Customers

Use This Guide For

Use Customer when you need to answer one of these questions:

The Customer area is the internal relationship and revenue workspace. The public Storefront receives interest; Customer turns that interest into owned follow-up and a traceable commercial lifecycle.

For a Pet Rescue or Animal Shelter, the same records and permissions are presented around the relationships the organization actually manages. The section is titled Adoption & community and its primary views are People & partners, Adoption enquiries, and Community outreach. Commercial pipeline, quote, order, and sales-funnel tabs are hidden because they are not part of the rescue’s normal operating model. Add person or partner still creates the canonical relationship record; it does not create a second kind of customer database. The shared rail, breadcrumbs, and Relationship Manager use the same rescue-facing language, so opening the coworker panel does not bring the suppressed commercial concepts back into view. The daily attention band is Adoption follow-up and describes people and community relationships rather than customers or a CRM.

The Customer Lifecycle

flowchart LR
  Signal["Storefront signal or manual lead"] --> Engage["Engagement"]
  Engage -->|"qualify"| Opp["Opportunity"]
  Opp --> Qual["Qualification"]
  Qual --> Disc["Discovery"]
  Disc --> Prop["Proposal"]
  Prop --> Neg["Negotiation"]
  Neg -->|"draft and send"| Quote["Quote"]
  Quote -->|"customer or operator accepts"| Order["Sales order"]
  Order --> Invoice["Invoice"]
  Order -.-> Contract["Optional support contract"]

Text alternative: A storefront signal or manual lead becomes an engagement. Qualifying an engagement creates an opportunity, which moves through qualification, discovery, proposal, and negotiation. A sent quote can be accepted, creating a sales order and invoice. An accepted order can later become a support contract when that lifecycle applies.

The records are related, but they are not interchangeable. An account describes the relationship; a contact identifies a person; an engagement records an inbound or outbound interaction; an opportunity represents qualified commercial work; a quote states an offer; and a sales order records an accepted commitment.

Find the Right View

The section navigation is permission-aware:

If you do not have the required Customer or Marketing capability, DPF hides the route rather than exposing a read-only version.

Pet Rescue and Animal Shelter organizations see the bounded relationship views described above. Other archetypes continue to see the full commercial navigation in this section.

Start the Day With Attention, Not the Database

  1. Open Customer and read the owner-first summary before expanding CRM detail. Pending reservations, orders, new inquiries, unworked engagements, overdue invoices, and approaching renewals appear as concrete follow-up work.
  2. Open the recommended action that represents real customer impact.
  3. In full navigation mode, expand All CRM detail to review revenue posture, duplicates, account attention signals, and the professional data grid.
  4. Open an account whose card says it needs attention. The signal explains why: an unworked engagement, stale activity, a dormant or aging opportunity, or a sent/expired quote that needs a decision.
  5. Record the next action in the owning record. Do not clear a warning by moving a stage without the corresponding customer evidence.

Simple navigation intentionally emphasizes today’s work. Full navigation exposes the wider CRM structure. A saved grid view still opens the detailed surface directly.

When you switch Accounts or Pipeline from List to Grid or Board, the domain’s working scope follows you. Accounts show current customers rather than superseded merge tombstones; Pipeline shows open qualification-through- negotiation work. Use All customers or All opportunities beside the view controls to include history. This scope is separate from personal saved grid sorting, grouping, and column choices, and remains in the URL.

Capture and Qualify a Lead

Manual lead

  1. Open Engagements and choose New lead.
  2. Enter first name, email, and company; add the source or useful context in Note.
  3. Create the lead. DPF creates or reuses the company account, creates the contact identity, and opens a new engagement together.
  4. After the first response, choose Mark contacted.
  5. Choose Qualify → opportunity only when an account is linked and the interaction represents real potential work. Choose Disqualify when it should leave the active follow-up queue.

Storefront or connected signal

The acquisition-signal router keeps observed Storefront and connection evidence separate from CRM commitments. Review the source and route a signal into an engagement when a person should own follow-up. The source reference remains visible as evidence on the engagement.

A signal is not automatically a sales opportunity. Qualification is the operator’s explicit boundary between observed interest and forecast work.

Work an Opportunity

The Pipeline page groups open work into Qualification, Discovery, Proposal, and Negotiation. Each card shows value, probability, stage age, and whether the next step is absent or overdue.

  1. Select an opportunity to open the stage inspector.
  2. Confirm the source engagement, account/contact, expected value, expected close, and recent activity.
  3. Read the stage exit criteria before changing the stage.
  4. Set a concrete next activity date. A stage change without a next action can make the board look healthy while the deal is still unattended.
  5. Use Ask Customer Advisor when you need help interpreting the evidence or preparing the next step; the operator remains responsible for the stage.

DPF flags dormant work and “rotting” stages based on stage age. Treat those flags as review prompts, not automatic proof that a deal is lost. Close an opportunity won or lost only when the customer outcome is known.

Quote, Accept, and Fulfil

  1. Open the opportunity and choose Draft quote.
  2. Confirm the line description, quantity, unit price, currency, and the automatically proposed 30-day validity window.
  3. Open the quote detail and review totals, discount, tax, terms, notes, and the related opportunity.
  4. Choose Mark as sent when the quote has actually left the business. A sent quote exposes a customer acceptance link when an acceptance token exists.
  5. Use Accept quote → create order only with acceptance evidence. Acceptance deterministically creates the sales order and generates the invoice; it is not a cosmetic status change.
  6. Confirm the linked order on the quote and then review Orders and the invoice in Finance.

An operator can record acceptance when handling an offline confirmation, while a customer can accept through the public quote link. In either case, preserve who accepted, when, and through which channel in the activity or quote evidence.

Maintain the Account Record

Account detail is the relationship history, not just a contact card. It includes:

Merge duplicate accounts from the account page only after comparing contacts, history, and the intended surviving record. A merged account is retained as a superseded tombstone and excluded from normal lists; Unmerge is available when the merge itself was wrong.

Correct or Retire an Account

You can keep the record truthful from the account page itself, without touching the database:

Every one of these actions is recorded on the account timeline, so a correction is auditable rather than silent.

Evidence and Recovery Checklist

Before advancing a customer record, confirm:

If the pipeline looks wrong, work backward through the chain: order → quote → opportunity → engagement → source signal. Correct the earliest inaccurate record and then reconcile downstream statuses. Do not create replacement records merely to make a dashboard count look right.

Market Intelligence — research a prospect on request

The Market Research Analyst coworker (on the Opportunities page, and summonable from anywhere) researches a prospect or market segment on request: the software tools they likely use, what those tools cost, and which of them the platform could replace. It reads your CRM opportunities and accounts (read-only) to ground the brief, researches the public web, and returns a cited brief tied to a specific opportunity.

Ask it things like “research the likely software stack for this prospect and what we can replace,” or “size the replaceable spend for my strongest opportunity.” It never presents an unsourced number as fact — every figure is cited to a source it retrieved, or clearly labelled as an estimate range. Use it to size the core pitch (how many tools the platform consolidates) before a sales conversation.

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