A customer says "invoice it to the company". Where does that go? One team member writes it in the notes, another sticks on a "corporate" tag, a third creates a custom field.
Three months later, when you want to run a campaign for corporate customers, you find the information split three ways and none of it trustworthy.
A simple rule
The decision comes down to three questions:
- Will you filter lists by this? If yes, a tag or a field; if no, a note.
- Does it have a limited set of values? If yes, a field (dropdown); if no, a tag.
- Can a person have more than one of these? If yes, a tag; if no, a field.
Examples: "sector" is a field — single-valued with a known list. "Products of interest" is a tag — there can be several. "Mentioned last time that their spouse had surgery" is a note — never used for filtering.
The tag proliferation problem
Tags are easy to create, which is both their strength and their weakness. Leave free-form tag entry open and within six months you get: "hot", "Hot", "hot lead", "warm-hot" — four different tags meaning one thing.
The remedy: choosing tags from a managed list and restricting who may create new ones. Everyone can apply a tag; not everyone can invent one.
Where notes belong
The notes field is not a bin; it is where the story lives. A good note carries context that makes the next conversation easier. A bad note imprisons data that should have been filterable.
Call summaries produced by the agent are notes too, and the same rule applies: structured information from the summary (product of interest, budget range) must additionally be written to a field or a tag.
The cost of multiplying fields
Creating a new field for every piece of information is not a solution either. On a contact card with forty fields, none get filled; the longer the form, the lower the completion rate.
A healthy balance: keep the fields actually used for filtering in daily work, and leave the rest to tags and notes. If a field has not been used as a filter criterion in six months, it is unnecessary.
Automatically populated fields
Some fields should come from the system rather than a person: country (from the number), source (from the form), last contact date (from the call). What these have in common is that manual entry makes them inconsistent.
The rule: any manually filled field can be left empty or written wrongly. Never ask a human to fill a field that can be populated automatically.
Cleanup time
Tag and field structures decay. A short review every six months is enough: which tags are never used, which mean the same thing, which fields are always empty. Deleting what is unused strengthens what is used.
Tomorrow we look at the most annoying consequence of all this: duplicate records.