Sometimes customers email you, sometimes they call, sometimes they come to an online chat. Sometimes you call them… Do you treat each of these as isolated incidents?
image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/gifrancis/ / CC BY 2.0
You shouldn’t.
Tracking all your customer communication in one accessible archive is incredibly useful. Here’s a scenario for illustration:
A potential customer emails for information about your product. You respond, and then wait. A few weeks go by, and you decide to follow up with a phone call, and you offer her 10% off her purchase. She still isn’t sure she wants to move forward, so you send her a follow up email with some links that she’ll find useful. Later, she comes to an online chat because one of the links you sent her didn’t work (oops!). She ends up buying the product for full price online, then emails requesting the discount.
That’s a lot of contact for one customer. Would you have a record of all those communications or remember every one of these touches yourself? Would any of your coworkers have access to any of this information to be able to satisfy the customer if you were not available?
If you use Email Center Pro, the answer is YES.
ECP allows you to create a Contact Card which contains all your customers information. Swell, you think — what email program doesn’t have that?
Okay, but do their Contact Cards log every touch with that contact? Every time they’ve come to a chat, every email they’ve sent you and you’ve sent them? Every phone call, complete with length of call and your notes about it?
The image above shows the history of recent actions with this customer. Clicking on the link in each item will bring up that specific communication — including the full call notes or the entire chat transcript. You can see everything you and the customer have discussed, all in one place.
And to top it off, you can email, IM, or call (via Skype) directly from the Contact Card!
Yeah, I didn’t think the others let you do that.
Managing email and managing contacts go hand in hand. Being great at one while ignoring the other is like competing in a triathlon but not being able to swim. You’ll lose the race, and drown in the process.
{ 5 comments }
