Tips on How to Keep Track of Clients Information

A growing list quickly becomes hard to manage as you struggle to keep track of clients. You have unpaid invoices to track, need to respond to client messages, and want to follow up on those leads you reached out to. As your business grows, you need tools that help you every step of the way, and make mundane tasks easier.

Do you still send out regular payment reminders, follow up with clients because they haven’t provided project details, and manually chase potential customers based on a spreadsheet client list? If so, you’re doing a lot of manual work that could be automated.

Let’s look at different scenarios on how to keep track of clients information and data related to them.

Why and how to keep track of clients information

Running a business is all about building relationships and meeting client expectations. If you promise to deliver a service in a certain amount of time, being late, loosing client files, or forgetting to send a follow-up email causes mistrust in your business. Eventually, clients will stop purchasing your services, or cancel their recurring service subscription.

Customers leaving a business happens more often than one would think. Don’t just take my word for it, as this study shows, one out of three customers might leave a company based on one bad experience.

To ensure that your clients are happy, and you deliver a consistent service quality, you need to keep the following things in mind:

• Make it easy to have access to all information in one place, for instance by using a client portal.

• Files should be linked to orders and be easily accessible without having to search for them.

• Nobody enjoys asking for invoices, so they should be automatically generated and sent to the client.

• The amount of information about your clients grows the longer they are loyal to your company.

• All client communication should be tracked and organized so that you can refer to it if needed.

Being able to easily reference all sorts of information makes you a good agency owner who can deliver work faster, of higher quality, and to higher client satisfaction.

Best way to keep track client information for different scenarios

Let’s look at the best ways to keep track of clients information.

Files

How often have you pulled out your hair looking for that one file your team needs right now? Even if you’re the master of organization, maybe you’ve put it in the wrong place, and don’t remember the file name. Or, you sent it via email and it’s been lost because the email has been deleted.

There are many ways to organize client files. With tools such as Google Drive or Dropbox, you could create a folder for each client, then organize the files into sub folders based on days or specific tasks.

Still, the files will be in a different place than the rest of the client related information–and that causes issues.

With SPP, all files are attached to a ticket or order so that you can easily find them. Plus, the file manager allows you to search for files by date, order, ticket, or client. Another big advantage is that you don’t need to play around with permissions.

Another great thing about SPP is that you can create intake forms with file upload fields. Those files are uploaded and safely stored within that order, so they are easy to find when you need them.

Subscriptions

Learning about the clients who’re most loyal to your business and are purchasing on a recurring basis is essential to your growth and scaling. But selling recurring services comes with a lot of tiresome tasks. That’s why you need a subscription management solution that saves all customer records and automates recurring billing.

As your business grows, so will your list of subscribers. The ideal approach to managing multiple subscriptions is doing it all in one place, for example, with the help of SPP. You can easily deal with massive amounts of transactions—cancel, upgrade or downgrade subscriptions.

Another noteworthy point is that SPP allows your clients to manage their subscriptions (this feature isn’t available by default) and get the information they need without contacting the support team. This, in the eyes of your clients, translates into more control and transparency. After all, 88% of US consumers expect businesses to have an online self-service support portal—meaning you’re two steps ahead with SPP.

Invoices

For productized services, invoice creation should be automatic. Up until recently, integrating payment gateways wasn’t a straightforward process. Luckily, this has changed over the past few years thanks to tools such as Service Provider Pro.

However, there’s one more element to keep in mind: when a client purchases your services, they expect to get an invoice in their email. Ideally, the invoices are also available (in a client portal) so they can download them again if needed.

That being said, sometimes you need to create an invoice manually. Maybe an old customer is looking for a more custom solution that you’d like to provide. You create the invoice, send it to them–but how do you track the payment now? If the invoice remains unpaid, you have to follow up manually. This creates friction, costs time, and doesn’t help with your customer relationship.

Modern invoicing solutions take some of this burden off your hands by tracking payments and sending an automated follow-up email. The same goes for SPP, as we send unpaid invoice reminder emails.

Customer lifetime value

The best thing about having your entire payment history in one place is that it allows you to keep an eye on your customer lifetime value. If your invoices are tracked via the client portal, and the payment processing is automated (via Stripe or PayPal), you can see exactly how much a client has spent.

In Service Provider Pro, this information is available on the client profile. You can send the data via our API to your agency CRM software, and use it to trigger targeted email marketing campaigns.

Besides the total client spending information, you can also view revenue reports by client for a specific date period. This helps you keep track of your biggest spenders and ensures that there are no client retention issues.

Communication

Email communication isn’t the most reliable way to get things done when you have dozens of clients and team members. There’s always the possibility that an important message is not answered quickly enough, or worse, it ends up in spam.

With the use of a client portal, the entire communication with your team, clients, and collaborators is in one place. You can tag colleagues in a note inside an order, ask clients questions, and send them files.

Our integrated helpdesk allows you to keep orders separate from other topics, such as general inquiries, or lead gen. You could even make the communication one-way and disable client replies in orders altogether, and rely solely on tickets.

Closing thoughts

Keeping track of client information isn’t a daunting task anymore thanks to modern tools you can make use of. Instead of saving everything in a spreadsheet, you’re able to leverage software such as a client portal and CRM to sync every piece of information between them. This allows you to target clients, making your service offering more personalized.