How to easily collect your Customers Christmas Closures

So I was speaking to a user the other day and they were talking about their Christmas closures and they were having quite a lot of trouble or, you know, it was a bit of a pain in the backside to call each and every one of their clients and find out their closure dates and everything else.

I made a suggestion to them and they were like, well, that's amazing.

Can you actually share that process with me?

So I thought, well, rather than just share it with them. I thought I’d share it with everyone.

I think there are lots of business owners that are quite stressed when it comes to this time of year especially when you've got clients closing over the Christmas and New Year break.

As you’d know, some clients you have to deliver reduced services to, extra trading hours or even no services across the break.

It can be quite a frustrating time when you've got 30 or 40 clients to collect that information from.

It can be a bit of a headache for the month.

So an easy way to do that is actually to create a Google Form. So you then send a form with all your questions that you need to know to your client for them to complete.

And once they populate that, the completed forms data is pushed directly into a Google spreadsheet. You can then capture what time they close on Christmas Eve? What date the come back if they close and even if they have any additional services they would like completed while they are away.

Do they want their carpets cleaning while they're away? Do they want their windows cleaned while they're closed, all those kinds of things they can answer in a nice form. The client just submits it and then it goes straight into a spreadsheet.

Which really then helps you look at what your resource requirements are across that period when it's all in one spot.

1. So to get started open Google Sheet, maybe name it Christmas Closures or something similar. Then click Insert>Form and a Google Form opens in a New Tab.
2. Add all your questions
3. Once you’ve done all that we want to send it to our customers using the form link. So whether you use MailChimp, HubSpot CRM, Active Campaign or you're just using old outlook and BBCing all your customers on a mass email, if you can copy the link and put some nice wording around it, then everyone gets sent the form with the press of one button.
4. Once your Customers receive the forms and complete them, the results will automatically appear in the Google Sheet you created.

There are a few mandatory items that we want to make sure we ask the client such as their:

• Company Name
• Contact Name
• Email
• Phone Number
• Premises Address etc

Then simply ask them, “Are you closing over the Christmas and New Year Period?” and ask for the info that is critical for you to be able to easily plan your teams schedule across the coming weeks.

So you could imagine if that goes to all 40, 50 or a 100 of your clients, we've captured all our Customers closure details into one spreadsheet.

Now this same process could be done using a survey tool like Survey Monkey or most online forms really. Many of them will capture all form fills in one location, so check out the forms or survey tools that work for your business and the tools you currently use.