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Here are some quick tips for using activities, history, and follow-up properly in ACT!  to ensure you don’t miss a beat when managing your tasks and taking care of your customers.

Activities

Activities are items that you schedule in advance that show up in a few places: on your Task List, your calendar, and on the record for the contact that you’ve scheduled an activity with.  To schedule an activity, first look up the contact that you want to schedule with, then choose the “Schedule” menu and choose the type of activity that you want to schedule or use the toolbar icons.

Pretty straight forward, right?  If you’re an ACT! user you’re likely already using activities.  But – are you clearing your activities and creating history records?

History

History items are the details of e-mails sent, meetings held, calls completed and other interactions between you and your staff and your contacts.

To create a history record when you’ve completed an activity, simply right-click the activity and choose “Clear Activity…” and you’ll get a window that allows you to fill in the results of the activity.  It’s important that you fill in the details so that later, when you or other ACT! users need a reminder, the information is there.

If you want to record history, but didn’t schedule an activity first – for example: the phone rings and a customer calls, you skip the activity creation and just record a history.  You’ll find this option on the Contact menu as well as on the History tab in the contact detail view.  Again, make sure you fill out the details otherwise this information would not be useful.

Follow-up

More often than not, when you’ve finished one thing and are clearing the activity, you’ll want to schedule the next thing to be done.  E.g. you clear a meeting but now need to schedule a call to follow up.  The “Follow-up” button will help you do this and saves time by pre-filling the contact and regarding line for you from the previous activity.