5 Templates to Improve Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

by Staff Writer

The success of your business depends on your ability to offer clients speed, consistency, and a high level of quality — and to do it again day after day and quarter after quarter. But as more businesses recognize the importance of providing seamless customer experiences across the supply chain, delivering customer satisfaction is no longer a competitive differentiator — it’s a business imperative.

While each customer is unique, there are common tasks and functions involved in managing these vital relationships, whether you work with just a few customers or hundreds of thousands. An ability to implement standard processes to guide each stage of the customer relationship can improve your ability to best serve each individual customer and also help you scale your business.
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To help you meet your customers’ needs at every stage, we’ve designed these five templates and template sets to get you up and running in Smartsheet in no time.
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1. Customer Onboarding Template Set

Successful customer onboarding involves the collection of key information and identification of tasks that will allow you to start delivering results quickly. To increase efficiency and reduce risks, it’s important to be able to collect and manage all of the relevant customer data and project-related information in an organized, standardized way. This customer onboarding template set includes a centralized customer onboarding hub for at-a-glance status information and easy access to related resources, along with templates for itemizing and tracking tasks and timelines, to help you optimize your customer onboarding.
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2. Client Implementation Template Set

Track all of the information related to implementing client projects with one robust template set. Client implementation templates include a team dashboard as well as sheets and reports that improve the ease and visibility of managing complex client projects. These include real-time status reports, a user task report to track team members’ assigned work across multiple projects, implementation and handoff sheets, and a summary metrics sheet to help you keep track of the entire project.
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3. Contract Management Template Set

Your contracts are a roadmap for your relationship with customers, encompassing deliverables, prices, and governing terms and conditions. To minimize risks and realize the full value of your contracts, it’s important to keep a close eye on your agreements, including key milestones noted there. To ensure the health of your organization, it’s also important to have overarching visibility into your full contract portfolio. This contract management template set gives you the tools to do both, with contract management dashboards that display contract values and statuses; rollup sheets; a sheet to collect, track and maintain all your contracts; and reporting to highlight contracts with expiry dates in the next 30 days.
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4. Request Management Template Set

To keep customers happy, it’s important to be able to respond to requests and concerns in a timely manner. But without the tools to manage requests in a systematic and organized fashion, customer asks can fall to the wayside, leaving their needs unmet. This request management template set provides a visual, organized way to reduce the risk of unhappy customers with rollup dashboards that display open requests, key metrics around request fulfillment and other data, a request form and tracker sheet, a metrics sheet, and report for displaying information related to specific requests.
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5. Customer Feedback Form Template

How do you keep customers coming back for more? By seeking feedback about their experience, acknowledging their insights, and implementing their suggestions when it makes business sense to do so. Whether you embed the form on your website or provide customers with a direct link, this customer feedback form template ensures this last step doesn’t get missed. You can even set up automated alerts that let you know when you have collected new responses so that you can more quickly respond to customers.

Your business can’t succeed without happy, loyal customers. And while managing the various aspects of the customer lifecycle can be complex, these templates can simplify your processes and reduce the challenge of creating satisfied repeat customers.

Source: Smartsheet Blog
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