Communication in ecratum

ecratum is based on managing interactions between companies. Therefore, in ecratum it is possible to communicate with your supplier in various ways:

 1) Communication via comments

One of the ways you can communicate with your suppliers is adding comments to your tasks. Each task in ecratum can have comments associated with it. This allows you to give you an accurate way to exchange information regarding a request. The comments can be visible internally only or made available to your business partner.

A comment available to the supplier can be seen by anyone that has access to the task which includes all users in the account of your supplier and ecratum users in your company that have access to it.

An internal comment cannot be seen by your business partner. It is visible to only you and ecratum users in your company with access to that specific task.

Through comments, you can ask questions about tasks, provide further information and have a clear communication overall.

Read more about:

• Product tasks in ecratum
• How to communicate via comments

  2) Instant messaging with Messenger

Another way to communicate with your business partners is using ecratum Messenger.

Using Messenger, you can send an instant message to users of your supplier and also users from your company.

In order to use Messenger with your business partner, you need to have a connection with them which means they need to be your supplier or your customer. Any user in your ecratum company account and any user of any company that you are connected to can be found in your contacts to send an instant message.

You have several options to get to the Messenger:

• You can click on the Messenger icon next to the Company Search in ecratum App. 
• You can contact the responsible user from your business partner's company for every task directly on the detailed view of that particular task.
• You can go to the Address Book, search for the company and select the specific user out of the listed users from that company.

Once an instant message is sent to your contact, they receive a notification within the ecratum application. If they do not read your message in 60 minutes, they also receive a notification email. By doing that, the possibilities of not noticing an instant message are eliminated.

Read more about:

• How can I use ecratum Messenger?

3) Address Book

In ecratum, the contact information of the users in your company account and your business partners is stored in the Address Book. With the Address Book, you can find all contact information of the user that you need to contact and send him/her an instant message via ecratum Messenger.

When a new user is added to your company account, that user’s contact information is automatically added into the Address Book. In similar, when you have a new business partner on ecratum, the contact information of the users of that particular company is also automatically inserted to the Address Book.

 Read more about:

• How can I use the Address Book?
• Getting started with company account administration (article coming soon)

4) Reminder Emails

Did you send product document request to your suppliers some time ago and not sure if they still recall them? Since suppliers receive lots of product documentation requests from various customers, it is possible that some of those requests might be forgotten and ecratum helps them by reminding requests.

ecratum sends reminder emails to your suppliers about the open requests that they have. Once your suppliers sign up for an ecratum account, they can set the frequency of the reminder email that they will receive from ecratum. They can receive daily reminder emails or weekly reminder emails depending on their preferences.

In the supplier overview, you can check who is your person of contact and when the last email was sent to your supplier.

Read more about:

• How can I manage my ecratum account?
• Managing your suppliers

5) Contact tasks

Even though you can reach the contact information of your business partner through Address Book, you might not know which user is responsible for which department. At this point, you can get to know the right contact through contact tasks. In contrast to the Address Book where every user of ecratum is named, you can request contact data that your supplier can provide without creating an account for this person. For example, you need the contact information for Director Supply Chain for documentation reason or for an emergency, you can request that person’s first and last names, telephone number and email address.

Read more about:

• How can I work with tasks?