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IXACT Contact’s full-service updates make building relationships a breeze

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Customer relationship management solution IXACT Contact has undergone some upgrades of late, primarily doubling down on ways to assist users in maximizing its many effective features.

The company has expanded its concierge program for new clients.

A smart retention strategy, this full-service approach keeps the majority of the on-boarding process with IXACT, allowing its on-call team to upload contacts, create email campaigns, help agents set performance goals and get websites published, among other aspects of getting started.

For the more hands-on agents and brokers, IXACT’s Setup Wizard is a 15-step process of getting a few basics up and going, such as an email header, business information, and how you want the database to handle contacts’ annual and holiday reminders. The user handles the rest.

The Keep In Touch Coach is a Buffini-inspired feature bent on ensuring agent-desired achievements are top-of-mind at all times.

Using historic averages for such metrics as annual gross commission income and total listings taken, for example, an ongoing dynamic report is generated that tells the user what it’ll take in each metric to hit their marks.

I’ve always been a fan of these built-in self-assessment and goal-setting tools. As I saw first-hand while demoing the updates, they make it easy to understand how the little things impact income, and they allow agents to measure the intimidating notion of annual income success with a ruler, not a yard stick.

There’s an updated Business Pipeline in the CRM now, too, which includes a recommendation rubric for surfacing leads more in need of immediate action.

The Social Stream is prominent upgrade to IXACT Contact. For an extra few bucks a month, the company offers access to more than 30 recognized media sources, from which they draw relevant content for auto-sharing to social media and for email campaigns.

Users can choose what specific news articles and outlets they’d like to share, such as CNN, Forbes or HGTV, decide how often it should send, and the software will handle it from there. Manual campaigns can be built, too, and it is possible to post multiple times per day.

As an added bit of branding, the articles shared are presented on a separate page with the agent’s name and call-to-cation, including a branded lead-capture form. In essence, a content landing page.

And lastly, also on the marketing front, IXACT has loaded new website templates. Designed with more cutting-edge responsive themes, the 16-page websites can also come completely ready for launch, from About Us copy to published blog content.

Provided content is derived from a few select copywriting relationships, not $1 per page content farms, according to Rich Gassenbeek, IXACT Contact’s co-founder and EVP.

Remember that software and CRM products in particular are always evolving. What you may not have seen in a product a few years ago could very well be what they do best today.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.