Our latest product improvement opens up exciting opportunities to improve conversations and strengthen relationships with customers.
“What do you mean? You’ve had contacts all along…” Yes, indeed! In fact, you could add any field in our custom fields as a contact field. This was how it worked before…
Contact 1 Name, Contact 1 Email, Contact Phone 1, Contact Name 2… and so on…
Custom fields are really flexible and allowed us to do some clever categorisations of customers like tiers, grouping and filtering on routes, status, etc. It even helped us to remember the birthdays or things like licence expiry dates, but there are some obvious limitations when it comes to storing the details of people in custom fields. Here are three limitations that our users frequently faced:
1. Customers in Skynamo could only have a set number of contacts, and once those fields were set up, they were fixed. No adding another contact even though we know some customers have a few contacts whereas others have many.
2. There was no relationship between the custom fields that represented a contact. So, we could not leverage the fact that Contact 1 Email belonged to Contact 1 Name. This means that you could not just select a contact on orders, quotes or credit requests, but that you always had to type out the email address (and we know how hard that is…).
3. No adding new contacts from the mobile apps. You could edit the contacts, but not add or remove them.
Why is this so important?
People are the cornerstone of customer relationships – especially in our line of work. The activities logged on Skynamo are important, but almost every interaction logged involves people.
The comments we log are often related to people, and the tasks are assigned to people. The customer conversation is not with the four walls and the shop face, but rather between the humans in the building. This is most apparent when a manager or buyer leaves the customer. The conversation has to start all over. Likewise, when your representative leaves or is replaced, the conversation starts again. Managing these conversations is central to managing the customer relationship. In order to better capture the customer conversation, we need to bring the people to the forefront, and that is exactly what we set out to do.
Starting this week, you will be able to add any number of contacts to a customer. These contacts will have the basic fields required to maintain the relationship and will be modelled in such a way that we can leverage contacts stored on other platforms like Outlook and Google Contacts in the future.
The link between the Skynamo Customers being visited and Contacts opens up a world of exciting opportunities. Importing contacts from Excel and from mobile phones will soon follow, and over time we will start to use this link to include more of the customer conversations that happen in other applications like email clients, calendars and messaging services.
For more information and to leverage this new feature, please get in touch with our friendly support team at support@skynamo.com
