Events and Event Flows
An event is an activity made in connection with a contact company or person, for example, the dispatch of a letter, a phone call, or a personal meeting.
Events are used for registering any type of contact to contact companies and persons, for example, in connection with sales, marketing, support, and so on. Scheduled events, as well as events which have already been completed, can be registered with information characterizing the event, including the name of the employee who is responsible for carrying out the event. It is also possible to describe the event in an unlimited number of text lines.
Events can be assigned to event flows. An event flow is simply an entity (not to be confused with the Entity dimension) binding together a number of related events. For instance, you may have a number of events resulting from a given customer contact, for example, initial call, shipping sales material, personal meeting, and so on. By binding together all these events relating to the same case and the same customer, you get an overview and history of the events that have taken place in that context. Event flows offer summaries and statistics over, for example, total time spent on events in the event flow, the time at which the latest event took place, and date and time of next expected event.
Each event flow can be assigned a so-called event plan to allow automatic creation of events in the flow, based on the outcome of existing events. For more information on event plans, see the section Event Plans later in this introduction.