Phone message module

[moff40]

Is there a module for taking incoming phone messages? What I'd like to do is have one employee be able to take and document an incoming phone message, and then send it to the appropriate person - sort of an electronic equivalent of the little pink pad... Then ideally, those messages could be displayed in a dashlet on the intended user's home page. This kind of thing has been available in Groupwise for a long time, allowing one user to create a new phone message and send it to another user.

[Angel]

Sugar doesn't have anything exactly like this, but you could use the Calls module to mimic the behavior to an extent.

[salesagility]

Angel's suggestion is good. When an call is received and a phone message is required, simply:

Navigate to the appropriate record on sugarcrm (ideally the person that made the call to your organisation)

Click on Schedule Call

Enter the Call details

Set the status to "Held"

Assign to the person who needs to deal with it.

Then the call is recorded in the system against that customer, the person dealing with the call gets an email to say a new call has been assigned ... and each user can build a new dashlet that scans for calls status held in date order

[moff40]

I like that idea, and I think I will use it as the primary phone message method. But it works best when the call is from an existing customer, and not so well if the call is from someone not in the database, or a non-customer, like a family member.

What I did is create a very simple "basic" module called "phone message", renamed a couple of fields (Name becomes "customer name", Description becomes "message"), set up the forms to accept input for "taken by", "date\time taken", "assign to", "caller name", "caller number", and "message". I put it in the Collaboration tab.

In a quick test, it appears to do what I needed, but I can see how the user's home page dashlet might become crowded over time with old phone messages.

This is a brand new Sugar implementation, so none of the customers are in the system yet, either. I have a long road ahead I think, unless I can export the customer data from GBO (we're travel agency, and GBO is the accounting system)...