How to Keep Track of Clients In 2024
In 2024 and beyond, all businesses must learn how to effectively and efficiently keep track of clients’ information scattered across multiple channels. Today's business landscape has evolved so big that it's rare to find a business that’s using just one customer or client relationship management tool.
From spreadsheet software and productivity tools to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and client portal solutions, there are so many solutions available through which businesses of different sizes process customer information.
Some of these solutions come with built-in functions to integrate with other services for seamless tracking of customer information across multiple channels or apps. Others require an external integration provider to connect with other apps where client information resides.
This resource explains the importance of proper client tracking and discusses top strategies and tools for keeping track of customers.
Continue reading to discover these client-tracking systems that many successful businesses use. Before that, here’s why customer tracking is important.
Why Keeping Track of Client Information?
The goal of every business is to experience growth, make a profit, and make customers happy. The previous two tend to be dependent on the last one. When clients and customers feel they get value for their money, they are happy to come back for more services or products and even refer others. This way, businesses make more money and can expand to serve more people.
For a win-win situation for both a business and the customer, it's important to have an efficient tracking system for basic contact information and other types of client-business interactions. These include communications, files, and meeting schedules. Here are some benefits of proper client tracking systems.
- Organization: An efficient client tracking system provides an organized storage and view for information and data related to customers. Employees' productivity can significantly improve if everything they need to complete client projects is organized and easily accessible.
- Personalized Interaction: When a business has a proper storage and retrieval system for information relating to customers, it becomes easier to provide customized marketing and support messages. The right tools and strategies will help a business deliver a personalized experience for customers.
- Enhanced Client Management: Effective client tracking should be an ongoing effort and done with purpose. The business landscape in 2024 is not at a standstill but evolving. With these changes, businesses must learn and find ways to provide overall enhanced client information and data management
- Customer Retention: Effective and efficient tracking of information helps inform present and future efforts on marketing, sales, and service delivery, all leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
After seeing the benefits of effective client tracking, it's time to consider different tools and strategies to implement client tracking. Keep in mind that depending on the stage of the business, some suggestions may not apply. As your business goes through growth stages, other suggestions may become useful. That said, here are 6 tools to manage client information.
Client Portal for Transactions and Projects In One Place
A client portal software is one of the best tools you can use to manage client information, projects, and transactions in one place. It’s a great way to keep track of every activity of clients who complete projects and collaborate with your business.
With a client portal, you have messages, invoices, orders, files, and related information in one single platform.
Client portal solutions cut out the hassle of a business and its employees having to move back and forth between spreadsheet applications and email clients to fetch corresponding client data and project details.
If you've been brainstorming different ways to help streamline business operations, then a client portal approach might be the right approach.
Understand that there isn’t a single blueprint for how to keep track of clients in today's business environment. This is because client acquisition and retention channels are so diverse. How a business handles customer acquisition and retention often depends on the type of the business.
A client-focused business will find client portal solutions more practical than customer-based businesses. A client project management portal provides a space for business relationships where partnership or long-term collaboration is required.
Client portal solutions come with purpose-built features and functions that may not be needed for customer-oriented businesses.
For example, a client portal solution will typically come with a project management module where teams can share updates among members and with clients. Such a feature is practically useless for a business selling just products or services—a situation where client collaboration and partnership are not needed.
A customer-oriented business is better off prioritizing tools and strategies that can help it track leads, customer transaction history, top-selling products or services, and other relevant key performance metrics.
Examples of Client Portal Solutions
Clinked
Clinked is a cloud-based client portal software offering white-label customization in addition to standard functions you’d expect from a client portal app. Clinked allows you to track interaction with clients and on projects in real-time.
Complementing Clinked instant messaging module is a secured file-sharing system that lets businesses and clients collaborate on projects and tasks all in one platform. Some other features provided to keep track of customer relationships with your practice or business are billing & invoicing, time tracking, and analytics.
Keeping Track of Client Information with Clinked
- Client Profiles: Store all client details in centralized profiles, including contact info and communication history.
- Document Management: Upload and organize client documents with version control for easy access and updates.
- Task Management: Assign and track tasks with deadlines, using the Follow feature to stay updated on key projects.
- Communication Tracking: Log all client communications in their profiles, with notifications for important updates.
- Client Portal: Provide clients with a dedicated portal to access documents, task progress, and essential information.
- Custom Fields: Track unique client details with custom fields in profiles.
- Audit Trail: Maintain an audit trail to track all changes and actions within client profiles, ensuring accountability and transparency.
- Reports & Analytics: Generate reports on client activity and project status to stay informed.
This streamlined approach helps you manage and track client information effectively within Clinked.
SuiteDash
SuiteDash is a client portal software that provides project and task management. The app comes with a file exchange feature through which you can share important files with clients. It comes with an appointment and scheduling tool important for managing client information. SuiteDash also comes with other features you’d expect in a client portal solution.
If you decide that a client portal is the best tool and strategy for your business, ensure you choose a solution with the right features and support for your business. The professionals at Clinked will be happy to discuss your needs and requirements, so we can customize a white-label portal platform perfect just for your business.
Spreadsheet for Small Business Client Tracking
It's a big misconception to think that tools and strategies for keeping track of client information should be novel or sophisticated. Subscribing to such an idea would be a disregard for the needs of small businesses. Without investing in big tools, a spreadsheet solution may be enough for the needs of a small business when it comes to tracking, organizing and storing client information.
Spreadsheet software is one of the popular tools used by professionals and small-sized businesses to track client data and manage business workflow.
Commonly Used Spreadsheet Software
Microsoft Excel
For those who run small businesses, managing and keeping track of customer information and data can be achieved with Excel. With Microsoft Excel, you can create columns for name, phone, and email and then enter customer information into corresponding rows. As a customer journey progresses, new records can be added and old ones be removed.
Excel, like any other spreadsheet software app, can serve as a centralized database for storing essential customer information.
Google Sheets
With a versatile spreadsheet software app like Google Sheets, multiple employees can access and edit a spreadsheet file simultaneously. The commenting feature can be used by team members to provide feedback and assign tasks. These are all nice features to track and manage information relating to customers.
Beyond client data storage and retrieval, tracking client information involves other activities that drive customer satisfaction. These activities include on-time project completion, communication about strategies to use, and process improvement tasks. Using a spreadsheet app like Google Sheets can help with these efforts.
Using Google Sheets for reporting can further enhance your efficiency. It allows you to create real-time reports and dashboards that provide valuable insights into your processes and performance, helping you make informed decisions and streamline operations.
So as a small business, feel free to use spreadsheet tools to not only track client information but also as a way to keep track of internal processes. When your clientele and service processes grow, you can scale by investing in other solutions.
CRM for Managing Customer Data
As your business grows, you’ll realize that spreadsheet apps are not well suited for handling large volumes of customer data. Investing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools at this point will help you maintain the effectiveness and efficiency of your customer tracking.
CRM software primarily helps collect and store information relating to customers, but that's not its only function. CRM solutions often come as a suite of products for managing customer information, marketing efforts, purchase history, support requests, and more.
There are so many types of CRM options on the market, with each most of the time providing unique features in addition to functions typical to a standard CRM app. Some have built-in project management systems so teams don't have to worry about managing client information in one place and completing projects in another location.
Examples of CRM Software Apps
HubSpot
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HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM solution that offers different tools for different client relationship management efforts. Marketed as Hubs, these tools are Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Operations, and Commerce.
Each hub or product is designed to help businesses handle a specific area of business operations. All of the hubs are connected by HubSpot’s core CRM, which serves as a unified system for all the hubs.
The core HubSpot CRM is free but comes with certain limitations that can be removed by upgrading to a paid plan.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a popular CRM tool for sales teams looking for a customizable solution. It helps businesses manage their leads, contacts, and customers. Salesforce comes with impressive features to move leads in the pipeline toward a close.
Some of the tool’s top offerings are marketing campaign management, mass emailing, and pipeline management. The lead auto assignment is useful for routing incoming leads to agents based on expertise or other criteria. This helps ensure that a potential customer is matched with internal personnel who likely can close the sale opportunity. This feature alone can help boost the sales record of a business.
The platform provides integrations with many more platforms for more customization that can help the business improve its efficiency. One of the key integrations is Google Analytics integration with Salesforce, which allows companies to track and analyze customer interactions seamlessly across platforms. This connection can lead to better data-driven decision-making and improved marketing strategies.
Social Monitoring to Improve Overall Client Relationship
A business from the ground up should invest in tools and strategies to track client information and interaction. When it's right to do so, the business should also consider social listening or monitoring tools to track conversations about the brand and products.
Using a social listening tool to track what’s going on with your competitors and the latest happenings in your industry might be beneficial, too. Adopting a strategy like this can help uncover new ways to better serve existing customers or avoid things for which competitors receive negative feedback.
Granted, businesses yet to make a name in their industry may not have enough mentions across social platforms, making social monitoring tools not a requirement. Medium-sized to big businesses though will find monitoring and tracking tools invaluable to overall business success.
Example of Social Listening Tools
Brand24
Brand24 is an advanced social monitoring tool with AI-powered reports and insights. You can use this listening to identify platforms where users are talking about your brand, products, and competitors, too.
The tool works by letting you track keywords, which could be about your brand, competitor, or hashtag. It crawls the entire web to find instances of the keyword in places like blogs, podcasts, new sites, and social media platforms.
Sentiment Analysis is one of the platform’s features that automatically plots a chart based on the words that appear alongside your tracked keywords. This can help businesses, for example, see what words users are using to describe their offers, be they positive or negative.
Mention
Mention is a social media monitoring tool to detect both favorable and critical mentions about your brand. Based on how you use the tool, you can use it to track client critiques of your business.
Like Brand24, Mention provides sentiment scoring to help you see if the feedback about your brand is positive or negative. Its Local Media coverage feature means monitoring is beyond social media; the tool can monitor the appearance of your brand on traditional media sources.
For reporting, there’s an option to target specific keywords and a dashboard for a comprehensive look at your reports.
Automation For Streamlining Data Entry
Automation has a big role to play in how to keep track of client information. Automation is a powerful way through which businesses sync data between apps and ensure client information is consistent across all platforms.
To understand the need for automation and appreciate its working, consider a scenario where a business uses HubSpot CRM to manage its customer relationships and MailChimp for e-mail marketing. The sales department can manually copy customer information between these two platforms, but that approach will be impractical for large volumes of data.
Another slightly better approach will be to export data from one platform and import it into the other. This method is prone to file-type compatibility issues.
Automation, however, helps automatically sync data between HubSpot and MailChimp. This way, the business eliminates potential errors and inconsistencies that can impact customer relationships and service delivery.
Automation capability is something you'd find in CRM software, project and task management apps, and recent business productivity tools. If not present as an out-of-the-box feature, automation is provided through an external integration service.
Examples of Automation Workflow Providers
Zapier
Zapier is a web automation tool that helps connect hundreds of other web apps and services. Its design goal and function is to provide seamless integration. With Zapier, you create automated workflows called Zaps to trigger events in one app which automatically completes a task in another app.
Zapier’s no-coding approach to automated workflows means users without coding expertise can connect their favorite apps. In the client tracking efforts, it helps sync data between two web services while automating data entry.
For instance, it can help automatically populate new lead information to your CRM or client database software, reducing errors and saving your team valuable time.
Pabbly Connect
Though not as powerful and robust as Zapier, Pabbly Connect can connect with many apps and services. It can also be used to automate many copy/pasting/creating jobs.
For example, you can use it to connect your survey tool with Google Sheets and Gmail so that every single survey response is added to the connected Google Sheets file, while you also get an e-mail delivered to your Gmail. One of the good things about this automation system is the easy setup and integration.
With 400+ app support, which is more than enough for many businesses, Pabbly Connect can help you automate client information and data tracking.
Appointment Scheduling for Efficient Meetings
If your business process requires lots of meetings, you understand how challenging it can be to juggle personal schedules with meeting appointments. Whether conducting sales calls, planning projects, or for interviews it’s very easy to miss out on schedules due to inefficient scheduling systems.
Scheduling helps streamline the appointment booking process by eliminating the back-and-forth of phone calls or emails. Scheduling apps are great for tracking client meeting appointments and related information.
Example of Appointment Scheduling Software
Calendly
Calendly is a tool that lets you have a dedicated booking page for free. On the page, clients can see your available times and choose a time and date that works best for them. Once a booking is secured, you get an email confirmation. There’s an option for email reminders before scheduled events if you subscribe to a paid plan.
People-facing professionals such as coaches, trainers, and consultants will find this scheduling extremely useful. Instead of going back and forth with clients discussing available dates, a link to Calendly link is all that is required to streamline that part of the meeting.
Backend, you get to customize the information clients see on the front end, i.e., the booking page. You can lock the time zone or let available times be displayed in the client’s time zone. The latter can help prevent possible confusion regarding timing.
Calendly comes with an invoicing option, allowing you to receive payment through the app. Especially for consultants, this is an easy way to charge for consultation and receive payment without needing an external invoicing or billing app. Plus this option can be used to track billings with customers.
Perhaps the best part of any scheduling tool is a seamless connection with other apps and web services. Calendly connects with the popular videoconferencing app Zoom by letting you add your link to Calendly event automatically. It can also connect with HubSpot, PayPal, and many more.
Doodle
A Calendly alternative that lets you send proposed meeting dates and times to team members across different time zones. Meeting participants can choose from suggested slots. This Doodle option is perfect for big businesses.
It can be challenging trying to get many participants scheduled for a meeting. Having, however, a purposely built scheduling tool like this can be helpful.
Doodle doesn't come with lots of integrations. The few ones it features, including Google Meet, Zoom, Google Calendar, and Zapier, should be enough for the requirements of large teams where the bells and whistles are not required.
Plus Zapier integration means its functionality can be further extended if necessary.
If you're looking for additional ways to enhance your workflow, consider exploring Zapier and IFTTT alternatives. These tools can provide similar automation capabilities, making it easier to streamline scheduling and other team operations."
Conclusion
With so much client-related information and data to track, it's important that business owners and managers know how to keep track of customers. Efficient management of contact information, files, support requests, purchase history, meeting schedules, and other data related to clients goes a long way in strengthening customer relationships.
Whether to track communications and projects or ensure consistency in client information across channels, the choice or selection of client tracking tool and strategy depends on the business goals and process requirements. When carefully selected, a customer tracking software app or solution will increase overall business efficiency.
Know that Clinked is a trusted service provider when it comes to delivering customized client portal solutions to client-focused businesses in diverse industries.
Whether for attorneys, medical healthcare practitioners, coaches, or other service providers, Clinked can help build a robust client portal solution for efficient client communication, information, and project tracking.
For a demo request, leave us a message and a representative will contact you.
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