Dialing Directly From an Activity or Address List (SAP Library - Sales Support: Computer-Aided Selling (CAS))

Dialing Directly From an Activity or Address List

Use

You can initiate outgoing calls to a customer or contact person directly from sales calls, telephone calls, sales letters, mailings and address lists in Sales Support.

Prerequisites

To use the direct call function, you must first configure SAPphone for your work centers. If you do not, the telephone icon does not appear.

For more information on SAPphone, see SAPphone in Communication Interfaces (BC-SRV-COM) under Basis Components.

Features

You initiate a call by clicking on the telephone icon next to the customer or contact person in the overview screen or address list. The Create Telephone Call dialog box which appears contains a list of telephone numbers defined for the customer. These can be:

Any number of private numbers
Any number of main business numbers
Any number of alternative business numbers

With so many possible numbers for each customer it may be difficult to discern which are the private, main business, or alternative business numbers. As a rule if the company field is blank, it is a private number. If the company field contains the name of the contact person, it is an alternative business number.

Note

The system no longer automatically assigns standard descriptions to these numbers. These you must maintain yourself for the various addresses in the customer master record (choose Logisitics ® Sales and Distribution ® Master Data ® Business partners or transaction VD01).

The system proposes the default telephone number (also set in the customer master) as well as the country ID of the country to which the call is being made. It accesses the relevant address to determine the country and, from this information, the area code of the selected telephone number. The system displays a second telephone number to the right of the number it has selected. This second number is simply the selected number with its area code and/or any other relevant preliminary numbers required to make the call. This is the number that is actually dialed.

If required, you can select a different telephone number in the dialog box. Note that the complete number to be dialed (on the right) may not correspond to your manual entry. You can either choose Refresh for the system to update the number, or simply choose Dial and close. The system will dial the number you selected even though the display is incorrect.

If you have not maintained any telephone numbers for the customer or contact person in the customer master, a dialog box appears in which you can manually enter a number.