Customer management is one of the cornerstones for success in business. The process not only brings new prospects for growth but also helps companies minimize churn by facilitating customer experience. Act is one of many customer management tools in the market that facilitate customer management via marketing automation but somehow fails to serve the purpose as they lack personal touch.
Customers have moved beyond explaining their queries to chatbots. Furthermore, bombarding your customers with automated messages and emails is simply going to annoy them rather than adding value to their experience. This is why growing companies have started looking for customer management solutions to replace Act or tools with similar functionality. Some use these “conversational” customer management tools in conjunction with ACT.
Here are the 5 best Act alternatives for customer management that you should consider in the year 2020.
1. uShare.to
uShare is an award-winning communication platform and one of the best Act alternatives to consider in the year 2020. One of the downsides of using Act is that the platform relies on a monotonous and impersonal way of communicating with customers – automated emails.
uShare.to is a “conversational” customer management platform that enables you to reach out to your clients via mobile texting, chat, audio, and video conferences. You can also reach out to your customers via email if needed.
uShare enables you to step up your game by facilitating lead nurturing via communication tools. You can be in touch with your leads across their customer journey via chat, audio, and video conferencing. Furthermore, uShare empowers you to engage visitors on your website by allowing them to initiate a video chat session with your agents right on your website. A more efficient way of engaging your leads compared to cold emailing don’t you think?
With uShare, each of your customers has a personalized portal of their own. This is their personal space for sharing product/service concerns and receiving learning materials such as links, notes, and files that are kept organized for future reference. Comparatively, uShare is more feature-packed than Act when it comes to customer management.
2. PipeDrive
If you’re looking for Act alternatives, PipeDrive is another tool to consider. With respect to features, PipeDrive is almost identical to Act. However, unlike the aforesaid replacement, PipeDrive adds value when it comes to customer experience as the tool is more inclined towards providing its users with a lead nurturing platform. Furthermore, PipeDrive enables you to generate quality leads by adding custom web forms on your website.
With PipeDrive, you can create custom lead funnels. You can also track progress by assigning values, win probability, and expected closing date. The leads can be imported in bulk using spreadsheets and managed using a single platform.
PipeDrive’s email integration makes it easy to track conversations with clients. The platform automatically syncs your contacts, leads, to give you overall visibility. Furthermore, having all your prospects in one place also improves your productivity. Overall, a decent Act alternative.
3. Nimble
Supporting over 160 external app connections, Nimble empowers its users to automatically sync contacts and leads from social media, email, and calendar appointments. Nimble serves as a centralized hub of information when it comes to managing contacts and extracting customers’ interaction history.
Nimble’s mass emailing feature allows you to create clusters or groups according to customer characteristics or interactions to facilitate bulk actions. This may come in handy if you’re looking for an organized mass emailing tool. Nimble sends smart alerts to help you with the follow-ups. The frequency of the reminders can be set to weekly, monthly, and, quarterly.
Nimble enables you to keep a close eye on your lead nurturing process by giving you a visual representation of your pipelines. This helps track your team’s performance by aligning it with the frequency of deals successfully closed. Furthermore, with different templates available, Nimble enables you to send personalized emails and track responses. The platform also allows you to track different KPIs via analytics.
By downloading Nimble’s browser extension, you can manage customers on-the-go from anywhere in the world. Nimble’s Prospector can also be integrated with your mailbox, business apps, and social media platforms. Compared to Act, Nimble is a bit more organized compared to its counterpart when it comes to customer management.
4. Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell is your one-stop solution for sending bulk emails, cold calling, and scheduling meetings with your customers. Sell is designed to capitalize on interactions – converting visitors into leads. By giving customer account insights to sales representatives, the platform significantly contributes to your conversions.
The platform helps you stay focused by enabling you to prioritize high-value leads in the sales pipeline. The pipeline can be customized as per your specific needs – making it simpler to filter and query your prospect list. You can also create clusters and segments to filter your leads as per customer characteristics.
The platform also keeps track of customer interactions – keeping you updated with deal history. With drag-and-drop simplicity, Sell enables you to create dashboards, track customer interactions, and take actions based on detailed insights and forecasts for your business. The tool’s external integrations enable you to connect other business-specific tools or build your own via an apps framework.
5. Commence
Commence is a low-cost Act alternative for customer management. The tool might not be feature-packed like some of the aforesaid alternatives but can be considered a viable option for small businesses that are just getting started with sales automation and customer management. Some salient features offered by the tool are lead nurturing, contact management, customer activity tracking, campaign insights, customer service, and project management.
Commence enables you to create customer profiles – giving you an organized view of client interactions and touchpoints at your fingertips. Furthermore, you can automate your actions based on a variety of data points – designing and dispatching messages catering to specific customer needs. Commence’s sales tracking system allows you to track high revenue accounts to help keep your eye on the ball.
Gauge outcomes against efforts with Commence’s customizable sales reports – facilitating you to track your marketing activities and KPIs. Customer service information paired with sales insights enables you to make data-driven decisions and capitalize on your strengths.
You can create tickets on behalf of clients regarding their specified concerns. Commence automatically notifies your customers once an issue has been resolved. In addition, Commence’s ticket management system enables your sales representatives to access all customer information organized via a single platform. All-in-all a good Act alternative worth considering.
Wrap Up
As you can see, “customer management” is an ambiguous term which can be used to cover many different types of tools. Hopefully, one of the above helps you to solve your specific customer management challenges.
