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Manage Households and Groups

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Outline the different ways to model individuals and businesses in Automotive Cloud.
  • Describe how contact contact relationships, account contact relationships, and account account relationships are used.
  • Explain how to use party relationship groups and party role relationships.

How to Model Individuals and Businesses

Automotive companies strive to tailor their services to specific customers and dealers. By understanding their interactions with different groups and households, companies can create effective messaging, offers, subscriptions, warranties, and services.

Typically, a household is represented as a business account in Automotive Cloud and the members are represented as contacts.

A graphic representing a household with multiple members who own two vehicles.

When it comes to representing customers and their households in Automotive Cloud, Neo Motors has a few options:

  • A person account and multiple contacts: Use a person account to represent the customer, and then create a contact record for each household member. Using this approach, Neo Motors would create Account Contact Relationship records to associate each contact with the person account.
  • Person accounts only: Create person account records to represent each member of a household. Remember, a person account is also a contact. In this scenario, Neo Motors would define Contact Contact Relationship records to associate the person accounts to each other and then use Account Contact Relationship records to associate the individual to other businesses.
  • A business account and person accounts: Create a business account to represent a household, and create contact records for each household member. In this case, Neo Motors can create Account Contact Relationship records to relate members to a household.

While each approach has pros and cons, after careful consideration, Neo Motors goes with the third option: creating a business account to represent a household.

Note

Automotive Cloud comes with features like party relationship groups and actionable relationship graphs, which work best with business accounts.

One Contact, Many Accounts

With Automotive Cloud, you can define relationships between a business and an individual using Account Contact Relationship records.

First, consider how a dealer contact relates to multiple accounts. Jean Roe is a trusted sales executive at the Dream Dealers Dallas dealership, overseeing the sales of all Neo luxury vehicles. Here’s an example of how Neo Motors tracks Jean’s relationship with all households and companies.

Contact

Account

Direct Relationship?

Role

Jean Roe

Dream Dealers Dallas

Yes

Employee

Shah Household

No

Sales Manager

Acme Building Solutions

No

Sales Manager

Each contact can relate to multiple accounts, with one account as the primary. Here’s an example of an account contact relationship record where Dyan Oldroyd is a primary contact for the Neo Gen Dealers Austin business account, and his role is decision maker.

An example of an account contact relationship record.

Next, discover how a customer contact relates to multiple accounts.

Leah Smith is a young college student who just purchased her first car from Dream Dealers in Miami. Her parents are separated, but both are loyal customers of Neo Motors, which wants to track Leah’s relationship with both households. To do this, they use Account Contact Relationship records.

Contact

Account

Direct Relationship?

Role

Leah Smith

Smith Household

Yes

Child

Mason Household

No

Child

The Importance of Your Role

Party Role Relationships establish the clearly defined roles between individuals and companies. Some relationships are reciprocal, such as between two spouses or between a supplier and a buyer. Other relationships are linear, like the one between two dealerships or between two clients of the same legal firm.

The table shows how Neo Motors creates party-role relationships to define common stakeholder relationships in Automotive Cloud.

Role Relationship Record

Role Relationship Name

Related Role Name

Relationship Object Name

Create Inverse Role Automatically?

Related Inverse Record

Sales Dealer-Sales Dealer-AAR

Sales Dealer

Sales Dealer

Account Account Relationship

No

N/A

Technician-Customer CCR

Technician

Customer

Contact Contact Relationship

Yes

Customer-Technician CCR

Subscription Provider- Subscription Buyer AAR

Subscription Provider

Subscription Buyer

Account Account Relationship

Yes

Subscription Buyer-Subscription Provider AAR

Legal Expert-Client AAR

Legal Expert

Client

Account Account Relationship

Yes

Client-Legal Expert AAR

Sibling Sibling CCR

Sibling

Sibling

Contact Contact Relationship

No

N/A

You can also use party role relationships to create a standard list of relationships between two accounts or two contacts. The screen shows the relationship between a retailer account and a client account.

An example of a party role relationship record.

Next up, Neo Motors uses these party role relationships to create relationships between two contacts or two accounts.

Two accounts or contacts can be at the same level of a hierarchy, such as two colleagues or two dealerships reporting to the same parent account, or share a parent-child record relationship such as a daughter and a parent, or a parent organization and its subsidiary.

Account Account Relationships

Two business accounts can be linked to each other using account-account relationships. The table shows a few examples.

Account

Related Account

Hierarchy Type

Party Role Relationship

Smith Household

Mason Household

Peer

Family-Family AAR

Dream Dealers Dallas

Dream Dealers Miami

Peer

Sales Dealer-Sales Dealer-AAR

Neo Financials

Neo Financials Texas

Parent

Parent Company-Subsidiary AAR

Neo Financials Texas

Neo Financials

Child

Subsidiary-Parent Company AAR

The image shows a relationship record with George Smith, who’s an independent automotive sales dealer, related to the parent Dream Autoservice California account.

An example of an account account relationship record.

It’s an example of a reciprocal party-role relationship.

Contact Contact Relationships

Two contacts can be linked to each other using contact contact relationships. Remember, person accounts also have corresponding Contact records in Salesforce, so you can also link two-person accounts using contact contact relationships.

Contact

Related Contact

Hierarchy Type

Party Role Relationship

Tina Mason

John Smith

Peer

Spouse-Spouse CCR

Sheikh Khan

Tina Mason

Peer

Technician-Customer CCR

Dylan Black

Julia Rose

Parent

Regional Manager-Sales Manager CCR

Julia Rose

Dylan Black

Child

Sales Manager-Regional Manager CCR

The image shows a Contact Contact Relationship record.

An example of a contact contact relationship record.

The spouses Harry Minor and Nancy Minor have a reciprocal party role relationship.

Groups and Families

It’s time to look at the final piece of the puzzle. For each business account created by Neo Motors, it’s important to know some additional information. Create party group relationships to store additional information about dealer groups, conglomerates, or households. Here are some examples.

Name

Type

Category

Size

Lifetime Vehicle Purchase Count

Lifetime Service Purchase Value

Lifetime Accessory Purchase Value

Car Oh! Dealers

Group

Dealer Unit

70

300

$100,000

$200,000

Mason Household

Household

Staying Together

3

2

$2000

$6000

Lakeview Housing Society

Group

Society

190

85

$38,000

$10,000

This screen shows a party group relationship for the Minor Household account.

An example of a party relationship group record.

The relationship has key details like group size, lifetime vehicle purchase value, and lifetime vehicle purchase count.

After you create a new party relationship group, use a guided workflow to associate contacts, related contacts, business accounts, and other party relationship groups to the record.

Party Group Relationship for a Household

John Smith and Mary Mason are separated and have two children, Leah Mason and Bob Smith. The family has bought multiple vehicles and accessories from Neo Motors through dealership-based sales. They’re also customers of Neo Financials because they’ve taken loans to finance their purchases.

The graphic represents two separate household accounts related to two accounts: a financial institution and a dealership.A graphic representing two account account relationships.

This table shows the different records related to the Smith-Mason Household party group relationship.

Party Relationship Group

Contacts

Related Contacts (Account Contact Relationships)

Business Accounts

Other Groups

Smith-Mason Household

John Smith

Leah Mason

Smith Household

Xela Motors

Mary Mason

Bob Smith

Mason Household

Xela Financials

Party Group Relationship for a Commercial Business

Landmark Hospitality Services is a commercial company with multiple recreation centers, hotels, and spas under its umbrella. Many hotels have leased fleets of buggy cars and other vehicles for their guests from Neo Motors.

Here are the records related to the Landmark Hospitality Services party group relationship.

Party Relationship Group

Contacts

Related Contacts (Account Contact Relationships)

Business Accounts

Other Groups

Landmark Hospitality Services

Mary Ann, Hospitality Manager at Landmark Resorts, California

John Smeed, Financial Consultant at BlackRobe Financials, which offers services to Landmark group

Landmark Resort & Spa, Miami

Landmark Resorts

Raghav Patel, Customer Relationship Manager at Landmark Recreation Centre, New York

Jassi Bhindra, Service Manager, Landmark Recreation Centres

Landmark Recreation Centre, New York

Landmark Recreation Centres

But relationships are volatile in nature, so Neo Motors must be ready for change. Scenarios like one company acquiring another or a household splitting due to divorce aren’t uncommon.

With Automotive Cloud, you can merge and split party relationship groups in a few quick steps using a guided workflow. When you merge two-party relationship groups, you add all members, related contacts, groups, and businesses from the secondary group to the primary group. Splitting a party relationship group moves the entities to a new or existing group.

In the next unit, learn how dealers and customers use Experience Cloud and how Neo Motors visualizes stakeholders.

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