Apart from the obvious name/address stuff
The first 3 fields in Maintable ID the prospect for his category (there are 32 categories) and the salesman. Most of the fields that have entries (as a result of my dummy calls) are for the outcome...unavailable etc and date/times. The field Diary that is for the salesman determines how the diary opens. A telemarketer could be calling for 4 different salesman at the same time.
Some of the fields (especially the null fields) are for client and personal. Also addresses as I keep three sets of addresses in that table but they only come into play when it is client or personal.. I have prospect, client and personal in the same table. In rare cases someone can be there 3 times as they start as a prospect and go through to being a client and also a personal contact. This done partly for the diary system. In other words I might have a meeting time with Bill Smith and someone looking at the diary can tell it is personal and so that time could be changed. If he is a prospect he has P in Marker field and C for client and M for miscellaneous.
Quite a few of the fields are also used for different details that apply to medical specialists.
A lot of the dates/times and outcomes are also used for recycling prospects. A macro pulls prospects from a holding table to match rthe number of rejects which it sends to another table. The various outcomes/dates determine when a lot of those prospects are brought back into the system. They are also used when we sell the names that were no good to us because we are insurance but that makes them good for something else.
The Many table AllAttempts is mainly for the calling statistics....contact rate per hour, appts made per hour etc. and is measured againts another table that has goals set for each prospect category.
At the bottom of form ProspectT you will see a few rows of unbound text boxes. The telemarketer can decide whether these will be visible (invisible by default) and used. If he does then they gives the call results Vs goals following each call.
But in a nutshell the goal is to get the maximum number of contacts per hour of calling. For example, those combos on the right of the screen are mainly used when we call doctors and they get the contact rate per hour up from around 1.5 to 4.5 per hour. We get about 1.5 per hour on the first call but second time around because the time/day entries in the combo are selecting/deselecting we get 10 contacts per hour on the second set of calls. I think it would be hard to select those prospects if the time/day entries were not in the maintable for the prospects record.
Some of the data is alo sent back to the name list suppliers for pricing. A simple example being "wrong number" or "no longer works there" as they make certain guarantees.
The major problem with subforms is the changing of the form as we do it quite frequently. If the telemarketer thinks he will do better with the form upside down etc then that is what he gets and we have the statistics to see how it goes.
But the other problem is that I can't see how the prospect selection can be done if the dates/times/outcomes are in the Many table. One reason being that the selection of the prospect is not solely based on the last call.
A couple of months ago I removed a lot redundant stuff and also reduced the size of several tables. The MainTable had about 240 fields and is now around 150 which was as small as I could make it. Of course if I put prospect, client and miscellaneous/person in different tables then each table would be much smaller but the total number of fiedls across the three tables would still be about the same. If none of the call results were put into the maintable then it would come down by maybe 50 fields or so.
As a side note and this is after years of using it, the cloud background gives the best call results and labels are much better than buttons, especially when a lot of them are to be used. However, some telemarketers prefer just to have the central part of the screen where the outcomes are clicked and not much else......in that case a plain form background works better.
