How to build an effective customer follow-up system

Even if you have the best sales and customer service teams possible, not following up can cost you. The average business loses around 4% of customers every month or around a third each year. That means even a small gap in your follow-up process may push customers to investigate competitors.

If you’re looking to design a better customer follow-up system, this guide explains everything you can do to have a better strategy.

7-step framework to building a better customer follow-up system

Customers ready to jump ship, lost business, and negative reviews — oh my. Thankfully, steering the ship back in the right direction isn’t an impossible task. 

Here are seven steps to set up a more effective customer follow-up system. 

1. Set goals for your follow-up system

Maybe your team is looking to increase your customer retention rates or boost annual revenue. Perhaps you want to improve response times, delight existing customers, and take a more proactive approach to customer relations. Either way, you need to create SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.

Here are some tips for setting realistic, measurable objectives:

• Clearly define your goal without leaving the scope up to interpretation. Instead of saying, ‘I want to boost sales,’ try rephrasing to, ‘I want to get 10 businesses that have 100+ employees to try our product or service in the next three months.’
• Determine your metrics and the time period for success. Do you plan on reviewing and reassessing after one month? Three months? Are you tracking success by the number of phone calls or conversions or something else?
• Be realistic about how much you can accomplish. For example, if you average three new customers per month, it’s probably not feasible in the next quarter to acquire 80 more. You may want to look back on existing data to make informed decisions about your goals and capacity.

2. Re-evaluate your tech stack — do you need more than just CRM software? 

Once you set SMART goals, you need the right tools for your follow-up system.

If you don’t already have customer relationship management, or CRM, software, now is the time to consider making a purchase. CRMs help you manage customer data and create labels for each contact so you can more easily understand their needs.

A few other helpful tools include:

• Task management software: Helps ensure your team is consistently following up with customers and meeting daily goals.
• A sales pipeline tool: Lets you dig deeper into how sales reps are following up with potential customers.
• A business phone solution: Helps you build better customer relationships over phone calls, answer text messages, and automate parts of your follow-up process.

Acquiring new software is only part of the tech stack evaluation process. You also need to identify where your team currently has bottlenecks. That way, you can determine whether customer information is spread across too many tools or interactions are siloed.

3. Identify the contact properties your team needs

Once you’ve reassessed your tech stack, consider what properties may be missing from the communication tools you use. Remember: customers don’t want to repeat their information multiple times. According to a global survey of 5,000 consumers, over 60% expect companies to have their up-to-date information when transferred between departments. 

You can start by looking at the properties you already have before comparing them to specific details you may be missing. Ask yourself: what do you need to know and document about your customers that can deliver a better customer experience?

There are a number of ways to gather and display new contact properties for your team. First, you could set up a labeling system that defines the type of follow up depending on:

• The size of the team
• The source of the lead
• Next steps for the caller
• Whether the customer should have priority customer support

Second, you can look into automation sequences to instantly push contact information where it needs to go. In Quo, a business phone platform, you can create custom properties to document details that can help you nurture leads more deliberately. You can also push contact details to Quo from CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce. That way, your team has a single source of truth for all customer interactions.

4. Put in clear processes for ownership

Your customers don’t want to be seen as just a number. They want to know your team is actively working towards their goals. Clearly defined ownership for conversations helps prevent your team from duplicating their efforts or assuming someone else has it handled.

In Quo, you can create a task directly from any call or message. No switching to a separate app. The full conversation context stays with the task. That way,the assigned teammate knows exactly what the customer asked for, what was promised, and when the follow-up is due.

Let’s say a customer calls asking for a quote. You can spin up a task right inside that conversation, assign it to the right person, send a notification, and set a due date — all before you hang up. Your team gets a clear, shared view of every open follow-up: what’s open, who owns it, what’s due.

Shared numbers and inboxes do the rest of the work. Everyone can access the same contacts and conversations, leave internal notes when they pick something up, and reassign threads to a teammate if a shift changes or someone goes out of office. 

For trickier handoffs, internal threads let you tag a colleague and add context before passing the conversation over. That way, the next person isn’t starting from scratch.

5. Define how and when to follow up 

Now decide where, when, and how often your team reaches out. 

Pick your channels

Phone calls, texts, and emails are the three most common channels. You could also schedule video calls depending on your system. Most teams use a mix. 

For example, your sales team may prefer phone calls or text for lead follow-up, while your marketing team prefers personalized follow-up emails to drum up interest. All this should be noted in your task management system so team members know preferred follow-up methods. 

With Quo, formerly OpenPhone, you can leave notes under each contact’s properties so team members can instantly distinguish preferred channels. 

Set a follow-up frequency

A few best practices:

• Send instant follow-ups after a prospect becomes a customer, like a thank-you email after customers make a purchase
• Set expectations for a timely follow-up when customers need a more personal touch, like troubleshooting a problem or catching up on a service request
• Aim to follow up no later than 24 hours in all interactions — customers don’t like to be left waiting

Set clear expectations

You should avoid cold messages or following up out of the blue so you don’t catch customers at an awkward time. Here are some ways to create a timeline that works for teammates and customers alike:

• Set expectations by scheduling a time during an in-person chat or call
• Send a text message asking for a few dates or times that work best with your customer’s schedule
• Ensure your team is timely when following up with customers who are specifically asking to hear back from you by tagging them; in Quo you can use internal threads to do this 

Stay compliant

There are certain compliance requirements based on the medium you choose to follow up through. This means you need to consider and share guidelines with your team around:

• CAN-SPAM Act guidelines for email messages, which include clear opt-in and opt-out methods for customers. You’re on the hook for compliance even if you use a third-party email marketing company. Be sure to check that all your email templates follow CAN-SPAM guidelines
• TCPA requirements for text, which say customers must always consent to texts through paper or digital forms. However, there are two exceptions. You’re free to message a contact if they message you first and your response is relevant to the ongoing conversation. You can also initiate contact with a customer if you’ve established a prior relationship. For example, they’ve submitted their email address to download a white paper.

Just getting started with business phone calls or texts? Check out the requirements for SMS compliance and STIR/SHAKEN to make sure your team is compliant.

6. Automate to save time sending follow-ups

As your business starts to take on more customers, your need for follow-up messages may continue to grow. This means you need to find ways of managing repetitive work so your team can have more time to focus on more involved tasks.

Thankfully, there are many different ways to build automated customer service workflows into your follow-up system. Here are some automation features you can use with Quo:

• Set up auto-replies that instantly address customers if you miss their calls or texts. You can also have auto-replies set up when your team is off for the day.
• Scheduled messages to help you avoid messaging during dinner or in the middle of the night.
• Use templated messages or snippets to send follow-ups faster. Feel free to check out these sales text and customer service text examples you can save as templates.
• Trigger a text based on a deal stage change. Using HubSpot, you can instantly send a text once a customer progresses to the next level of your sales funnel. If you don’t want it to instantly go out, you can set it to send a short time afterwards by adding in a Zap delay. Since the sequence can be paused at any time, you don’t have to worry about unwanted messages going out without your knowledge.

You can save your team even more time by having even more automated options through Quo’s Zapier integration. For example, when a customer fills out a form on your website, they can instantly receive an appointment confirmation text letting them know it’s on your calendar.

7. Block dedicated time for following up

It’s easy to let the day get away from you, especially as a growing business that’s juggling many responsibilities. The fix is simple: put follow-up time on the calendar. 

• Block at least an hour in the middle or at the end of your workday. If your team is mostly on the phone, use Quo’s analytics dashboard to find your quietest hours and block them.
• Queue messages for your customer’s time zone, not yours. Make it easy with scheduled follow-up text messages in Quo. Surveys say the two best times to schedule follow-ups with customers are between 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM or 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM. 
• Measure what’s working. Watch for spikes in incoming calls or texts after a follow-up block. That’s the signal your effort is landing. 

To make the time count, lean on Quo’s AI call summaries. Every call gets an overview, action items, and a full transcript broken down by speaker and timestamp. Your team knows exactly what to follow up on without re-listening to anything.

5 Best customer follow-up system software

Here’s a quick overview of the best tools for building a customer follow-up system:

Tool	Best for	Starting price
Quo	Calls, texts, shared inboxes, and follow-up tasks in one place	$15 per user per month
HubSpot	Storing contact records and tracking deals through a pipeline	Free tier available; paid from $20 per month
Front	Email-heavy teams that want shared inboxes for support and sales	$25 per user per month
Freshdesk	Larger teams running a ticket-based support operation	Free tier available; paid from $19 per user per month
Zendesk	Omnichannel customer service tickets at scale	$19 per user per month

For the deep dive, check out our guide to the best customer communication management software. 

Quo: The most effective follow-up system for phone calls and texts

A great customer follow-up system can delight your clients, improve retention rates, and even create new leads. By designing a simplified and automated process for all team members to follow, you can rest assured customers receive the best you have to offer.

If your current follow-up software or business communication tools fall short of your goals, consider switching to a business phone solution. Quo lets you easily follow up with customers and give your team shared context. We make it easy to keep in touch with customers and save time while doing it, too:

• You can get unlimited calls to the US and Canada on every plan
• Every user on your account comes with one free local US, Canadian, or North American toll-free number
• You can send free SMS and MMS messages to customers in the US and Canada
• Everyone on your team can send international calls and texts with transparent rates
• You can easily streamline your incoming calls and messages by setting up  business hours, IVR phone menus, and auto-replies
• Save time following up by easily reviewing voicemail transcriptions
• You can set up on-demand or automatic call recording so you can listen back on past interactions and get context quickly

Curious to see how Quo can help you build better follow-up systems for your customers? You can try it out with your team during our seven-day free trial.

FAQs