Salesforce comes with multiple user features, one of which is called Contact Roles. This simply organizes the members of the organization within the system so that every member knows who holds what role and who needs to be contacted should a particular need for assistance arises. It also informs organizational members of the best time to contact any point person.
Feature Compatibility
This particular feature can be accessed in all editions of Classic and Lightning Experience but may vary per system type. For Salesforce Classic, you can use contact roles for your cases, opportunities, accounts, and contracts. However, when it comes to Salesforce Lightning Experience, it will only be applicable to contracts and opportunities.
Contact Roles can be applied to different objects in Salesforce and generally provide the same value but do understand that these are independent of one another. With this in mind, do remember to set up roles for each object in your system.
Setting Up Contact Roles
Once set up, this will allow you to define various roles across the system within your organization. These details will then be visible to all of your sales personnel regardless of their rank in the organizational hierarchy. Here are the steps you need to follow to successfully set up this Salesforce feature:
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Go to “Setup” and look for “Quick Find.”
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Choose from the list of contact roles. If you’re working with accounts, you need to select “Contacts to Multiple Accounts” and not “Contact Roles.”
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Adjust the picklist values as you see fit. You can modify these, add new values, and change color assignments (for charting) as well.
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Click “Save.”
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Add the roles lists to their designated page layouts. For example, if your sales personnel utilizes opportunity page layouts, make sure to add the right list of contact roles to said layouts. This will ensure that they’ll gain access to it when they’re logged into the system.