Best way to notify users of an account that needs to be updated?

Question

I am using Microsoft CRM 4.0. I currently have many accounts that need to be updated by the sales person assigned to the account. What would be the best way to notify the user of the update? Also, It would be nice if there was also a way to notify me back that the task had been completed. I was thinking the best way would be through a workflow but It does not allow me to select multiple accounts at once to notify the user, of which ones need the update. I also have mobile access with CRM.

Answer 1

You're on the right track. You could use a combination of workflows to accomplish this. I don't know what exactly it is they need to update but you could create a bit flag called new_isrecordupdated and then create workflows that wait until the fields needing to be updated are changed. When they are you can set that flag to true. Then have another workflow sleep for X days and verify that the field is false, if so send out an email to the user.

If you need them to complete tasks, then the workflow will need to sit on the tasks if they're regarding an account. On a status change of completed, update the flag to false.

Again, I'm not sure what you're looking for them to update so I can't say with 100% certainty that this is what you need.

Answer 2

Depending on how many accounts you are talking about, you may want a scheduled console application to find all of the outstanding accounts that still require attention. It could then create a single email for each sales person each day with links to each of the accounts that still required attention.

You could also have a single daily report letting you know which accounts had been updated and which were still needed updating.

These could be done with a scheduled application or an SSRS Report.

In addition it would be helpful to add a view for your sales reps that showed them the complete list of accounts that they needed to update. You would also want a similar view sorted by the assigned owner.

This way you have notification, but not abusive notification if a lot of these are happening and you have a way for both you and your salesmen see anything outstanding with a simple glance at a view.

You would probably need to have a boolean to set an account as needing an update, and then you could use a plug-in to reset that flag whenever the owner updated it along with setting a last updated date. This would give you the fields to flag an account as needing to be updated and the date would allow you to see which accounts had been updated by their owners.