Use Profile Questionnaires to Classify Business Contacts

Article
05/24/2022

You can rate a prospect so you can identify the ideal prospects to focus your sales campaign on. You can set up profile questionnaires that you want to use when entering information about your contacts' profiles. Within each questionnaire, you can set up the different questions you intend to ask your contacts. This way, you can group contacts so that your campaigns are more likely to target the right people based on the criteria that you define with the questionnaires.

With the right questionnaires, you can rate your prospects and group them into categories. You can use existing questions and answers and combine them with new questions and answers to form the basis of your rating. Each answer in the rating is given a point value and, depending on the range you set up for the categories (From Value and To Value), the rating system will group your contacts in the categories you have defined. For example, ABC customers, High/Low loyalty vendors, or Platinum/Gold/Silver prospects.

You can also run the questionnaire to answer some of the questions based on contact, customer, or vendor data automatically.

To add a profile questionnaire

Choose the icon, enter Questionnaire Setup, and then choose the related link.
Choose the New Action.
Fill in the fields as necessary. Hover over a field to read a short description.

To add questions to a profile questionnaire

Choose the relevant profile questionnaire, and then choose the Edit Questionnaire Setup action.
On the first empty line, in the Type field, choose Question and type your question in the Description field. Fill in the other fields on this line.

Optionally, add details to the question.
1. Choose the line with the question, and then, choose the Line menu, and then choose Question Details.
2. On the Classification FastTab in the Profile Question Details page, select the Auto Contact Classification field.
3. In the Contact Class. Field field, select the Rating option.
4. Fill in the Min. % Questions Answered field. The default is 0.
  
  This specifies the number of questions in percentage that must be answered for this rating to be calculated.
5. On the Actions tab, in the Page group, choose Answer Points. Enter the points you want to give each answer listed in the Answer Points page.
  
  If you want to get an overview of the points you have given each answer, choose the Answer Points action.
6. To run an update, return to the Profile Questionnaire Setup page. On the Actions menu, in the Functions group, choose Update Classification.
In the Profile Questionnaire Setup page, the number of contacts that meets this criteria is displayed in the No. of Contacts field, as well as on the Contact Card of each contact.
On the next empty line, in the Type field, choose Answer and type your answer in the Description field.
In the Priority field, select the priority. In the From Value and To Value fields, define a point range. Contacts that receive points within the defined range will get the answer.

Repeat these steps to enter all the questions and answers within the profile questionnaire.

After you have created a questionnaire, you can use it to rate and classify your contacts. You can also set up questions that are rated automatically based on information in the contact card.

Note

If you enter a question that is automatically answered, choose Line, and then choose Question Details, to enter the criteria to automatically answer the question.

Apply questionnaires to contacts

You can apply your questionnaires to contacts manually. Just open the relevant contact card, and then choose the Profile action. Then, once you have applied the questionnaires that you want to apply, you can start using the categories in your campaigns.

The Automatic Classification of Contacts

You can automatically classify your contacts according to customer, vendor, and contact information, by setting up automatically answered profile questions on the Profile Questionnaire Setup page.

Note

Only contacts that are recorded as customers can be assigned a classification based on customer data and only contacts that are recorded as vendors can be assigned a classification based on vendor data. The automatic classification is not updated automatically. Consequently, you may want to update the profile questionnaires, after you have updated the customer, vendor or contact data they are based on.

After you have set up automatically answered profile questions, if you assign the profile questionnaire containing these questions to a contact, Business Central will automatically assign the right answers for the contact.

Example

You can classify your contacts according to how much they bought from you:

Answer	Applies to
A	contacts who bought for 500,000 LCY or more
B	contacts who bought for 100,000 up to 499,999 LCY
C	contacts who bought for 99,999 LCY or less

To do this, fill on the Profile Questionnaire Setup page as follows:

Type	Description	Automatic Classification	From Value	To Value
Question	ABC Classification	Click to insert a check mark
Answer	A		500,000
Answer	B		100,000	499,999
Answer	C			99,999

Then fill on the Profile Question Details page as follows:

Field	Value
Customer Classification Field	Sales (LCY)
Classification Method	Defined Value

When you assign the profile questionnaire containing this question to a contact, application automatically enters the relevant answer for this contact on the profile lines of the contact card.

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