Overview
Contact responsibilities record what a contact does for the business: who signs the contract, who handles billing, who chases payment, who influences a decision. A contact can hold several.
They exist in their own right, and they also answer one Relationship Health check: whether the right influential contacts exist for a customer. If you have ever lost time working out who to call about an invoice, this is the feature that fixes it.
Managing the list
Go to Settings then Contact Responsibilities. The list is per company and starts from a supplied set when Relationship Health is enabled. You can add, rename or retire roles at any time without a code change.
Column | What it means |
Role | The name people choose from on a contact. Renaming is safe: assignments and scoring follow the role itself, not its name. |
Counts towards coverage | Whether the coverage check requires this role. Tick it for roles every customer should have, leave it clear for roles that are useful to record but not expected everywhere. |
Active | Whether the role is offered on contacts and counted in scoring. Untick to retire a role. |
There is deliberately no delete. Retiring a role by unticking Active hides it from editors and from scoring while keeping the history of who held it.
Assigning responsibilities to a contact
Open a contact on a customer, or create a new one.
In the Responsibilities section, tick every role that contact holds.
Save. The next recalculation picks it up, or use Refresh on the Relationship Health panel to see the effect straight away.
If you do not see a Responsibilities section, either no roles exist yet for your company or the database update has not been applied on your environment. The settings page states which it is.
Seeing who holds what
The customer's Contacts tab has a Responsibilities column next to the decision maker and influencer flags, showing the roles each contact holds. When the coverage check tells you a role is uncovered, this is where you find out who to give it to, without opening contacts one at a time.
The column only appears once somebody in your company has assigned at least one responsibility, so it stays out of the way until the feature is in use.
How the coverage check scores
It passes when every role marked as counting towards coverage has at least one live contact holding it.
One contact can cover several roles. The check is about coverage, not headcount.
Deleted contacts do not count. Only live contacts on the customer are considered.
The evidence names the gaps. When the check fails, it lists the roles nobody covers, so you know exactly what to fix.
Before you start using it, while no contact anywhere has a responsibility assigned, the check falls back to a Yes or No field on the customer so it does not fail everybody on day one. As soon as assignments exist, it scores properly for everyone.
Choosing your required set
Be deliberate about which roles count towards coverage. Every role you tick is a role that must be filled on every customer, or the check fails. A short, genuinely expected set is more useful than an aspirational one that fails everywhere and gets ignored.
A common pattern is to require the commercial and financial contacts that every account genuinely needs, and to record more specialised roles without ticking them for coverage.
Rolling it out
Agree the list with the people who own the accounts, then set it up in Settings.
Tick counts towards coverage only for the roles you will hold people to.
Ask account managers to assign responsibilities on their customers' contacts. Expect this to take a review cycle.
Use the Responsibilities column on each customer's Contacts tab to see the gaps at a glance.
Once assignments are being made, the check becomes automatic and the manual field stops being read.
Support
Support page: thelayer.com/support
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 03333 222 000