How to help non-technical people log “meetings offered”

Question

Dear Alteryx Community,

I need your help to develop a simple process where non-technical can log “meeting offered” with customer targets.

The situation: We track when we meet with around 100 customer targets. Today, we have a CRM system in place that provides a list of each date a meeting has occurred for each customer target (all have unique IDs) in a vertical data structure. We have a coordinator team that logs the meetings in the CRM system. This data is used in Alteryx to track progress towards customer interations goals.

The challenge: If there are customers on the list we are not meeting with it’s difficult to understand. Unfortunately, there is no “meeting offered” option in the CRM system. Therefore, we'd like to be able to keep track of which customers we've offered a meeting to and when (i.e. dates) in a simple manner. This will help us determine how many meetings have been offered for each target and determine if that is the reason we have not met with them.

Since our coordinator team already utilises a simple excel list of the 100 customer targets it would be nice if they could include each date they offered a target a meeting in such a sheet. The structure of the sheet is simple with: Customer rank, Customer ID, Customer Name.

Do any of you have good idea how to do this in a simple way that’s easy for the coordinator team and easy to handle in Alteryx afterwards?

Thanks a lot for your help,

David

davidlandsted · Answer

Hi @PanPP,

Thanks a lot for the reply. Unfortunately, it’s a somewhat manual process of offering meetings over e-mail and only adding them to CRM system if the meeting actually occurs. Hence, unfortuantely we cannot pull information on if a meeting is pulled from the calendar.

Basically, we are trying to log if we have for example offered “customer 29” a meeting and on 20 February 2022 and 10 November 2022. A simple, but somewhat messy solution would be to simply add columns for each date. If we took the example above it would be:

RankCustomer IDCustomer NameOffered date 1Offered date 2…29XX029Customer 2920 Feb 202210 Nov 2022

This could then be altered in Alteryx and joined with the dataset with actual meetings. However, I’m wondering if there is a better option to achieve the result.

/David

PanPP · Answer

Hi @davidlandsted

Depending on what information is logged when meeting with the customer, you can join the 2 data sources together based on the Customer's name in order to merge the meeting notes/which date you met with a customer/ duration, etc.

You can use a .ics file if that is an option. I would recommend checking out this community discussion to see if it is a possible solution.

An ICS file is just text so you can read it in, edit it, and write it out.

Hope this helps. If it does, please like the post.