Support "Friendly" Company Names
In many scenarios, a Company will have a formal name (International Business Machines) and a colloquial name (IBM). We should have a facility that allows me to record both values in the Company record. When performing a Company search, it should incorporate both the existing "Company" field, and the new "friendly" field. That way, I can search for either "International Business Machines" or "IBM" and be taken to the same record.
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Tim commented
If we could have more than one 'Friendly Name' field it would solve the problem of Company name changes.
Currently we change the Company name to retain Notes, Opps, Cust Serv cases etc then create a new Dummy record with the original name and in brackets '... see XYZ Company'. -
Richard Harris commented
Yes, this arises regularly and the presence of "The" at the start of a name is always a problem, where the entity may be known as for example as "The K-Club" but you want it to file under "K" not "T"
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Mike Caliguri commented
This needs to happen 100% also you have allot of DBAs or company's that have a corporate identity as well. It would also be nice to select or separate these names for mailing and any contact either printed or emailed since all conact may only need to be addressed by one of the entities. We have allot of company's that need all business conducted under name XXXX however all billing is received to us paid through company YYYYY
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Steve Bromschwig commented
John,
Your solution of simply adding "IBM (International Business Machines)" as the Company Name is definitely a work-around to the limitation of having only a single Company field - and it's one that I've used with clients previously.
In most cases, it works fine - but looks really tacky (for lack of a better word) when you generate mailing labels from your Maximizer list - or if you are generating a report that needs to be transmitted to the Company.
Ian - I like your feedback on the "include nicknames" checkbox being a self-remembering setting and/or a user preference.
I hadn't thought about making the Alias/Nickname field available as something that could be placed in a Column Setup, but I think that makes sense. Again, treat is as an entity separate from the formal Company field - but I could see value in allowing it be be placed in a Column Setup.
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Ian Wallace - CABC commented
I have frequently been asked for this feature by users, often better use of existing wildcard searching options will help.
I would suggest that this needs to be a separate field to solve the problem properly. This has the benefit that you could probably support multiple friendly names per account which I suspect may be the next request if this is improved.
The full company name field should always be what you would print on a letter and should not include the friendly name.
If the field was a long enough text field then a list could be entered, "IBM,Big Blue,I.B.M." and maximizer could simply wildcard your search term into this. To be more sophistaicated you would need a friendly name table to support multiple records per account properly and then seaching *Blue would work correctly too.
Searching company name could automatically include the friendly name field.
Ideally the search form should ask if you want to use 'include nicknames' - default to yes - remember last setting or as a pref.Should you be able to add the new field to Views?
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John Boulton commented
I have lots of companies like this but I just give all such companies a name like "IBM (International Business Machines). What would be more useful to me is the ability to ensure that the search for "International Business" returns IBM without having to search for "*International Business*".
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Steve Bromschwig commented
I would like to see this separated into multiple fields. If I am generating a mailing label, or printing a formal report, I would want the name of the company to display as "International Business Machines", not "International Business Machines (IBM)".
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Do you think this can be accomplished with a more optimized search? For example, the company field alone can hold the entire name 'International Business Machines (IBM)' and the search will return this record when any piece of the company name is being searched on.