Frequently your business will communicate with its customers by a variety of different means. For example, a potential new lead may complete a web form, that is followed up by a telephone call from your sales team, who then sends a follow up email containing further information. In this scenario there are 3 different touch points, which, if reviewed in isolation would lead to an incomplete picture of the customers needs and requirements.
Why does this matter?
Let’s take a real life example:
You arrive at work on Monday morning and log into your shared inbox to find the following message:
Hi
Thanks for taking my call on Friday. Your product sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.
I look forward to receiving the additional information that we discussed.
Regards,
John
This email raises a number of questions:
- Who was on the call?
- What was the additional information that was discussed?
- Has the information been sent?
Before you can respond to this email, you will need to find this information. This could be really simple if your company only has a handful of employees but what if your organisation has hundreds of employees?
In most organisations the next step would be to either:
- Send an email to the whole team to see if anyone remembers talking to this client; or
- If your company uses a CRM tool (like HubSpot, Salesforce, Copper etc), then it might be possible that by looking at the customer’s record that you can find some or all of the information you are looking for.
Of course, both approaches take time and are dependent upon an unidentified person’s input: in the first scenario, you are relying on the relevant employee having read your email and replying; in the second instance, that the employee made detailed notes and has updated the CRM.
Let’s assume that the company is using HubSpot. You check the CRM, and can see that it was your colleague Dave who took the call. He hasn’t left any notes of the call and there is no email activity logged on the customer’s timeline. You also discover that Dave is now on holiday.
You take the decision to call the customer to try and find out more, however when you speak to the customer, it turns out that Dave did respond from his personal email account and forgot to ‘bcc’ the CRM. It also transpires that he forgot to make any notes about the call because he was in a rush to handover his workload before his holiday.
The Solution
Had the company in this example been using an intelligent message hub, such as Threads, all of the initial questions could have been answered in a matter of minutes:
Who was on the call?
By storing both emails and phone calls in one place, you can quickly identify who took the Friday call.
What was the information that was discussed?
By making a copy of the call recording accessible to all employees, you can quickly replay the original call (and view a copy of the transcript if required) to quickly understand the content of the call and what had been discussed as well as any action points following the call. The fact that Dave had not written up the notes would not have mattered.
Has the information been sent?
By using a shared inbox solution, you can quickly see all messages that have been exchanged by your company and a customer, regardless of who sent the message. This would have immediately identified the email that Dave had sent from his personal inbox to the customer and avoided wasted effort.
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