Question

Best Practices Question: If you have to send a request/question to a client how do you track followup?

  • 22 November 2022
  • 6 replies
  • 175 views

Userlevel 1

Good day, everyone!

We previously used Hubspot for our sales CRM (proved to be un-useful for ongoign client operations).  It had a cool feature that if you sent a client an email or placed a call, you could schedule a follow up task or reminder to circle back with the client/lead if they failed to respond by X days (it had default 1 and 3 days, but you could select a custom amount).  This email would then end up on a that future day’s task list.  Additionally if the client/lead replied before then, the email inbox window would show on the right this email conversation has a follow up task, which you could clear right there since you were getting the follow up desired in the reply.

For example:

  • Monday send email:
    • Client ABC, it appears the below list of team members have outstanding expense reports due last week.  Can you follow up with them and let us know those are complete so we can process month close? 
    • I’d then put a follow up reminder 3 days from now if the client hasn’t responded or the expense reports were not completed.
  • Thursday morning durring “task completion time”:
    • my task list shows a follow up reminder to the email, I escalate to calling the client directly.  

The ability of Karbon to automatically send follow up emails for a client portal request is pretty sweet and seems to be a perfect tool for templated or repeating projects.  Maybe I’m missing something.  But right now I have one-off open items or open-questions that fall off the radar because there isn’t a task list saying “on Thursday you’re following up with Client ABC about your previous email”.

 

Additionally, a member of our staff will often have an ad-hoc online meeting with the client on a different project.  These have been great times to follow up with the client on prior requests.  “I’m so glad you called about this project, while I have you on the call, we’ve been trying to get the expense reports closed out so we can close the month.  We sent an email on Monday but didn’t get a response.  Do you know when we can get those from you?”  We’ve found such reminders have shown our professional organization skills and results oriented mindset that clients pay more for because they know we’ll push the project over the finish line rather than the client having to follow up with us.

 

What best practices have you employed to:

  1. Track or set reminders to outgoing emails/calls that require followup if no response is given?
  2. Visually see those one-off items concisely by client should you get a chance to get them on the phone?

 

Thanks everyone for the help!


6 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +10

Hello @Nick Britt Welcome to Karbon

 

What best practices have you employed to:

  1. Track or set reminders to outgoing emails/calls that require followup if no response is given?
  2. Visually see those one-off items concisely by client should you get a chance to get them on the phone?

 

I try to utilize My Week, Assignments and Pinned notes to stay on top of these situations.  None of these have automatic notifications though.  

When I send an email that I want to keep track of I always assign it to a work order and assign that email to My Week and drop that to Working on Now in My Week.  That is a lot of clicks (there are feature requests floating around to streamline this).  The nice thing here is that any responses to that email show up in My Week until you move it out of there.

If I wanted to really get my attention at a certain date/time I would schedule an email to myself to follow up.  Not ideal but the closest to creating an automatic notification that I have found.

To visually see one-off items, I would add them to a pinned note on a work order open in My Week.  Then when I click on that item the pinned note is visible.  This is really only for open work though and you would need to scroll through My Week since it does not currently sort by client.

I think a more valuable use of pinned notes for one-off items would be to pin the note to the main timeline, then when you or anyone gets that client on a call you could go directly to the contact timeline and see any pinned notes.  You could also assign these notes with a due date if you want to have them show up in Triage and My Week.  During the call I would open up comments and make notes and @anyone on my team that needs to have that info.  I may even reassign that note if there are action items for a team member.

All of this sounds like a lot but I found that once I got into a rhythm it is almost muscle memory.

Hope this helps,

V

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +13

We also use the Pinned note to a Timeline.  You can assign these notes to yourself or a Colleague, you can add the note to My Week, and you can leave updates in the comment section.

Once the issue is resolved, remember to unpin the note so the Timeline is ready for the next issue.

I have also created custom work items for myself assigned to an internal admin client.  You could have a weekly item labeled follow-up call needed. There you can list the calls you need to make and why you need to follow up.  Once completed, just check them off.  We have several yearly work items that allow us to track this type of work. We have a yearly work item that lists all the IRS notices received in each month and what action was taken to address each notice. We can use the documents tab to see all notices for the entire year.

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

What best practices have you employed to:

Track or set reminders to outgoing emails/calls that require followup if no response is given?

 

I add the email to MyWeek. If I want to follow-up on a certain, I drag the MyWeek item to the MyWeek calendar on the appropriate day.

Visually see those one-off items concisely by client should you get a chance to get them on the phone?

I put the note or email in priority order in “Working on Now” so I can see what’s outstanding. I generally follow-up on a weekly basis, so many times I just drag the item to next week or put it at the bottom of my prioritized “Working on Now” list.

I work hard to keep My Week to 50 or less items and work through it each day to make sure I’m not missing something important.

 

Badge

We’re looking for a way to better track client emails that need to be reviewed during the time of the month end close.

We have one client that has multiple entities and sends a ton of emails. There are so many emails, this client even has their own inbox/user in Karbon. 

I will explain out current process in hopes that maybe there are better suggestions out there:

I currently work on reviewing the clients emails. Each email gets assigned to the month-end close work item for the applicable entity - but there are a bunch of emails that get assigned to the month-end work item. Not ALL emails on the month-end work item need to be addressed by the accounting team during the month-end close. Currently, we have a group in Karbon of the 2 employees who work on this particular client. And whenever there’s an email that will be needed during the close-out, we tag that team in the comments - but unfortunately doing so floods the client teams triages. We’re looking for a better solution on how we can track those emails without flooding the client teams triage. Pinning the emails is not an ideal solution for us. 

Looking for/open to any suggestions out there! Thanks in advance 😊

Deana

 

 

Badge

Oh no, I thought I was posting a new question - not a follow up on this thread. Apologies! I will repost to create it’s own thread. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Here’s Deana’s thread if anyone else has suggestions!

 

Reply