The beauty of Google Sites is that it is secure and collaborative. That balance allows for opportunities to work and present your services in an experiential fashion with your customers.
One of the areas where Google Sites can work to provide a personal and customized branded experience for your customers is with proposals and reporting. This format traditionally is sent in an email with a pdf or Microsoft Word format. However, you can do more with a Google site in the way of presentation and working with your prospective customers. Here is how you can set this up as a process and system for your team:
- Customize a site. Make a specific site for your customer. Provide their branding, especially their logo, in the header information. Use domain mapping to provide a unique and memorable subdomain to their site.
- Record journal entries. Use the Announcements type page on your site to record reverse chronological documentation of your engagement with a customer. Insert graphical images and make each post a comment which invites collaboration. They can leave a comment for each post.
- Measure visits and responses. Subscribe to any site changes to be notified of any comments to the content you post. Also, use Google Analytics to measure your visitors, especially if several people are beneficiaries of the information.
- Integrate Google Spreadsheets. Anything which requires calculations and graphs should be done within a Google Spreadsheet. Insert these as custom pages and allow the data to be navigated in the context of your presentation.
- Provide checklists. Checklists can help your customer see what you are going to do with the data. Maintain a checklist of items of actions you will take to improve on the metrics.
Over time, your Google Site becomes a hub to track and interpret information on projects or systems you may be measuring. It is valuable because it has your advice and interpretation of the data. It is more than a sterile report from a system.
What are some ways you can use Google Sites to serve your customers using these strategies? Feel free to comment.
