How do you receive and keep track of your business client's requests?

Hey there 👋

I'd say it really depends on the nature of your product and existing communication channels for customers. For example, you don't want to inconvenience your customers with a "new portal login" when they're happy and communicative sending you emails directly.

Here are 3 potential avenues to investigate that all lend themselves well to different scenarios.

Forums (e.g. Discourse)
CRM with Email/SMS Integration (e.g Hubspot)
Ticketing System (e.g Jira Service desk)

Forums are great when the issues and support customers face are experienced across many customers and - mostly - non confidential in nature. Any topic or issue created by a customer becomes a public resource for other customers to rally behind, participate in, and in some scenarios even help solve for you. Plus, customers tend to write in a more natural manner (framing of questions and answers) so forums that are indexable by search engines become valuable marketing assets for SEO value.

CRM with an Email/SMS Integration is a great way to triage incoming requests so that no communications (inbound or outbound) gets lost. Depending on the complexity of your service, it's then up to you to manage the process on your side of delivering a solution, which could flow into one of many systems depending on the inquiry; a feature needing a bug fix being passed to a PM system vs. a documentation article solving the customers issue being shared.

Ticketing System are great when you have highly engaged users in your product. They're super relevant to B2B SaaS though less so for agencies who are usually hiring YOU to do the work, not have to learn your process. However, if you can funnel customers into a ticketing system, they're are very powerful ones out there that will track the completion of the ticket while giving all participants (customer included) visibility into there various touch points along the way.

While internally there can be an endless variety of systems and methodologies for handling incoming client requests, I'd recommend considering these 3 as the high level client facing options.

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Hey there 👋

I'd say it really depends on the nature of your product and existing communication channels for customers. For example, you don't want to inconvenience your customers with a "new portal login" when they're happy and communicative sending you emails directly.

Here are 3 potential avenues to investigate that all lend themselves well to different scenarios.
1. Forums (e.g. Discourse)
2. CRM with Email/SMS Integration (e.g Hubspot)
3. Ticketing System (e.g Jira Service desk)
Forums are great when the issues and support customers face are experienced across many customers and - mostly - non confidential in nature. Any topic or issue created by a customer becomes a public resource for other customers to rally behind, participate in, and in some scenarios even help solve for you. Plus, customers tend to write in a more natural manner (framing of questions and answers) so forums that are indexable by search engines become valuable marketing assets for SEO value.

CRM with an Email/SMS Integration is a great way to triage incoming requests so that no communications (inbound or outbound) gets lost. Depending on the complexity of your service, it's then up to you to manage the process on your side of delivering a solution, which could flow into one of many systems depending on the inquiry; a feature needing a bug fix being passed to a PM system vs. a documentation article solving the customers issue being shared.

Ticketing System are great when you have highly engaged users in your product. They're super relevant to B2B SaaS though less so for agencies who are usually hiring YOU to do the work, not have to learn your process. However, if you can funnel customers into a ticketing system, they're are very powerful ones out there that will track the completion of the ticket while giving all participants (customer included) visibility into there various touch points along the way.

While internally there can be an endless variety of systems and methodologies for handling incoming client requests, I'd recommend considering these 3 as the high level client facing options.
SebastianScholl

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4 years ago
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