A few days ago I got an e-mail asking for some help in Salesforce.com -

How to make a field as Read only in GUI. For ex: In Account Tab, i want to make a Phone Field as Read Only in GUI. when we click on Edit on an Account, in that I want to disable that textbox related to Phone field. How can i do this.

So, the assumption is somehow they are entering the phone number data in to SFDC by means of a data-load. They want users to view the phone number, but not edit it. This is actually fairly easy to do using Page Layouts and field level security. Just go to Setup - Customize - Contacts. Click on the field you want to control permissions for (in this case Phone) and then click on “View Field Accessibility”. On that page you can control Field Access by Role! You will of course need Salesforce.com Admin privileges to make this change.

I was on LinkedIn earlier today and looking up the profile of a former colleague, wanting to get back in touch with him. LinkedIn had placed a Google-driven Ad next to the profile listing. Check this screenshot:

Last week we released the latest version of 5Buckets. This last release was centered around one major feature - integrating with Vontoo.

Vontoo is a permission based voice messaging product. Their tagline is “Say It. Send It. Track It.” Essentially you can create audio clips and have Vontoo make phone calls to your list of opt-in subscribers. Sounds a little intrusive? Initially I thought so too. Phone calls after all have a little urgency to them. So receiving marketing messages on your phone is definitely annoying.

However, there are many situations where I want to get a phone call - school delays, weather alerts come to mind first. But beyond those reminder of a webinar I signed up for or a company wide communication by the CEO also lend themselves to phone calls. Vontoo has a customer in the music industry. The band has recorded messages and phone calls go out to fans about upcoming concerts, ticket sales & CD releases. Hmm, I certainly won’t mind a recorded message from Bono or Paul McCartney. :)

5Buckets is now integrated with Vontoo. It is another “output device” much like ExactTarget is an output device for email communications. The “input device” - the placeholder for phone numbers & email addresses - can be Salesforce.com or your own SQL Server database. For example, you can create a report in Salesforce.com that lists customers that completed their one year anniversary with you. Every day, 5Buckets will pull from Salesforce.com the list of customers with anniversary today and send them a pre-recorded voice message from Vontoo thanking them for their business.

This simple scenario can be extended to include email communications. For example, 30 days before the anniversary date an email could be sent by 5Buckets reminding the same customers that their renewal is due. An email as a renewal reminder, and a personal phone call on their anniversary thanking the customer when they renew.

A project we are wrapping up here at Right On Interactive is an integration between Salesforce.com and a chat tool called “Boldchat”. You may have been to web sites where they let you chat with the sales person or a customer service representative. So, instead of emailing or calling the company, you can chat with a live person right on the company’s website. Boldchat is one such product that enables companies to provide the chat feature on their website.

We have a customer that uses Boldchat on their website; the chat is used by prospects looking for product information. We recently implemented Salesforce.com for this customer and customized their online quote request form to create an Opportunity in Salesforce.com when someone submits the form. Customer was really happy with the way the Opportunities were coming in from the online quote form (slight digression – the quote form checks if the person submitting the form is already in SFDC and creates or updates the record; additional data is captured in a custom object) that he decided that he wants the chat sessions in Boldchat to create Opportunities in SFDC too.

Boldchat is a mature product. They have a well documented API. So, the initial question of “how can we get the data out of Boldchat” was answered quickly – use the API! The next question on my mind was – “but chat sessions are quite unstructured”. Unlike an online quote form, an IM session is very loose and “all over the place”. There is no telling when or how chat visitor indicated their name, their contact information or what product they were looking for. I even looked at the some of the chat sessions and the sessions were literally all over the place. They ranged from simple questions to detailed technical discussions.

We solved the problem by using what’s called a “pre-chat survey”. The chat visitor is required to fill-out some initial information like their name & phone number and some other optional information. That gives us the basic information we need to create/update Contacts in SFDC; and the entire text of the chat session is then dropped in as an Opportunity with the LeadSource set to Boldchat.

Boldchat’s website is: www.boldchat.com and more info about Boldchat’s API is here: http://wiki.boldchat.com/api/

Here’s a quick little tip about the new ExactTarget Webservices API, particularly the one that does the integration between Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. When you trigger an email send using the ETforAppEx API, make sure you specify -

a) IndividualResults = true;

b) IndividualResultsSpecified = true;

This will ensure that the send, open(s), click(s) are dumped in to Salesforce.com by ExactTarget. The manual says there is no need to explicity specify IndividualResults, and that the tracking will be dumped in to SFDC by default. But as a good practice I would strongly recommend you specify it explicitly. You really don’t want to be left guessing if that tracking information will really be sent to SFDC or not.

Send me an email (adalvi -at- rightoninteractive.com) if you want a more detailed code sample.

I am a firm believer in learning as much as you can about your customer by analyzing all of the data available to you. This allows marketers to make informed decisions that will ultimately build out a relationship with their customers based on mutual benefit. This is a win-win and is the only real way to achieve long term customer loyalty and build brand awareness.

But the question is when does it all get a little weird?

I was once charged with looking into a product that was able to cookie a person when they became a lead and then recorded all of their individual browsing behavior into the company CRM. So every time they came back to the site - the activity was recorded and sent to the appropriate sales person where they could act on the information.

But I was forced to ask - how?

I understand that it could help prod conversation without actually having to come right out and say

“Hey, I noticed that you looked at but didn’t download that whitepaper - how come?!”

But it was still extremely creepy to me. How exactly was this really going to help the salesperson close the deal? What kind of risk does this pose if this method of tracking became public? How do you really make use of the data at the individual level?

I understand that there are B2B companies out there that have a very small and concentrated customer base where individual information is more meaningful than in aggregate - but it seems to me like spying on someone while they shower…i dont think just because you let them over to your house once that you gave permission for that level of access.

But maybe Im crazy! Let me know what YOU think.