Manage Contact’s Lifecycle Status
planned
Jerry (CEO)
Business Problem:
Contacts typically have a lifecycle status that defines their current engagement or sales progress with the business. Currently, tracking and managing a contact's lifecycle status within the platform is challenging.
Furthermore, the existing open and closed conversation statuses are inadequate for lead management. Contacts in the sales pipeline often remain in open conversations rather than being closed, as sales agents still need to follow up with them. This has led to clutter in the open conversation list, causing some contacts to be overlooked for follow-up and resulting in lost leads.
Desired Outcome:
It would be good if we could track and manage the lifecycle status of contacts within the platform directly and organize the conversations based on the lifecycle status to enhance conversation management. Additionally, generating insights to monitor lifecycle metrics, such as conversion rate would be valuable for monitoring the sales process and making data-driven improvements.
Workaround:
Create a custom field and custom inboxes to track the lifecycle status.
F
Fernanda Giroleti Weiden
Do you have more granularity than just say this is planned? This post is 2.5 years old.
Amalia Putrieka
Hi Fernanda Giroleti Weiden thank you for your patience and for following up!
While we can't provide a specific timeline, please know that this feature is actively being worked on. We understand the importance of this functionality and appreciate your continued interest.
We will keep you updated with any significant progress :)
D
Davi Peyroton
I'm looking forward to using this feature! I'm using dropdown fields on the contact fields to set as funnel stages at the moment. This feature will save our lives a lot - track the lifecycle of our "leads" is crucial.
Amalia Putrieka
Davi Peyroton: Hi, thank you for your feedback and enthusiasm! We'll keep you updated here on any progress and improvements regarding managing contact lifecycle status :)
N
Nabilah Binti Salleh
planned
Y
Yihui Chan
Yuriy Dobrianskiy
Hi! I'm also waiting for this feature. Do you have any deadlines for this one?
S
Shi Hui
Hi Yuriy Dobrianskiy, we hope to look into this feature soon, currently the team are working on other exciting features which are deemed higher priority 😃
Yuriy Dobrianskiy
Shi Hui: Got it. As I understand you still didn't start to work on it... But, if you have any ideas(dates) when you plan to release it, this help us a lot for planning. B/c without this feature we're thinking to choose another crm platform... :(
S
Shi Hui
Yuriy Dobrianskiy: We don't have a tentative date for now :(
Out of curiosity, have you tried using Zapier integration to connect with Trello? If yes, does it able to fulfill your use case?
Yuriy Dobrianskiy
Shi Hui: No, we don't. We'll try, thanks.
S
Shi Hui
Yuriy Dobrianskiy: Alrights, do let us know how it goes 😊
P
Patricia Goh
Hi Jerry (CEO) - Yes our company is looking for a lightweight deals management tool that can be associated with the leads. A simple kanban view is enough to move the deals between stages, but it's important that when a deal is created it has all the necessary contact details upfront so they don't need to go back and forth to contact/deal pages. Most CRM softwares are meant for larger enterprises, and it is too much hassle for an agile team like ours. Respond has all the lead communication in one app (and mobile), and if we can just add additional Deals information and manage in pipeline format that's going to be a huge win and we can say bye-bye to the heavy-weight CRM. I think Jivo has this solution already.
Jerry (CEO)
Hey Patricia Goh, thanks for sharing! We will look into Jivo and see if their implementation is good. Let us know if you have any other feedback!
Jerry (CEO)
V
Viktor Nagornyy
This would be great. My other ticket would be relevant to this to attach external data to these entities, such as ecommerce order data to support tickets, or if a company has an onboarding process, etc.
Jerry (CEO)
Viktor Nagornyy: hahaha you are getting a bit ahead of us on this 😅
How would this work? You would associate one of this "cards" to e.g. a shopify order?
V
Viktor Nagornyy
Jerry (CEO): I guess the exact implementation would depend on your implementation of external data. If you store external data locally, as key/value pair, then you could show that data any way you want.
Jerry (CEO)
H
Hasan Niyaz
More and more corporate customers are looking for social chat support / sales and currently the leading support CRM's don't support social chats. Respond.io should quickly move to support the basic functionalities like tickets, escalations offered by these CRM's so that Respond.io can take the place of these CRM's. Corporates don't want to keep on adding apps into their work flow. Jerry (CEO) please think about this.
Jerry (CEO)
Hasan Niyaz: Thanks for your feedback!
Unlike Email, where you can have multiple threads with your customers (one per ticket), messaging apps don't have this facility. For the end customer everything appears in one long list of messages, there is no concept of "thread".
This is why we built our platform to be based on "Conversations" and not tickets and only one conversation can be opened at a time. This way your agents see the conversation the same way your customers do.
We would like to introduce a concept similar to "Tickets" in the future, but we are still looking for the best way to do this.
Please do let us know if you have any ideas!
Hasan Niyaz
Jerry (CEO): yes it's the tickets and a ref # that the corporate and the customer requires. So that they can have a ref to refer to or search.
Ideally each conversation opened can be given a ticket id. which the user can search and refer to among team members or with supervisor.
Overall corporates are looking for features that they are familiar with when they are using their existing CRM platforms. Losing features that they are used to is hard for them.
Jerry (CEO)
Hasan Niyaz: Do you think that providing a Conversation ID # number would be enough for your customers? that's something we could add with much less effort.
V
Viktor Nagornyy
Jerry (CEO): This is something important to me, so I'll reply. As you said before, "everything appears in one long list of messages". A conversation ID would be pointless if you need to refer to a specific interaction from 2 years ago, for example. There are 2 ways to approach this:
- Give users (us) a choice between threaded/ticket type conversations or one long conversation as it is right now.
- Group separate interactions within one conversation internally to assign IDs. So each conversation could be made up of sub-conversations or tickets, whatever you want to call. You would keep track of these internally based on the first message and the the last message prior to "closing" conversation. So that group of messages would be assigned unique ID, which we could use to filter/search for that specific interaction.
Being able to refer to a specific interaction/ticket makes life easier not just for staff but for customers, too.
My wife works in customer service for a large company, which uses Salesforce for everything. They handle all interactions with customers as "cases" with assigned numbers, so they can easily communicate about those cases with all the stakeholders.
The other side of this is being able to have multiple conversations with customers at the same time, which is impossible if everything is in one giant conversation. For example, a customer might send an email about a billing question; then they might see something on Twitter and DM a question about an offer they saw. I have customers who like to email our support with 1 question per email, usually in the subject line because they want those separate topics to be separate.
Jerry (CEO)
Hey Viktor Nagornyy: You have some interesting points there. Note that creating a new entity like "case" (or "ticket") would require quite a bit of planning, so is not something we would be able to work on in the near term. We have another feature request for this: https://respond.canny.io/feature-request/p/pipeline-like-trello-to-handle-ticketsdealsetc-as-cards
Thinking out loud here:
What if we add the conversation ID to
(1) the start and end of the conversation,
(2) on the Activity Tab, and
(3) on the Conversation List in the reporting module
That way agents would have a way to refer to a specific conversation and manager would be able to check what happened to a specific conversation.
Would still help with your use case?
V
Viktor Nagornyy
Jerry (CEO): The important part to understand here is what conversation data is assigned to that ID.
If we have 2 years worth of conversations with a contact and the conversation ID covers the entire time, then it won't be helpful. The URL of each conversation already includes unique ID.
But, if these are smaller conversations with a unique ID then it would be helpful.
The other side of this is being able to have multiple conversations with the same contact at the same time.
Jerry (CEO)
Viktor Nagornyy: The conversation starts from the moment the contact sends a message until the Agent presses on "close conversation" (conversation can also be closed via automations/integrations)
The ID you see in the URL, is the contact ID. One Contact can have unlimited conversation. If the contacts asks for e.g. "Do you sell apples" and your agents answer and then proceed to Close the Conversation, that will be consider 1 conversation. The next time that the contact comes back to ask about e.g. "Do you sell melons" and the agents replies would be consider a separate conversation. In terms of IDs, 2 different conversation IDs would be created, both belonging to 1 contact. This is the current behaviour of the platform :)
The other side of this is being able to have multiple conversations with the same contact at the same time.
This on the other hand is more complicated, for this the feature request I share with you before (Pipeline (like Trello) to handle Tickets/Deals/etc as Cards) would be our best solution.
V
Viktor Nagornyy
Jerry (CEO): Thanks for explaining it. I think we're on the same page now. If we can see those IDs and be able to view those conversations (and search by ID) individually if needed, I think that would work exactly as traditional tickets.
Two other things related to this and email channel that came to mind:
- That conversation ID should be included in the subject line of emails.
- Specifically for email replies, we would need a rich text editor. Email replies tend to be long and sometimes contain a lot of information - text and images. So when email channel is selected, we should be able to have a proper text editor to compose replies. This could also apply to web chat, but not necessary.
Thanks!
Jerry (CEO)
Viktor Nagornyy: thanks for the feedback, I have added your vote to a new feature request, see here: https://respond.canny.io/feature-request/p/make-conversation-id-available-on-messages-and-report
Feel free to add any suggestions on that thread :)
H
Hasan Niyaz
Jerry (CEO): Thanks. I have upvoted.
If you can add 'priority status and/or escalation status' on these would be good as well along with rule that can automate the status depending on the how long a conversation has been opened, unattended etc. This will enable managers to ensure QoS of his team.
Load More
→