This week is mostly about adding workflow to our customer relationship management software.
The “customer journey” describes how a customer changes from being a lead, through its various possible other labels. There is no real end-point to the journey – a signed customer might become a re-sign, etc, a canceled customer might eventually become a lead again.
In our system, you can define what customer types are possible “next steps” in the journey, ensuring that your managers don’t accidentally update a lead immediately to a re-sign, for example. Of course, each of these labels is completely customisable by yourself, so you can name them whatever you want, add as many as you want, etc.
When you set up a customer type, it is set by default that any customer with that type can be changed to any other afterwards. But, you can reset this so that customer with that type can only be moved onwards to set other ones. For example, a customer with “Signed” status should not movable to “Qualified” or “Lead”.
Another thing we’ve added is that when a customer is moved onto a specific customer type, a templated email can be automatically sent out to them. For example, if you have just signed someone up to your product, you might want to automatically send out a welcome email with a list of instructional documents and videos. Combining this week’s work with the email template work described last week, you can choose what emails should be sent, and design those up however you want.
In a way, this is like the workflow that happens in field service management software – when a customer reaches a point where you need to change how to label them, there are usually a restricted set of ways forward (which types they can be changed to), and a number of associated messages that need to be sent out.
