Customer list workflows and preferred contact times: work through your customers regularly, at the right time for each

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Your customer lists can now power your regular workflows: a recurring checklist your team works through, customer by customer, whether that’s a weekly call round, a monthly visit to key accounts, or checking in on new customers after their first order.

Pick any customer list, including a dynamic one such as customers Breww predicts are overdue to reorder, and Breww turns it into a fresh list to work through every week or month, keeps track of who has been done, and puts everything your team needs for each customer on one page. Your team works through the entire list, completing tasks and taking orders, without ever leaving that page, so they stay focused and move through it faster.

Here’s what’s new:

A fresh list to work through for each period. Edit a customer list and answer “yes” to “Would you like to create a workflow for this list?”, then choose a set day each week, over each week, or over each month. At the start of each period Breww opens a checklist of the customers on the list at that moment, with a task for the people assigned to it. Read more about customer list workflows.

See who needs attention first. Each customer’s row shows their main contact, any orders this period and when they were last contacted, and flags customers who are overdue, at risk of churning or due for an order in the next 7 days, based on Breww’s order predictions.

Never leave the page. Open a customer from their row, and a sidebar shows their contacts, recent activity, orders and products. Log what you did, update their details, copy a previous order, or create a new one in a pop-up, all without leaving the list; the row updates as you go, so you’re straight on to the next customer.

Workflow items can complete themselves when the customer orders. Mark customers as completed or declined as you go, or, where the aim is to win an order, let Breww mark them as completed automatically as soon as they place one in the period.

Contact customers at the right time. Record the days and times each customer and lead prefers to be contacted, or import them for your existing customers from a spreadsheet. Workflows list customers in the order their windows open, and “Only contactable now” shows who you can reach right now. Read more about preferred contact times.

Made for long lists. Search by name, postcode, tag or contact, and switch to a compact view to see more customers at once.

[barry-labendz]

It would be great to have the ability to select a preferred method along with day and time for each customer in a work flow. we currently have days and contact methods organized on contacts/customers as tags.

Is it also possible to include this information in the new customer form as customer fields rather than a custom entry we input?

[barry-labendz]

It appears that saved filters applied to customer lists (excluding closed accounts, account types) are not reflected in the work flows so companies which are normally excluded are reappearing.

[luke]

Thanks for trying workflows out so quickly, and for the feedback!

On the customers reappearing: a workflow uses exactly the same filter as its customer list, so your saved filters are applied. The difference is timing. When each period starts, Breww takes the customers matching the list at that moment and turns them into that period’s checklist. That list stays fixed for the rest of the period. It isn’t re-checked each time you open it the way the customer list is.

So if a customer was updated in such a way that removed them from a list (e.g. a new order or a tag change), or you changed the list’s filter, after the current period started, they’ll still show in this period’s workflow. They’ll drop out when the next period starts. In the meantime, you can mark them as declined to clear them from the checklist. This is how it intentionally works.

One other thing that can cause this: customers added to a list by hand are always included, whatever the list’s filter says. That’s true on the customer list itself too.

If neither of those explains what you’re seeing, let us know which list and which customers, and we’ll take a closer look (you’ll need to open a support ticket so we can access your account data).

On your first comment, the preferred contact method and having these as fields on the new customer form are great ideas. Could you post each of them as its own topic in Ideas & feature requests? Suggestions made in replies on announcement threads like this one tend to get lost. A topic of their own means we can track them properly, and other breweries can vote and add their thoughts. The same goes for workflows updating mid-period when a customer stops matching, if that would help you.

Thanks again!