How to engage your customers with Odoo

Retain users and attract visitors to your site

As we have been showing you, Odoo has tools for a wide range of business needs. In this article, we’ll focus on how you can engage with your website users and attract new visitors.

Attract

Once you have your website up and running, you need to direct traffic to it. In order to do that, many businesses turn to online campaigns, such as online ads in search engines, social media and other websites. In recent years, content creation has been a marketing strategy used across all areas and types of businesses.

A blog is one of the tools used by companies to create their own content. Odoo provides its user with a blogging platform for their website - just like in your Odoo site, you are able to easily add and edit all types of content.


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The Odoo Blog has features that enable you to provide a good experience for your visitors and for your employees. You and your employees can easily edit and add new content to the blog, authors can be identified in posts and run A/B tests. As you start typing, you can see automatically how the page will look like - how the images are placed, the text size or where call-to-action is supposed to show.

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 Track your blog performance, as well as individual posts with link tracking and Google Analytics integration.


 Visitors can easily find information thanks to tags, view it on mobile devices, share in social media and comment posts. They are able to highlight sentences to generate Tweets and sign-up for newsletters.


 With a modern platform like this, now all you need is to develop attention-grabbing content. Write about topics that are important and related to your business, but above all, your content must be constructed to be appealing to your audience.


 To properly maintain your blog, in the Website app, the Blog menu provides the tools you need for back-end management. Go to Blogs and create how many blogs you need, or import one from another platform. Now, you can view information about your posts and tags used.

Another feature to connect with your customers on your website is the forum. Create a community where your customers engage with each other, with you and vice versa. Your customers can take initiative and ask questions or participate in discussions, search a topic with tags and filters, or sort them by other conditions.

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Like any other forum out there, you are able to moderate discussions to make sure everyone is acting accordingly. Members of your forum can personalize their profiles, gain points, badges access more tools as a reward for being an active participant.

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The forum menu can be found in the menu bar of the Website app. Create a new forum and tick the boxes for the features (questions, links and discussions) you want to be enabled. View forum posts on the Forum Posts page, create documentation and documentation posts in the respective pages.

Interact

By now it’s general knowledge that customer service is an important factor in retaining customers and preventing them from running into the waiting arms of your competitors.

A customer’s experience is influenced by the product, the website navigation and interactions with you. In 2017, a study conducted by American Express found that 33% of customers back out of making purchases immediately if they have a bad experience and 66% will seriously consider switching to a new provider due to poor customer service.

That affects your sales as well as your reputation with the general public. Perceiving your company as “bad” will influence potential clients and possibly chase away the customers you worked so hard for. On the other hand, a great customer experience inspires loyalty. They focus on how they are treated instead of the price.

The Odoo Helpdesk module is aimed to improve your business’ customer service. With this tool you can improve your customers’ satisfaction by receiving information or help from you - these calls will later turn into valuable information about your products or services. 

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You have a dashboard that gives you an overview of tickets, your teams and their respective tasks. In the dashboard, users are able to access tickets (new and closed) with kanban view by clicking on the Tickets button in the Team form.

Mark tickets as urgent by clicking the star icons to indicate the level of urgency. Select the circle icon in kanban view to change a ticket status to Blocked or Ready for stage.

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Odoo Helpdesk comes with a default team called “Support” - it can be edited in the Settings page, under Configuration, where new teams are created. Create a new team and tick all the boxes relevant to a team be able to do their job.

This action sets how customers will submit tickets (email, live chat, website form and API) or select the assignment method of tickets to team members. Take a careful look at the options and decide what’s best for your business.

Just as the name suggests, the All Tickets page displays all the tickets received. They can be filtered by customer, assignee, priority and stage. Your team members are able to select a ticket and click Assign to Me button to become responsible for that task if the assignment method set is manual.

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Define SLA Policies in the page with the same name.

The Reporting menu provides insights into your teams’ performance.

 


Record the time spent on a ticket by going to the ticket’s form, select the Timesheets tab and add information. Note that you need to have Timesheet on Ticket (Settings) option enabled first in order to log time spent. 

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If you want to invoice the time spent on tickets, first, you have to go back to Settings and on the Timesheets option, click on the link. Hit Create and Edit to make a new project for the Helpdesk. Save and create a new service in the Sales app.

Select the product type as Service and unit of measure as Hours. Add other relevant information and click on the Invoicing tab at the bottom.

There, click on the radio buttons for Timesheets on tasks and Create a task in an existing project - choose the project previously created for the Helpdesk in the new field. 

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Now, when you receive a new ticket, make a sales order for the service created, confirm the sale and save. If you check the Helpdesk project in the Projects app, you’ll see that a new task from that sales order was created.

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Link the new task with the ticket by selecting the ticket in the Helpdesk app and in the Task field, select the sale order. In the Timesheets tab, insert the number of hours spent.

Finally, to create an invoice, go back to Sales, locate the corresponding sale order and click on the Create Invoice button.

As mentioned above, the Live Chat app can be used as a mean for customers to submit tickets. This app takes the form of a small window in the website on the bottom right of your screen.


Chat in real-time with your customers online and while you’re working on other tasks. You can be taking care of sales orders while talking to a new customer because the chat can be accessed in other modules.

Personalise the chat window’s look and behaviour. The app also has smileys to make your conversation more dynamic and ensure the person on the other side is not talking with a computer. People tend to prefer talking to another person as the issues grow in complexity.

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Your dashboard displays your channels. Create custom channels for different countries or agents here. Click the create button and insert information in the new window. In order for it to be visible on the site, you have to select the button in the top right corner of the form.


It’ll direct you to your website where you have to toggle the page from Unpublished to Published. Disable the chat window by doing the opposite action.

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Configure canned responses to common questions on the Canned Responses page from the Configuration menu.

Just click create and enter information in the fields.

After you’re done talking, review the entire conversation through chat history and check your performance from the evaluation system. These are available through the Reports menu - view session statistics and operator analysis as well.