Category Archives: Salesforce

portatour® meets geomarketing: map with individual symbols and colors

True to the proverb: “a picture is worth a thousand words”, we have extended portatour® by two features for improved visualization of customers on the map.

Individual customer symbols

To better identify customers on the map, you assign meaningful symbols to your clients. This way you see at a glance, for example, the revenue potential of the customer or the industry.

Landkarte mit Kundensymbolen

To set the symbol, open the customer, click on the pencil above the address, and then click the new menu item “Symbol”. A text box will appear allowing you to enter any 1-2 characters. Click “Show symbol table…” for a choice of different symbols.

Edit Customer Symbol

Tip: Enable the “Selection Mode” to select multiple customers. This option can be found below the customer list. Then click “Edit Selected” to set the same symbol for multiple customers.

Consequently, the client symbol appears not only on the map, but at all places in portatour® where the customer name is shown, for example in the schedule, in the customer list or in the portatour® report.

Technical background information: portatour® uses the Unicode character standard to display and store symbols. Unicode is also used for the “smileys” appearring at many places in the internet. The appearance of the symbols varies depending on the device, operating system, installed fonts and browsers.

Note for Outlook and Salesforce-users: Setting the symbol is also possible in Outlook and Salesforce. Go to the customer call settings of a customer, you find the symbol at the bottom.

Color of a customer on the map

So far there was only one criterion for the coloring of the customers on the map: the current call urgency shown in the traffic-light colors red/yellow/green.

Now it becomes colorful: in the map view, click on option-symbol (“cogwheel”) and you can set the coloring yourself. Choose from both the built-in portatour® fields – call interval, call duration, etc. – as well as from custom fields that you can create yourself. For example, revenue or industry can be used.

portatour® automatically takes care of grouping and coloring on basis of the defined criterion. On the bottom-right of the map you will find the map legend icon. Click it to see the color mapping.

Map with Turnover

The call urgency of a customer is still visible: the lower part of the customer-marker on the map shows – as always – the urgency via a red / yellow / green color indicator.

 

We wish you a productive time using these new features and are looking forward to
your feedback, which you can send us to feedback@portatour.com .

P.S.: Users of portatour® for Outlook, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Connector must first install the latest version of portatour® to access the new functionality. Click the download-link or contact your administrator.

New Maps “Summer 2014”

We have just updated the map data for Australia and Europe.

Changes in the road network may affect driving times between customers, so we recalculated them for you in portatour®. Some users might notice the change, when updating the schedule for the next time.

Two new settings for fine-tuning

We added two new parameters to portatour® that help you fine-tune the generated routes to your specific needs even better:

Adherence to business hours for the entire duration of the call

So far portatour® cared that the start of the customer call is within the business hours of the customer – i.e. you start the call just in time before they close. portatour® has been assuming your call can last beyond business hours.

This can be problematic if your visits have a long duration. Then, there is a high risk that your visit stretches far beyond the business hours.

With the new setting “Adherence to business hours” in Options > Call Parameters > Scheduling Parameters you can define how portatour® should treat the business hours. Choose from the previous behavior (only the “Start of call” has to be within business hours) or the new behavior: the “Entire call” has to be within the business hours.

Note that choosing “Entire call” will leave less time for customer calls and therefore fewer calls will be scheduled. Especially lunch breaks of customers reduce the available time for calls significantly.

Preferred adherence to the call interval for important customers

As a user of portatour® you know that you can control how often a customer should be scheduled for a call by changing the call interval. For example, a customer with an interval of 30 days will be scheduled to be visited regularly once a month.

This works well if your territory is “properly sized” – i.e. it is realistic to visit all your customers within the desired call interval under consideration of your working time and travel time.

In case your area is oversized – that is, you have too many customers or too short call intervals – then it will be not possible to comply with the configured call intervals of the customers. The calls will take place late. However, portatour® adheres to the relations, i.e. a 30-day customer will still be visited twice as often as a 60-day customer, just not every 30 days, but later.

With the new setting “Interval adherence” in the Scheduling parameters of a customer you can switch important customers from “Normal” to “Preferred“. portatour® automatically takes care that for customers with a preferred interval adherence, exceeding the call interval is avoided – even if your territory is oversized. This is managed by portatour® by adding “internal reservations” for these customers once the call interval has been reached or exceeded.

Two important notes on this:

  • Use sparingly! Set the “preferred interval adherence” only for your most important customers where you can not tolerate delaying the call. As a rule of thumb, we recommend 20% of your periodically visited customers at maximum. If you prefer too many customers, the desired effect is lost because too many reservations can’t be included in the schedule. Additionally, the driving distance optimization suffers.
  • Make sure that your territory is properly sized. Request a portatour® report and evaluate it. In section “Structure of customers” under heading “Classification of my customers per call interval” you find the “Necessary calls per day to satisfy call interval”. If this value does not correspond to reality, adjust the number of customers or the call intervals.

p.s.: Users of portatour® for Outlook, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Connector must first install the latest version of portatour® to get the two new settings (click the links for the download area). If necessary, contact your administrator. 

New Maps 2014

We updated the map data for North America (USA, Canada, Mexico) on 26th May 2014 (today).

Changes in the road network may affect driving times between customers, so we recalculated them for you in portatour®. Some users might notice the change, when updating the schedule for the next time.

Synchronize recurring appointments between Anywhere and Outlook / Salesforce / Dynamics CRM

In December 2013, we introduced recurring appointments as new feature for portatour® Anywhere – see also our blog post.

Now – after nearly 6 months of tough and intense programming work – we can present you the complete synchronization of recurring appointments with source-systems such as Outlook, Salesforce, and Dynamics CRM. You can now edit recurring appointments both in Anywhere and in your source system and changes will be smoothly synchronized.

To use this feature, first install the latest version of portatour® in your source-system (your administrator can do that) and then trigger a synchronization with Anywhere.

The latest versions to download and install are here:

Two facts to know about synchronization:

  • The biggest challenge when implementing the synchronization was to identify the unique specialties that each source system employed and to rebuild those within portatour® Anywhere. To ensure a smooth synchronization, limitations on recurring appointments existing in the source systems also apply within portatour® Anywhere.
  • portatour® Anywhere supports the most common recurrence rules. In case you pick a recurrence rule in the source-system that portatour® doesn’t support, the appointments will be synchronized but you will not be able the recurrence rule within portatour® Anywhere.

We wish you a productive time using this new feature and are looking forward to
your feedback, which you can send us to feedback@portatour.com .

Welcome to portatour® for Salesforce (Beta)

We are proud to announce that portatour® – the personal sales-route planner – is now available for the Salesforce community.

We wish you a great time optimizing your sales routes!

Currently development is in a rapid pace and any feedback you have for us is greatly appreciated: feedback@portatour.com