We would like to “tag” CRM Contacts when adding an activity on a CRM Account. We can currently tag internal team members with an @, which notifies them. We’d like to select Contacts as well in the activity.
As an example, ideally we’d create an activity labeled “Call Summary” on the Account CompanyABC. In the activity we’d like to select Eric Brown and Sarah Thomas, both from CompanyABC, as on the call. Then the Call Summary would show up on Eric Brown’s Activities and Sarah Thomas’ Activities. I’d include an automation that when an activity is added, the Last Contacted column is populated with today’s date, so we can see that Eric Brown and Sarah Thomas were last contacted today.
As a note, we do not want Eric Brown and Sarah Thomas to receive email notifications, as this would merely be an internal note in our CRM. Those two would be external users who don’t have Monday.com accounts through us.
We used Salesforce as our CRM previously and were able to do this. It helps us keep track of last touches and know who was involved in what activities dynamically.
But this would already be handled via relationships.
When you add an activity on the account level - and the account is associated with the respective contacts, the activity should show up automatically in the contacts timeline.
Hi Shayan, that is a good point. what we’ve found is that it shows up on every Contact associated with that account. So if we had five contacts associated with CompanyABC, it would show as an activity with each of them, but it was only two contacts were involved.
That is misleading for the last communicated date for the contact. For larger clients, whom we’re engaging with different contacts at different points about different issues, the Activities tab for each of those Contacts gets unwieldly as it shows all communication with the client, not filtered to be just the contact itself.
Ah I see, i. that case wouldn’t it make sense to add the activity on the contact level (for both contacts respectively)?
This way, people on the account level could see the activity (and filter by contacts) and the individual last contacted date would also update correctly.
Although I agree it might be a bit more tedious. But hey you can’t have everything.
Wondering about your use case though where you are in contact with 2 contacts at the same time.
Alternatively you can also build a (probably rather complicated ) automation to create the activity for both contacts respectively. What comes to mind would be a long Text column and an „add call summary“ button. Then you can create an automation that creates the activity for the contact and fills it with the input from the long text column.
Then a sales person would filter the contacts board for that particular company. Select the two contacts that were involved, fill the call summary into the long text columns for both contacts and click the create call summary button for both.
To be honest with you though, I also agree that the current emails and activities is a good base but needs some major overhauls.
The way it currently works is really rather confusing in my opinion.
I believe it should be more transparent in which item an activity was added and one should be able to filter by every item, not just connected one. Hope the Monday Team puts some more work into it
The Update last email activity trigger would not update the latest activity on the contact level when an activity on the account level is created. (I hope the Monday team keeps it this way as this opens up use cases for other things like Ticketing).
Last activity date is only updated when the activity is added to the item directly
Hi Shayan, thanks for thinking through this and coming up with options that work in the current ecosystem. Yes, I have directed my team to add these activities on the contact level, if they really want just the contacts involved to display the activity, or at the account level if it’s wide enough for all contacts associated. They understand that Monday CRM isn’t Salesforce, at least not yet!, and that they will need to adjust to how Monday is set up currently. It is more roundabout to add it to each of the contact’s activity pages, so we’ll see how much they end up doing that. I hadn’t thought about the automation you discussed. It’s certainly a possibility. I can see how that would work and will run it by our team to see if that’s preferred to the current method.
I really do like Emails & Activities. With some additional enhancements, it could be a very powerful that feature. This would be a suggestion I have for future Monday.com CRM development.
Oh, that is very good to note about the Last Update only on the item it was created on, even if the activity will show in connected items. I hadn’t tested this yet, as we were still seeking clarification from support if there was any way to better handle this. Thanks for testing that out and letting us know. That does change the calculus a bit for how we’ll currently handle things.
Something else came to mind when thinking about your case. Not sure if it helps but here anyway:
You can use the fact that the last activity update doesn’t update to your advantage:
Create another connect Boards column on the account level: Called „Contacts current Activity“. With a two-way connection to the contacts board.
Create a status column on the Account Board that’s called „Activity Trigger“ the status column can have two states: „active/inactive“ you can hide this column it will only be used for automations.
Create the last activity update date column on the accounts board as well.
Then create an automation that will change the Activity Trigger to active once the Last Account Activity column changes. And then immediately sets it to inactive again.
On the Contacts Board Mirror the Activity Trigger from the newly created connect Boards column.
Create a mirror automation(this is only possible with pre made automations) that changes a status column on the contacts board (you can create one if you don’t have a contact status column) when the Mirrored Activity Trigger column changes.
Lastly create a custom automation on the contacts Board that sets last contact updated column to today when the status column of the contact changes.
This will allow your sales people to go into the accounts board: Select the contacts they were involved with in the newly created connect boards column. Then create a single Call summary in the account.
After that only the two selected contacts will be updated in their status and last activity.
Further you can also create an automation that clears the connect Boards column once an activity was created to not confuse sales people and to avoid incorrect updates to occur.