Search by Phone Number in CRM 2013

Roshan Mehta, 12 September 2013

One of the great improvements of CRM 2013 is the ability to quickly search for records. This is illustrated quite well when creating a new Phone Call activity when you need to identify the recipient of the phone call. In previous versions of CRM, you would have to use the lookup control to find a Contact and then add it to the phone call, which would take a number of clicks. In CRM 2013, they have made it a whole lot easier! Let’s see how.

Let’s assume that someone in our organisation has left me a message on my desk saying that I need to call someone and all they have left me is the recipient’s mobile phone number. Before calling the mysterious person, I decide to create a phone call activity so I can plan out the conversation. Now this phone number might be linked to an Account or Contact in the system so it seems like a lot of work to go through and find out who I’m actually going to speak to.

A much faster way is to create the new phone call activity and enter the phone number into the Call To field. CRM will then search for a matching Account or Contact in the system based on the phone number I have entered.

For example, I have entered “0211234567” and CRM automatically matches it up with a Contact record for “Roshan Mehta”.

If I try entering “5506591”, it will find the matching Account with that phone number.

This is a great little tool for anyone who will be working with Phone Call activities in CRM. It works perfectly for inbound calls and allows you to identify if you are speaking to an existing Customer or a brand new Customer.