You work hard to make sales and retain customers. It is lesson 101 for any business. Then why is it that more and more companies go into hiding once they have landed the client. We should all learn  from this and not make the same mistake. Here is what I mean let me elaborate on it. National courier company – during a telephone conversation I requested to re-deliver on Monday as they never accepted my first FICA doc. From here I learned:

  • The twitter account is active with a few thousand followers – nice going – send a DM – no response or acknowledgment. Side note here they have not tweeted in the last few months. Not great.
  • Facebook popped a message there also.
  • I know the message for redelivery is in the system caused I have an update on it once I found a link that worked – you see it seems my number was not linked correctly so I could not track the parcel online.

So a fail all around for a national company that spends a bomb on advertising, however, cannot get the basics right. Sound familiar in your business? Let’s look at some ways we can change that – close the loopholes:

  • Test your channels – test your channels daily if you have high traffic/weekly if not so high – check all the channels that you getting the messages or notifications correctly and cross-check that none have dropped through the system.
  • If the messages and notifications go through to different emails or different people look for a way to consolidate it. This will keep it simple and minimize the points of failure in the contact funnel.
  • Check junk mail daily you don’t want options to communicate go to waste.
  • If you going on holiday or shutting down set up autoresponders so people are aware – so set up notifications on your channels.

Remember people who make contact with your company are either clients already or want to be one – it’s simple to keep them – show them how keen you are for either keeping their business or gaining their business and building trust.

Let’s take it to the next level and let me share some ideas however to really make this change a few gears:

  • Forget coping emails and sharing an inbox – move towards what is known as a help desk/ticket system. This way when anyone contacts you via a channel make sure it is logged and trackable. When agents respond from the help system you will be able to check that all cases have been addressed – when and how. This is crucial for training/tracking staff/finding trends / finding sales opportunities. There are a few systems one can use and work it straight out the box:
    • open source favorite is osticket – does the basics and works well straight out the box.
    • Fresh desk – this is a great popular option however gets costly very quicky however enterprise strength.
    • Atlassian – has to be one of the greatest pieces of software available – I love confluence for making notes comments, project management and a service desk all rolled into one. This is an ideal option for less than 3 agents in a service desk – otherwise also gets costly so depending on what you need and how many people.

If your need is more than 10 agents then I would certainly looking at investigating your whole business model and combine sales service and delivery into one CRM / contact management system along with a good chat roping in marketing so everyone is on the same page – break the silos when it comes to comms have a clean understanding who is doing what and when – don’t loose face to clients and close those potential deals.

Just before closing off this arm full of advice if you want to automate the marketing / help you must also check out 2 options namely Zapier for integration and triggers and Mautic for sales automation and workflows – both are super programs to incorporate into your company.