Help your business grow with these WORKetc CRM tips from real users.Speed, efficiency, productivity. They’re all buzzwords, yeah, but they’re also key components to any small business’ survival.
We’ve already rolled out quite a few tips and tricks for increasing efficiency and productivity with WORKetc, but nothing beats those tips whose effectivity have already been proven in the wild, by real businesses that use WORKetc everyday.
Here’s another round of WORKetc tips and tricks from real users that’ll help your business not just survive, but grow.
Increase Ticket Visibility With Workgroups
Assign support cases to a work group instead of an individual. – Heather Tardy, 24hr Bookkeeper
Imagine this: you just finished clearing your full support queue by assigning most of the critical, top-level tickets to your best support agent.
That agent is supposed to clock in in 10 minutes, but 5 minutes before his shift he suddenly sends you an email: he won’t be coming to work today.
That’s a scenario that no support manager ever wants to happen. When it does, they’d have to go through every single one of those assigned tickets and re-assign them to other agents,
You could save yourself a headache by assigning tickets to workgroups, instead.
By assigning support tickets to a workgroup, you can ensure that there’s always someone on the team who will be able to lay eyes on and handle the tickets that enter your support queue.
Increase ticket visibility by assigning them to workgroups.Let’s turn to WORKetc user Celina Garcia, office manager for the Texas-based IT firm tekRESCUE, for a real-life scenario.
When a client logs a support ticket, Celina assigns it to a workgroup that the tekRESCUE team calls their “bucket”.
“If we were assigning the tickets to a specific person, and that person did not come to work for whatever reason or if they’re out of the office, there’s always a chance that it would just not get done,” Celina explains.
“Having a bucket keeps that visibility for everyone who needs to look at tickets.”
By creating these “buckets”, you can more easily make sure that the right tickets are seen by the right people without having to worry about flooding one specific person with too many tasks.
You can also use this same method to increase visibility for sales leads. Just create a “Sales” workgroup and assign any unassigned new leads their way and you’re good to go.
Record Any Data You Need With Custom Fields
Get to know custom fields. Customize your own fields rather than trying to fit everything into the fields that already exist. – Lara Mayes, Newell Consulting, Inc.
It’s a very rare occasion when you come across a CRM with data fields that fit your business’ needs perfectly right out of the box—doubly so for highly-specialized and niche businesses.
WORKetc makes this issue moot by giving users the ability to add whatever custom data fields they want to any item, be it a contact, a sales lead, a project, a support ticket, or even an invoice.
By using a drag-and-drop editor, you can customize and tailor WORKetc’s custom fields to capture any kind of data your business needs, no matter how niche it may be.
An IT firm that sells, installs, and maintains servers, for example, can create custom fields for manufacturers, server models, and serial numbers and then use them to track exactly which servers are installed in each of their clients’ offices.
They can even keep track of maintenance schedules and who exactly to talk to at the client company when maintenance needs to be done.
These custom fields can even be used to slice and dice the data you keep in WORKetc.
Let’s say there’s an important firmware update for all ServerX-brand servers. You can create a smartlist that filters for all clients that have ServerX servers installed at their offices and then send out an email blast informing those clients of the update.
Custom fields, along with custom tags, can be very effective in helping you segment your clients, increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, and create deeper, more insightful reports.
Easily Move Emails to the Appropriate Items
Use the “move” function to reallocate emails from one project/case to another. – Ross Hendy, Promethean Editions
Sometimes, the fastest way for a client to get in touch with you is to simply open up the last email they got from you and reply to that.
It’s good for the client, but sometimes this creates a few problems when you want all pieces of communication to be attached to the exact, appropriate items to which they should be attached.
It can get a bit confusing, for example, if the original client email about your latest sales lead is actually attached to a project you’re working on for for an entirely different business that your client also runs.
Let’s say you work in a digital marketing company. Two weeks ago you successfully resolved an issue your client had with the website you made for them.
Today you received a new reply from the client, but even though it was automatically attached to the support ticket you resolved, it’s actually about engaging your PPC services for the very website you just created for them.
You can copy and paste everything that the client wrote into the description field of a new sales lead, but a better option is to simply move that latest email to the new sales lead.
This way, you have a clear communication history for the new sales lead. Your sales agents can quickly get up to speed simply by reviewing that lead’s activity history, which gives them a running record of all communication with and everything you’ve done for the client, without having to refer back to that support ticket every time.
Easily move and attach emails to the appropriate items.Work From Inside Your Gmail Inbox
Install and use the Gmail add-on! Many customers forget to email our support address, which automatically creates support tickets. When I get a direct email, I can turn it into a ticket instantly and track it from within WORKetc. – Nicole Watt, Integrant Services
Add the WORKetc add-on to your Gmail. It makes it super quick and easy to attach important emails to anything in WORKetc. – Margaret Mack, Wound Care Advantage
Nicole brings up a scenario that almost everyone who has ever worked support in a small business has run into before.
Instead of sending an email to your official support email address, a client you’ve been working with for a long time just sends an email to your personal work address instead.
It’s convenient for the client, but not so great for keeping proper track of every single support ticket that you receive and resolve.
You don’t want to risk your relationship with the client by asking them to email your official support address instead, so you go ahead and switch over to your customer support app, create a new ticket, and copy and paste the whole email there.
That’s what you would have to do if you’re not using WORKetc and the WORKetc Gmail add-on, anyway.
With the WORKetc Gmail add-on, you can quickly turn that client email into a support ticket and assign it to someone on your support team without even leaving your Gmail inbox.
You can even do all that without navigating away from your client’s email, letting you easily record all the important details in any custom support ticket fields you may have.
And the WORKetc Gmail add-on isn’t limited to support tickets. From inside Gmail, you can create new contacts and sales leads, record timesheets and expenses, schedule events, and update projects.
Managing your entire business from inside your Gmail inbox becomes a reality—and if you have an Android phone, you can even do the same using only your Gmail app.
