3 Evernote Tips for Effective Communication
Customer Relationship Management goes hand in hand with entrepreneurship, no doubt you’ve noticed how complicated day-to-day customer communication has become. Effective customer communication no longer uses the proverbial front door like it did in days past.
Email is only one of any number of channels customers use to communicate, from face-to-face meetings, Skype, Slack, phone calls and texts, the seemingly endless channels we use for business are made only more complex by the fact that there are humans involved. Humans have commitments to be honoured, agreements to be followed up on, signed documents to be archived, relationship milestones to be tracked, anniversaries to be congratulated and birthdays to be remembered.
Evernote is an ideal solution for effective communication and improved customer relationship management
The majority of today’s entrepreneurs, business owners or working professionals have a tenuous handle on customer communication, at best. It’s not that we’re unaware that better systems, approaches and methods should be explored... it’s simply a matter of “not enough hours in the day” – taking the time to stop, and rethink how we manage customer communication is a luxury few can afford.
Using Evernote for more effective customer communication
I want to touch on three ‘usual suspects’ of customer interaction, as well as outline how Evernote can serve as an ideal solution for upping your communication game and ensuring that you don't drop the ball when it comes to managing your most important business relationships.
Effective Communication Tip #1.
Keep the important emails and ditch the rest, guilt-free.
Email clients are notoriously mediocre when it comes to finding the content you’re looking for. Most entrepreneurs resign themselves to relying on email to archive mission-critical correspondence, knowing full well that when the time comes to look up a critical piece of detail minutes before a big meeting, the odds are not stacked in their favour.
Here’s why you should quit relying on your sh*tty email client and lean on Evernote instead for email archiving and data retrieval:
- Search for inline content as well as any attached files. Depending on the Evernote tier* you’re on, Evernote will include the data inside attached files (e.g PDF, Word documents) in search results, dramatically improving the odds of finding exactly what you’re looking for
- Access content offline. If you’ve ever experienced the sinking feeling of trying to bring up an email, only to realise that you’re offline, then you'll appreciate this feature. Evernote stores selected notes** on the device, ensuring that you’re able to bring up the content you need, regardless of whether you’re online or not
Effective Communication Tip #2. Record, Transcribe and Store Important Meetings.. Forever.
It’s a damn shame that many great ideas, important points, action items and follow ups that come up in business meetings fade away in the days, weeks and months that follow.
I’d argue that nothing is more important for effective customer communication than making your customer feel heard. Ensuring that you capture a meeting accurately, while remaining present and attentive is a challenge for even the most experience professional – Evernote’s audio recording function frees you up to be fully engaged in your meeting, assured that you’ll have a clearly audible record to review and summarise later.
Effective Communication Tip #3. Track Your Commitments.
You know those ultra-organised types who never overlook an appointment, or miss a deadline? I can’t stand those guys. I do admire them though, reliability is the glue which holds customer relationships together, and Evernote comes to the party in helping you deliver on your commitments.
Here are a few tips to leverage Evernote and keep track of the promises you make:
- If you’ve just sent off an email to a client, forward that email into Evernote using your custom Evernote email address
- Assign a tag to your imported note, for example “commitments”
- If required, use the Reminders feature to assign a date to the note. This will remind you when your deadline date is near.
Check out this article for a detailed overview of the Reminders feature! - By searching for your assigned tag (e.g “commitments”) you can quickly bring up all notes which share this tag across all of your notebooks
Bonus Tip!
Knowing when a note was created in Evernote is often handy information to refer to. If you want to ‘stamp’ any note with the date and/or time it was created, follow these simple steps:
- Place your cursor in the body area of the note
- Click Format > Insert Date to insert today’s date into your note
- Click Format > Insert Time to insert the current time into your note
- You can then use Evernote’s text editing features to style and format your text
