Are You Open On Christmas Day?

18 Dec 2012

In an ever shrinking world, largely thanks to our online presence (not presents – focus, there’s a few business days left yet!) we’ve become much more accustomed to enquiries arriving at odd times in the morning, and indeed on ‘odd’ days of the year. While the rest of the world is off celebrating Christmas, shutting shop for the holidays comes with more consideration than in years gone by, and certainly doesn’t mean that you are closed for business.

If you do receive an enquiry at half past leaving time on Christmas Eve and nobody makes contact until early January, it’s likely that customer will find another supplier before you’ve even had chance to formulate a reply. Short of staffing up or working yourself on those important family days what can be done to combat this?

Well for starters, your OpenCRM system can help. First of all it is accessible anywhere you have a web browser – while we’re not advocating sending a flurry of emails from your tablet hidden under the dinner table, there’s nothing stopping you from managing your enquiries. But there are slicker and certainly more “family-friendly” ways of achieving that…

You can use a web form in conjunction  with OpenCRM to capture enquiries from your website this data will automatically generate a Lead in your system. Using a mixture of Auto Email rules and Action Plans you can respond instantly, thanking your potential customer for making contact, and managing their expectation for a response, and your Action Plan could set up an automated Activity, scheduled as a reminder on the day you know you’re returning to the office.

Using the automation features in OpenCRM can save you time throughout the year but it’s never more important to set these actions up before the holidays. One big missed enquiry can mean the difference between hitting your target or the wall.

OpenCRM also gives you the facility to auto manage Support enquiries from inbound email. Provide us with some basic email settings and we can enable auto ticket creation, auto replies and escalation. Again, make use of always available access to combat any urgent enquiries – right from your armchair at home.

So whatever you’re doing this Christmas, make time for family and OpenCRM will help to ease your mind.

We’d like to wish all our customers and regular readers a restful but productive holiday, and a prosperous New Year, and we look forward to sharing many more seasons as an integral business partner.