Account managers, customer success managers, client relationship managers… Whichever moniker your organization uses for this position, these colleagues play an essential role in your business’s success.
These individuals communicate more frequently with clients than anyone else. Once the sales team has moved on to hunt their next whale, account managers are still working with those customers, listening to their feedback while shepherding their onboarding and expansion.
Account management is the first line of support when your customers have trouble and your consistent eyes and ears to detect potential challenges and opportunities. But to do their job well, account management needs as much context and background information as possible about each client engagement. In most cases, official contracts and other documentation are only a small fraction of the information account teams need to best service their customers. What they really need are the emails.
Email’s role in account management
Your customers’ journey begins all the way from the initial cold emails sent at the top of the sales funnel. It winds its way through a variety of email exchanges with the sales team, pre-sales technical inquiries, contract negotiations, implementation schedules, and support requests, not to mention billing invoices, payment receipts, shipping notifications, and renewal notices.
All these communications paint a picture of the many ways a given customer has interacted with your organization. It illustrates when they’ve been satisfied and delighted, but also when they’ve been frustrated or complained or merely had a new feature request. Emails contain the blow-by-blow history account managers need and insight into the key stakeholders on the client side. But this kaleidoscope of communications likely includes many messages that didn’t include the client in question’s current account manager, yet they’re the ones who need this context most.
In a perfect world, they’d have a comprehensive view of every message sent both internally and externally related to each client in a single, searchable location for quick access to historical information. For organizations that have adopted Microsoft 365, the best place to share these messages in a collaborative environment is in Microsoft Teams or SharePoint.
One place to share them all
Microsoft Teams or SharePoint is the ideal location to share emails, attachments, and other related files for each client. Everyone with permission to see this important data can access it from any location and it remains in a single, centralized location, which also minimizes version control issues.
At a minimum, there should be one Teams channel or SharePoint directory for each client that contains all related files and emails. Your organization might further subdivide those files and messages into subfolders for different types of information, such as one folder for legal, one for financials, and another for support.
Regardless of these nuances, having a single, go-to location for everything related to a particular engagement makes account management both more productive—since they’re not spending lots of time hunting for the info they need—and better able to serve customers quickly and accurately since they have all previous communications at their fingertips. This is particularly helpful when an account gets transferred to a different owner or someone must cover for the customer’s primary contact.
Getting colleagues to actually share email messages
Until you’re in the habit, sharing emails to SharePoint or Microsoft Teams is a significant behavior change that can be easy to forget during a busy workday. And, once the moment has passed, it’s even less likely that someone will go back after the fact and share those messages. That’s where harmon.ie comes in.
This Outlook plug-in makes sharing emails to Teams or SharePoint a snap. With harmon.ie, end users can simply drag and drop emails directly from their inbox to a location on SharePoint or Teams without ever leaving Outlook. With a user experience this simple, everyone can make sharing emails part of their regular routine without having to add a completely new step to their regular workflows.
harmon.ie automatically extracts metadata about each shared email message, such as who it was sent to, who sent it, the date, the subject, and whether there were attachments. As an added bonus, end users can add additional metadata tags for every file or email they share to provide even more context. harmon.ie will prompt users to populate these fields as part of the drag-and-drop process, which greatly increases compliance and gives account managers even more tools to search and sift through client-related emails to get the details they need.
Arm account managers with the information—and tools—they need
To be the trusted partner your customers deserve, account management must be responsive and accurate when clients reach out, answering inquiries that take into account previous communications, commitments, and complaints. Empowering account managers by giving them searchable, sortable, contextualized information will increase customer satisfaction while boosting response times and worker productivity. It turns institutional knowledge into an asset anyone can mine.
With consistent sharing to SharePoint or Teams and a tool that lets workers do everything from their Outlook inbox, account managers can quickly assess the full situation, understand the account background and history, and solve more customer issues without needing to rope in others from sales, product, finance, or support unless they’re truly needed. This means quicker turnaround times for customers and fewer interruptions for other staff.
Stop asking account managers to support customers with a limited view of the engagement and start using harmon.ie today to realize the full potential of Teams or SharePoint. Boost customer satisfaction, increase retention, and maximize your team’s productivity with harmon.ie.
