Customer Contact

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If you need to contact your customers, either to remind them their MOT or service is due, or to let them know about a special offer you're running, you use the Customer Contact Screen.  If you are running MOT and/or Service Reminders please press the appropriate button as seen below, this will pre-populate the Customer Contact screen with customers that have vehicles that are due a service/mot.  Otherwise you would press the 'Customer Contact' button (as shown below) which will open the screen with all customers listed.

 

In V4 the customer contact (previously know as mail shots) has changed a little, this is to allow you to contact your customers via various methods without duplication, i.e. once you've selected which customers you want to contact, you can send SMS to those that have a mobile number, once you've sent these you get the option to remove them from the list, leaving customers who you might want to email, once these are done you are left with customers who you'll need to send post to.

 

 

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Once you've pressed the button, you'll see the next screen

 

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The mail merge screen is asking whether you need to include vehicle details in your mail merge (note, you won't be asked this if running MOT and service reminders), there is an overhead to including vehicle details so don't include them if you don't need them.

 

Please note, customers that are marked as Insurance are included unless you select to add vehicle details.

 

Once you answer you will see the screen with the relevant customers

 

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Note that only customers that have the 'Allow Customer Contact' option selected are shown (though don't forget that you can set this to default to selected)

 

So now we have a screen with all our customers, to decide which we want to contact we need to select them, if you want to contact all then press 'Select all' if you want a sub set then you can either manually select by holding down the 'Ctrl' button and selecting each customer individually, or you might want to contact only those with a Vauxhall, in which case filtering on a column (or more) will show matching customers which you can then select.

 

Once you've got your list of customers, with the ones you want to write to selected, you need to decide how you want to contact them, it's up to you but you might want to send SMS messages first, then email then post (either through MSWord Mail Merge, or through our internal Mail Shot).

 

SMS

 

Having selected your customers (see above) you press the SMS button, after a short while you'll see the screen below advising that customers who don't have mobile numbers have been excluded

 

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Now you'll see the SMS screen

 

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Here you can see that only Mr Bloggs has a mobile number, so everyone else has been excluded.  Once you've sent the SMS (more info re the SMS screen here), you'll return to the Customer Contact Screen, but you'll be asked if you want to remove Mr Bloggs from the selection (after all, you've already sent him an SMS, do you want to also email him?), if you don't want to remove him then answer 'No'.  Assuming that you've removed him you'll see the list has changed.

 

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So now you're ready to email

 

Email

 

Having selected your customers (see above) you press the Email button, after a short while you'll see the screen below advising that customers who don't have an email have been excluded

 

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Here we can see that only Mrs Berlin has an email address.  Once you've sent your email (for more info on using the email manager see here), you'll be returned to the Customer Contact screen where you'll again be asked if you want to remove Mrs Berlin, assuming you do you'll now see the following

 

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So now there's only Miss Wincy to contact, she has an address so we can either use MS Mail Merge or our Mail Shots