Best Practice Checklist - Relationships

Regular training is essential

Staff changes, have any of your staff that deal with customers, suppliers or prospects changed

Key staff, is there just one staff member who is an expert in the relationships module? If so you are at risk if that person leaves or goes on holiday. Also it is hard to say if they are implementing best practice. Consider cross training your team so that you always have another point of view in respect to each persons work

New features, Readysell is coming out with new features all the time. If you notice a new feature or a number of new features that are relevant to you consider a training session to update your team on recent developments

Business trends, the business environment is always changing. For example the Australian dollar's value effects costs and prices. If there are any significant changes effecting your business, changes to how you use Readysell might help address the issue

Keep your card lists tidy and up to date

Archive customers that are not trading. Over time you customer list can fill up with inactive accounts. You can use the last sale date to identify cards that have not traded for a long time and change their status to archived

Review the industry and job information on your contacts as this is required by CRM and marketing automation

Archive contacts that are not used and update contact details. The contacts list in relationship helps make this easier

Cleaning up your cards and contacts increase the value of your business. The business value depends on the quality and quantity of your customer database

Use available services

Use loyalty points to lock customers in to your business

Change your invoice and statement messages to keep communications with customers interesting and fresh

In some cases Readysell allows your customers to reprint their invoices and statements from Readysell. Check if this is available to you and if so send our emails and take other messages to encourage your customers to use this feature.

Email's keep you in touch with your customers, prospects and suppliers

Automatically email invoices to most customers at end of day. Don't send emails during the day. As you want a chance to reverse errors before they are emailed out

Automatically email statements with attachments. Attach flyers etc. to your statements to put your marketing information in front of customers. They may not read your normal marketing emails, but they are always interested in statements. So your material sent out with the statement might get their attention.

General email batches used to send information, updates and announcements to customers

Automatic emails to collect meter counts if you use the service module

Email out remittances when you enter customer payments

Email out remittances when you produce supplier payments

EDI supplier purchase orders if possible, email then if you have to

Send emails from the card using Readysell's emailer to keep the history of the email conversation in Readysell

Use email and batch email defaults to send images of products on sale and link those images to your sales website. Images with links on emails can be an effective way of communicating to your customers. Customers tend to look at invoices and statements in more detail than other communications such as direct marketing

Telephone integration

Readysell can link to many phone systems. Record summary information about calls in your Readysell system. This improves service reporting. There is a lot to be learnt by drilling into the phone calls by customer, time of day, telemarketer etc.

Use contacts as a marketing tool

Put new customers on a introductory contract

Use a few standard contracts such as Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze where possible. Use individual product contracts only where you have to. 

Put groups of customers on the same standard contracts where you can

Publish the benefits of your standard contracts to customers

Use Readysell contract performance reports to monitor the success of your contracts

Use cases and integration as a simple CRM System

Readysell cases can help you track calls to your customer, recontact dates etc.

Implement integration from Readysell to MailChimp or similar products to support your marketing emails.

Consider integrating Readysell to a full blown CRM system such as Salesforce