly in B2B flows) but mainly by front-end flows where consumers sets up their own Community(ies).

• Select Contact

  • from existing contacts or

  • create a new

• Relation of the Contact with the Community. Relations are pre-defined by the business.

• Group name provides the ability to the community owner to give unique names to their group of members like My family or My friends

• Note that when a contact invites members to join the community, then each member has to specifically accept or reject the invitation. Only members who accepted their invitation can benefit from the Community’s advantages.

There are three different options for the owner of the Community to set up for its members. It’s important to note that the creator of the Community is also the owner and the person responsible for managing it.

• Access Level : Community owner gives permissions to the Community’s members to act on behalf of the community in various processes of a front-end application

  • Full access: No restrictions apply (i.e. Admin user)

    • For Person type communities, the Admin user is the community owner

    • For Company type communities, a backend user must add a contact and assign them full permissions. This Contact can then, in turn, add and manage other contacts (e.g. employees, managers etc.) to the company's community

  • Restricted access: Restrictions apply to the Permissions set for the Contact

    • Permissions are:

      • Contact management: ability to update the community's contacts (& contact details)

      • Service Request management: the ability to create and manage service requests

      • Order management: the ability to create & manage orders

• CRM.COM Wallet Sharing: The owner of the community funds a member’s purchase by sharing their CRM.COM Wallet’s money

  • The owner specifies an amount of money to funds its member’s purchase during a calendar month and optionally based on a commerce pool

  • On each purchase, the member asks from the owner of the Community for funds and if conditions applied, then money is transferred from the owner’s CRM.COM Wallet to the member’s CRM.COM Wallet and that amount of money can be used to pay off the member’s purchase.

• Usage Allowance: The owner of the community subscribes to a termed service that provides the ability to consume usage. The owner can additionally share this usage allowance with the community’s members

  • The owner of the community specifies cash and/or usage allowance for all or a sub-set of usage/non-traceable physical goods for each one of its members (which has to be a subset of the service’s usage allowance)

  • A member with community usage allowance can consume usage without being a subscriber to a termed service. The member consumes usage according to the allowance settings and the owner of the community will be responsible for paying off the subscription’s billing at the end of each billing cycle.

Terminate and anonymise

In compliance with GDPR, anonymising a Contact removes all identifying particulars and details of a Contact so that they are no longer distinguishable within the system without actually removing the Contact and its related transactions.

Anonymisation of Contact can happen due to their inactivity or withdrawal of their consent.

Termination of a contact permanently deletes a Contact and all its related transactions from the system.

Both Anonymisation and Terminations are subject to specific rules.

Segment customers into multiple micro-personas

Segmentation is a powerful tool to a business since it segments contacts based on who they are and what actions they did or did not do during a period of time.

Segmentation is based collections kept in internal MongoDB that show who the contact is and what events they do (or don’t) performed:

• Contact Profiles that gathers basic contacts information, account and subscriptions information and

• Events that includes all of the events performed by the contacts such as Awards, Spends, Orders and various subscription events.

Each segment can include one or more groups of conditions providing thus the ability to set up complex business conditions on how the segment will be formed.

Segmentation features:

• Preview a segment to see the results, i.e. the list of contacts meeting the segment's conditions.  

• Export a segment’s contacts and get the exported file via email.

• Refresh the segment either on demand or on a regular basis

• Automatically add or remove a contact from a Segment once a contact is created or updated and the Segment is included in a Reward Offer or Promotion.

Custom Fields

If you require additional information not supported by CRM.COM, you can create custom fields of various formats to meet your specific needs.

Custom Forms

Configure your own custom data screen for Contacts.

Automations

Automations for Contacts can be created based on the following trigger events:

• Events

  • Register Contact

  • Update Contact

  • Prior to Contact Creation

  • Prior to Contact Update

  • Expand Contact Community

  • Accept Invitation to Join a Community

  • Reject Invitation to Join a Community

  • Award Contact

Available actions depending on the selected event:

• Actions

  • CRM.COM Communications

  • CRM.COM Webhooks

  • CRM.COM Activity Scheduling

Analytics

• Dashboards

  • View summarised Contact numbers from the following dashboards:

    • Home

    • CRM Overview

• Reports

  • Generate or schedule the Contact’s report to run regularly according to selected criteria.

    • Contacts Summary - View a list of your Contacts with summarised financial information