Hello there, I'm not really sure which area to post this question so I'm starting here. I'm wondering how people are currently using phones, and to see if you all can help me think through the roadblocks we're facing.
I read through a thread on the Roadmap forum (http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Community/forums/t/1865.aspx?PageIndex=1) in which a lot of people brought up the same issues we're having, but it's pretty old so I thought I'd put the questions out there again.
What we currently have is a not-too-well-thought-out mix of using Phones 1,2,3 and the secondary categories that aren't tied to addresses to keep constituent phone numbers. I'll lay out the reasons we're evaluating and trying to change our strategy... as well as why we can't really seem to all agree on a solution.
First, one challenge with Phones 1, 2, and 3 are that they're tied to addresses but are often not all related to addresses at all. From historical data input, many phone 1 numbers are home landlines and many phone 2 numbers are businesses, but most of the more recently input data has phone 1 primarily a cell, and if we're talking about a household often all three of these are cells. They're also problematic because if someone forgets to copy a phone number when a new address is given, suddenly that constituent appears to have no phone and won't be included on lists for telefunding or telemarketing, for example.
Second, thinking about new input and moving forward: Phones 1, 2, and 3 are less specific in terms of what type of number you're actually calling, and if we just rename those fields as home, business, or cell, we aren't being accurate because the existing numbers in those fields are really a mystery. But, Phones 1/2/3 are nice because they give us the ability to sort of 'rank' the numbers - Phone 1 is probably the best number for our telefunding team to call first, for example. The other phone types that aren't connected to addresses are probably more accurate historically, and more specific for moving forward - we have lots of fields here - cell, fax, business, etc, and there can be multiple entries of each type. But, they don't allow us to rank. If there are two cell phones, for instance, how do we know which one to try first?
So, to 'improve' our current, sort of haphazard internal best practice: One suggestion has been to move away completely from using Phones 1,2,3 and only use the secondary categories, but again - you can't rank the 'best' number then. Another suggestion was to primarily use the secondary categories, but duplicate the 'best' numbers in Phones 1,2,3. I'm skeptical of this as I hate the idea of adding duplicate data, and since we currently use contact point purposes to guide our funding and marketing efforts, this creates a lot of potential error if the CPPs aren't correctly duplicated on the mirror entry of the same number. Another suggestion was to rename Phones 1,2,3 back to home, business, cell, but again, this is probably inaccurate for a lot of our existing data and I think would be even more confusing than what we already have.
If anyone out there is using the phone fields in a way that you think speaks to these challenges I would love to know your internal 'best practice.' Thanks for reading this long explanation and for any advice you might have!
Allison