ConvergeHub Blog for 2015

Social Media Support Services for every company

Year or two ago 62 percent businesses thought they could do without social media. Today all of them have an active social media service channel. That’s because whether the customers are younger tech-savvy ones or not, social media phenomenon is on all. And as a company, you need to target this dynamic ground for more customer acquisition and retention. This blog explains the importance of social customer service and gives an easy way out to start delivering it.

Social Media Support Services for every company is the latest final stage to conqure. The last couple of years have seen a tremendous change in the business landscape. One of them is the change of attitude towards social media. Today, social customer service is no longer just the focus of the large enterprises. It has caught the attention of the small but highly innovative companies too.

However, while the large enterprises are going great guns in it, the SMEs are grappling. Reason simply being: the wrong use of social media platform

For instance, a report states that 42 percent small and medium-sized companies are using social media as a marketing channel for outbound publishing and promotion. In such a scenario, either they are completely ignoring the customers’ posts/comments or are redirecting customers off social media to more traditional service channels.

Resultant of which, SMEs are failing to meet customer expectations and indirectly contributing to a negative brand reputation.

Why is social customer service critical?

Let’s say: You have employed a large support team to answer every email and phone query. You are confident that your service quality will now improve, considering the fact that your support team is all prepped up to give your customers the prompt support they deserve.

But then all this will only happen when your customers get in touch with your team through phone/email.

What if they don’t?

Industry reports suggest that more than 90 percent of customers prefer social media to phone/email when it comes to expressing service requests. Only a fraction of customers actually get to shooting an email or calling the support hotline. Majority find it easy and quick to post the service query in some channel like Facebook and Twitter. And these posts automatically grab the attention of the prospects and influence their opinion right away!

So if you reply late to any of the customers’ posts, the perception obviously becomes off-putting. Prospective customers find you sluggish and incompetently agile. Which means, they move back from the sales funnel, taking more time to convert to an actual paying customer

It’s precisely an upshot of this that you have many fast growing small and medium-sized businesses prioritize social media for rendering service. According to recent research from Forrester – over 67% of companies rated social customer service as a competitive differentiator and tagged it as the most pressing short-term priority.

How can you go “social”?

Taking your customer support to Facebook and Twitter profiles is a matter of minutes. Managing it is the real challenge. The problem is that now your agents need to juggle between different applications to manage social media profiles along with supporting your customers through email and phone. Imagine the time and productivity loss that will take place?

As a result, you need to bring together all the knowledge in these disparate sources into one place so that you can give your reps a much clearer and unified view. And this is only possible when you have dedicated software that is capable of monitoring social media coalesced with existing customer support channels.

CRM Cloud Software with active social media management capabilities is excellent in doing this – Read below:

CRM: The Complete Customer Support Solution, minus the Complications

The new age Web based CRM solutions are the one-stop customer service solution. They enable you to take your support everywhere your customers go. Right from traditional customer service channels to social media – these solutions streamline all, making it easy for the users to manage and monitor the mediums together.

For example, using any of the leading CRM solutions, your agents can directly answer the customer on social media without leaving their CRM portal. That way, your agents can use the knowledge/data stored in the CRM repository to give prompt yet accurate replies. Result: not only do issues get addressed quick but resolved fast too. How cool is that?

And most significantly, from within the CRM application, your agents can cater to customers across traditional and social mediums from wherever they are. That means 24/7 service

So whether your customers throw their fists up in public to get due attention or tear apart your service – your team do not get stuck anywhere. Using the CRM (data and technology) they can post a satisfying reply to every comment to give a happy ending to all issues.

Dealing with an ineffective Sales Force Automation module in the CRM?

Sales Force Automation module integrated within CRM has been no less than a boom to the small and medium-sized businesses. Relieved from the annoyance of handling two separate standalone systems, they have one integrated platform to merge sales with other business process. But the recent times show a conflicting picture. There has been a steady increase in the number of instances where CRMs have fallen short with their SFA modules. This blog shows you WHY?

There are many ways’s of Dealing with an ineffective Sales Force Automation. Over the years, it’s been observed that companies (using SFA modules in CRM systems) complain of an unsuccessful experience. And one of the most severe impacts of this experience is failed sales processes.

With failed sales processes, businesses suffer in a number of ways:

•Duplication of sales effort

•Low productivity gains.

One of the proposed reasons behind broken SFA modules in CRMs are because companies have a generic perspective about CRM. So while buying, they categorize all the CRMs together – failing to understand their USPs. In addition to this, they do not focus on the vendor selection.

Little do the companies realize that an average CRM software if not well supported by the vendor, eventually becomes of no use. The CRM simply lies as a liability, clogging up the business process.

As a result, when companies implement the cloud CRM solution, it fails to function efficiently as sales force automation software. It does not deliver upon its projected return on investment (ROI).

However, surprisingly, this problem accounts for just 22% of the cases.

Denise Holland (CRM expert & implementation consultant) explains –

‘’If you bought CRM software that has a below par SFA module or simply is not well supported by the vendor, you can perform another CRM search and replace it. Problem solved. But only in the rarest of the rare cases, web CRM software or the vendor lies at fault.’’

Most of the time, CRMs do not perform as fully-functional sales force automation software, because the planning and execution processes (by the company) are not up to the mark.

How do we say this?

In close to 88% of cases, sales force automation modules within the CRM break at the goals analysis stage itself.

Why does it happen? Let’s find out –

Too often, CRM buyers focus on the pointers cited by the vendor, instead of their own real requirements. Let’s say you meet a small business CRM vendor who gives you the demo of the software and emphasizes upon its main USP:

‘’Our small business CRM functions as an excellent SFA software. Using it, Call duration will be down by 20%’’

Great productivity gain! Worth a buy isn’t it?

Wait…

The ones who said no – Correct Answer

The ones who said yes – Read below

While the above-mentioned USP of the CRM is remarkable – the MAIN pointers are:

•Does this USP complement your business process?

•How will your business benefit by reducing your sales calls duration?

•Will you be able to measure the financial benefit out of this call duration reduction?

Precisely, these questions should’ve come to your mind before saying the Yes. Remember, by doing this exercise, you might just realize that reduced call duration was never a priority for you. So what’s the use of investing in a small business CRM that gives you this benefit? No doubt the CRM can be good but it doesn’t suits your business wavelength.

So ideally what should a company do?

To ensure that you gain the optimum return from your CRM investment, list out the objectives that you want:

1. How do you want the CRM to impact your sales process?

It can be in the form of:

•Decreased call duration

•Automation of laborious sales activities

•Increased up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.

2. Find out ways how you can quantify your requirements

For instance, if you prioritize up-sell or cross-sell opportunities – make sure the web CRM (you choose) provides you a way to measure the percentage of increased cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.

Correspondingly, if you prioritize “accurate sales forecast” as your requirement, make sure you know how the CRM will enable you measure that.

3. Give a specific number

I want the sales force automation module to decrease the call duration is a vague statement. The CRM vendor can always fool you with a CRM application that only decreases the call duration by 5 percent. Do you really want that sort of solution? Definitely No.

So add numerical to your requirements. Give a range of percentage. Let’s say

I want the sales force automation software to decrease the sales call duration by 20 to 40 percent.

4. Make the CRM vendor go through your list of requirements

Have a mutual discussion on the possibilities and to what extent can the CRM deliver. Ensure that both you and the vendor are on the same page. Accordingly, move forward with the software implementation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Review your CRM software. Reexamine the sales force automation module to understand how effectively it’s working for your sales process.

If found broken, understand the reason behind it. In no way do we claim that every failed SFA module within the CRM is due to poor goals analysis, but considering that it’s the largest reason reported, it’s worth taking the effort. All you need to do is redefine your requirements, check whether the present CRM is compatible with it and if not then look around for an alternative.

CRM Is Changing the Role of Sales Professionals

New-Age CRM tools no longer concentrate only on post-sales customer relationship management. They involve the complete customer lifecycle journey (CLJ) right from lead to a customer. In this entire process, sales form a crucial part. Resultant of which, majority of the modern Cloud CRM solutions offer sales force automation modules. So how does this affect the companies? Is there any alteration in the sales process? Let’s find out:

How CRM Is Changing the Role of Sales Professionals let’s learn and understand the differences of the CRM and their effective connection with sales professionals.

Blurred lines between Sales and Customer Service

The proliferation of CRM sales force automation tools has radically transformed the sales world inside out. And the best example to prove this is the latest report from CRM Search that shows the traditional demarcation of inside and outside sales teams getting blurred.

The reason cited for this is: New-Age CRM tools that have made it possible for any type of salesperson to connect with leads from anywhere. So the whole concept of in-house and field salespeople have blurred. Instead what we are getting now is Hybrid Salesperson, who can fit into either sales role.

CRM Search further suggests that this changed role of sales professionals is not just limited to in-house or field sales jobs. A few of the companies have merged their sales people with the customer support process.

Mark Cotlier, (Research Analyst) comments – ‘’this is indeed a new development happening across different verticals. In the lieu of offering unified sales and customer support, companies are taking every possible endeavor. One of which is to coalesce the sales and customer support professionals and arm them with tablets and smart phones.’’

With cloud CRMs available in every internet-connected device, the employees are getting the flexibility to connect or respond to the leads or customers from practically any location or time.

Because all the data is stored in the CRM repository, both sales and support professionals are equipped to switch in their roles whenever required. Within seconds of using the CRM, they know the:

•past interactions of the customer with the company

•exact position of the customer in the journey

Inevitably, this is giving them the confidence to effortlessly handle leads or customers.

Stany Malinowski, (Vice President of Next Plus, Inc,) comments –

“Online CRM products have been no less than a boon to the businesses. In view of the fact that Cloud CRM solution give the ability to access customer contacts, opportunities and other records via any internet-device, both sales and support professionals are stepping into each other’s shoes effortlessly. Today sales rep Tom is competently resolving the query of customer John in between the floors or support rep Tim is up selling to customer Mary while crossing the road. The lifelong excuse of ineffective customer service or sales because the concerned rep is missing does not exist.

Virtual Sales World

Forward-thinking organizations are taking advantage of the ubiquity of Cloud based CRM to give rise to the concept of a virtual sales world; where they are empowered to cater to the customers across any channel or medium.

Daniel Trailer (sales expert, author, speaker and consultant) comments – ‘’Companies’ focus is shifting away from where its salespeople are based to how the customer wants to interact with the company. So if the clients demand a conversation over any social media platform (which many are) then the company is delivering that without a hitch.’’

Leveraging the power of New-Age web based CRM solutions that offer an array of functionalities (online conferencing, Social Media & Gmail Integration), the sales force are equipped to deal with the client on any chosen platform. And this has precisely changed the game for many.

For instance, Tony Blitzer (VP & Co-Founder of an inbound sales agency), states – ‘’Customers have always been wanting for more online deals and now with New-Age small business CRM solutions, we are finally being able to provide that. Technologies like Web conferences, GoToMeeting and WebEx technology are all ubiquitously present in modern Cloud CRMs, facilitating to collaborate with customers online.’’

It’s a consequence of this trend that the perception of outsides sales as “opportunity generators,” and inside sales as mere “order takers,’’ has diminished. Now, inside sales are armed to take the sales process from prospecting to deal closure without intervention.

Blitzer further comments, – ‘’this paradigm shift has reduced the cost of our business. Instead of having two separate sales teams (in-house and field), today we are relying heavily on one integrated sales force team to generate the revenue.’’

While a section of experts claim that the rise of virtual sale doesn’t mean the end to the traveling salesman – the need to do so has definitely gone down. Today, for every sale, there isn’t as much need to put bodies on airplanes and do face-to-face meetings. Both the customers and the companies have the flexibility to collaborate from any location of the world and meet only if it really demands to do so.

In fact, CSO Insights’ state that, CRM using sales people hold an advantage over traditional field sales reps. They continue to outpace field sales by using cloud CRM software and joining forces with the customers at any spur of the moment. As a result, (CRM using) sales people are ahead of their counterparts in moving their targets from leads to customers stage.

How to solve the mystery of Cloud technology

What is Cloud? It’s a question that has been answered zillion times across the world by innumerable business experts. So let us not go into that. For those who are still confused about cloud computing, it is nothing but the reference to hosted IT services. It provides us the facility of accessing IT resources when we do not want to take its installation and maintenance responsibility. With Cloud technology what we get is ready-to-use software applications on a platter.

What is Cloud?

It’s a question that has been answered zillion times across the world by innumerable business experts. So let us not go into that. For those who are still confused about cloud computing, it is nothing but the reference to hosted IT services. It provides us the facility of accessing IT resources when we do not want to take its installation and maintenance responsibility. With Cloud technology what we get is ready-to-use software applications on a platter.

It’s just like when we order food from a restaurant. Irrespective of our location, the food gets delivered to our address. Similarly, Cloud technology delivers us the software services as and when we require it. No hardware/infrastructure expense involved. Interesting eh?

Well, most business experts are of the opinion that cloud infrastructure minimizes the need of physical devices. This is not so. Rather than totally eliminating the need of physical devices, it just eliminates the need of complex ones. So once you start using cloud applications, laptops, desktops, mobile devices or for that matter any internet-enabled device is all what you require to access the resources.

Who introduced Cloud?

Although most of us are acquainted with the term cloud computing, not many of us actually know its history. For instance, how many of us are aware of the fact that the concept of cloud computing was introduced way back in the 1960s. Or names such as J.C.R. Licklider, John McCarthy and Douglas F Parkhill are associated with the introduction and exploration of cloud computing. Not many right?

The actual contribution of the IT companies happened somewhere from the 1990s. As the experts realized the benefits of cloud computing, there were higher numbers of takers for it. Today, the scenario stands such that many small and big names have advocated the concept of cloud computing. Unique technologies and better pricing models have enabled Cloud to revolutionize the IT infrastructure.

Where are the servers?

What makes Cloud a highly fascinating concept is the fact that users do not know from where they are fetching the data. In fact, this is the exact thought behind Cloud technology – users do not know and perhaps do not have to worry about the computing/storage being done.

Unlike the traditional infrastructure where you have the servers’ right there in your office, cloud-technology has replicated servers all over the world. From major cities to the smaller ones, datacenters can be present everywhere providing your organization with interrupted cloud service.

Note: In a few rare cases, the location of the datacenters can become important. For instance, if your operations are governed by certain compliance rules, then you have to ensure that cloud facilities abide by the rules.

How to get started with Cloud?

Most of us reading this blog are already using the cloud services. Surprised? Let’s see how –

Cloud infrastructure has penetrated in several applications. So whether you are using Facebook, Dropbox, or any Google Apps – you are indeed a cloud user.

Adopting a virtualized environment or migrating legacy apps to cloud is a wise business move. The best example to show is the large-scale organizations who have already adopted Cloud based CRM and other enterprise applications.

And not to forget the SMBs and the SMEs who are not left behind in the race of cloud-based software platforms. What makes us say this – the exceptional demand of Cloud based CRM for small business.

If you too want to make use of cloud commuting resources, now is the ideal time to do so. With the perfect combination of efficient technology and low pricing, there is nothing better that a business entrepreneur can ask for.

Why every company needs an integrated data system

Today, most business professionals are facing a tough time managing the operations of a company. The decision to find the best data management system is perhaps their biggest challenge. In spite of knowing the importance of a proper integrated data system, most business executives do not implement it for budgetary issues. Well, perhaps they do not realize that the benefits of implementing an integrated business software system (that makes all data accessible in one database) is double the investment made

Why every company needs an integrated data system, that works best with any business. Today, most business professionals are facing a tough time managing the operations of a company. The decision to find the best data management system is perhaps their biggest challenge. In spite of knowing the importance of a proper integrated data system, most business executives do not implement it for budgetary issues. Well, perhaps they do not realize that the benefits of implementing an integrated business software system (that makes all data accessible in one database) is double the investment made.

To substitute an integrated data system, different software applications are installed. Inevitably it results in business process inefficiency. A disjointed business system gives rise to several challenges and bogs down the overall productivity.

In what follows is an overview of the several challenges caused by an incoherent business data system:

Wasted resources: An incoherent business system slows the productivity of the employees. With the presence of several disparate applications, it becomes difficult for teams to work in synthesis. In addition to lack of synergy, the work process gets delayed too. For instance, an employee might take double the time of entering and re-entering the same data in two different systems.

Manual feeding of data in two different systems always have a high chance of errors. If errors are made or a transaction changed, the employees have to tackle heaps of data again. Needless to say, such labor-intensive tasks bring down a company’s quickness.

Customer loss: A disjointed business system increases the chances of customer churn. With several applications installed in different functional areas, customers find it difficult to get their issues resolved timely. Absence of updated information (about product/services) or out of stock products are a few problems they have to deal with.

In addition to the customer inconvenience, employees too struggle with the customer concerns. They are unable to have immediate access to customer records for rendering proper customer service.

Overlapping databases: A disjointed business system makes it time consuming for the employees to prepare finance, sales, customer-support and marketing reports. Considering this fact, in most companies timely report preparation takes a back seat. This step is taken to prevent the countless hours spend on sourcing and analyzing data from different sources.

While doing this saves a company from losing on its time, it forces the executives to take crucial decisions without accurate data on hand.

Added maintenance: Needless to say that the presence of many disparate applications puts up an added expense on the company. Apart from installation and maintenance cost, acquiring the newer application versions also involves investment. The IT department that can otherwise work on other crucial areas becomes occupied making the different applications work.

For instance, integration of ERP and Social Media with Cloud CRM Software is an essential move. With finance, customer and social media activities available through one database, it helps a company gain optimal benefit of Cloud CRM Solution.

A Modern Approach to Campaign Management

Companies normally spend thousands on making their advertisement campaigns successful. Companies put a lot of effort and resources in designing the campaign that will make the consumers fall in love with the product. But, how to ensure that the campaign will deliver desired results!

A Modern Approach to Campaign Management is planned to optimized the business and leads. Learn the secrets of the modern marketing plans. Companies normally spend thousands on making their advertisement campaigns successful. Companies put a lot of effort and resources in designing the campaign that will make the consumers fall in love with the product. But, how to ensure that the campaign will deliver desired results!

Many a time, a marketing campaign may fail to deliver optimum results despite the best efforts. To monitor the effectiveness of a campaign you therefore need an effective campaign management policy. A modern sales force automation software is designed to take the burden off your shoulder by automating most part of an advertising campaign and providing you the advantages of the tools to monitor its progress.

Modern customer management software can help the user create, execute and monitor both simple and complex marketing campaigns to maximize their outcomes. From the point of view of a small business this is particularly useful since they often are resource strapped and look for quick results. One can receive comparative reports on conversions, lead generation, or proselytization to determine the probability of success of his campaigns.

The best contact management software for small business is designed to offer one stop solution for all aspects of a campaign management. It lets you build a marketing campaign from the scratch – design campaign, describe target market, set frequency, set duration, add criteria, define stop campaign criteria, generate reports, and more. Following are the highlights of an effective campaign management through customer management software.

- Create, manage and track multiple campaigns from within the CRM. Maximize your outcome by evaluating a campaign at every step.
- Describe and set criteria using the software intelligence to make your marketing campaigns more targeted.
- Turn campaigns into business. Get the numbers of new business generated through the campaign at your fingertips. The CRM software will generate report cards for each campaign for you to know which of them are driving in the best results.
- Analyze performances of your campaigns. Find out which are most and least successful simultaneously, i.e. which have brought you the desired outcomes. Accordingly, adjust your marketing strategy.
- Categorize customer data based on their responses to the campaign. Make lists of the most responsive ones and work upon them. Plan to deliver one-to-one interactive platform to turn them into business.
- Manage multiple campaigns on multiple channels from one platform. Optimize your time and productivity by making smart campaigning choices.
- Receive real-time updates on the performance of your campaigns. Make necessary adjustments to fine-tune them to your business goals.
- Generate comparative results on different marketing campaigns to get comprehensive idea on their performances.

Modern customer management system has come a long way from the early contact management days to become a complete sales and marketing tool. It now applies business intelligence to help you nurture your leads and forge a strong, long-term relationship with clients. Effective marketing management solutions offered by CRM software will help you thrive in the highly competitive environment.

ConvergeHub is designed to let you run multi-channel marketing campaigns from a single platform.

ConvergeHub is a new generation cloud based CRM that is completely capable of managing your multi-channel marketing campaigns from its interactive UI. It can be your complete marketing solution tool that will help you run effective marketing campaigns with real-time statistics to evaluate their success. You can create and manage all your campaigns in three easy steps.

Step#1

Lists: Create your desired list of receivers, who you want to target through your marketing campaign. The CRM offers further segmentation solution that let you create filtered recipients’ lists. This will ensure higher success rate for your campaign.

Step#2

Templates: Create, edit, or use the default attractive campaign templates to add aesthetics to your campaigning. Converge Enterprise CRM allows you to create most visually appealing, succinct and powerful ad campaigns that will always hit a home run with your customers.

Step#3

Campaign: Create the most effective campaign in five easy steps from a single screen. Preview and test drive your campaign before sending it out to your customers. With ConvergeHub you can schedule the date and time for your marketing campaign to run. You can decide to start immediately or at any future date depending upon your advertising strategies.

Converging Operational CRM and Social CRM

The global outlook towards social platform is transforming fast. Corporate have come to recognize social media as a serious way to engage and interact with customers. It has helped in changing the idea that customers aren’t only sets of leads or accounts but real people and simple ways of tracking isn’t sufficient to understand their true nature.

Learn by Converging Operational CRM and Social CRM, the benefits and gains out of it. The global outlook towards social platform is transforming fast. Corporate have come to recognize social media as a serious way to engage and interact with customers. It has helped in changing the idea that customers aren’t only sets of leads or accounts but real people and simple ways of tracking isn’t sufficient to understand their true nature.

Today social media is finding many takers in corporate world. The importance of social media management and marketing has improved significantly. This change becomes obvious when organizations look to integrate social CRM to their traditional CRM system.

In this post we will discuss how social CRM differs from traditional CRM and how ConvergeHub is combining the best of both in creating the most powerful CRM solution for small businesses.

Traditional CRM is effectively a lead management solution focusing on maintain static activity logs to promote sales performance. The transformation of traditional CRM has been gradual. It started as a contact management system to gradually transform to track leads, maintaining accounts, managing activities, calculating sales, tracking pipeline etc. Its focus was on automating most and parts of the sales process to allows sales representative more time on the fields by predicting accurately about sales volume and closed deals, generating reports and forecasting sales performance. It also worked towards timely routing leads and generating alerts for consistent follow-ups.

The next generation CRM started integrating marketing management solutions and generated the demand for establishing relationships with customers at personal level. Introduction of social dimension helped dissolving the barriers and promoted interpersonal connectivity with potential customers. Social media has crossed the initial stage of being a platform for casual interactions to become a hunting ground for potential customers. The purpose of integrating social CRM with traditional CRM is to add insight obtained from external data to enhance the viability of internal data.

Earlier a CRM entry was a bunch of contact information but now introduction of social CRM helped in looking beyond the available data into the mindset of an individual to form a perception about his personality.

Today the concept of CRM is evolving fast and social CRM too has crossed the initial stage of infancy to grow to become real business solution. Gathering data and updates on customers through social feeds has already lost its acceptance. But gaining real time opportunities to promote sales and services is the newest trend in social CRM world.

In order to gain most from social CRM integration you need to know the areas where it can be applied.

Customer analysis

Social CRM is used to find ad track target markets. The data gleaned serves as the base for market research and targeting potential areas. The social feed gathered on your CRM can help you design personalized approach to escalate a deal process for an existing customer.

ConvergeHub can help you track your existing customers on social platforms and attach the insight to offer better visual on a customer.

Lead generation

Perhaps the most important purpose of integrating social media is to generate leads through it. ConvergeHub social CRM collaboration can help you identifying the right areas to focus on social platform. You can manage your reputation through monitoring what people have to say about your services. You’d need to take a more personal approach in generating leads through social sites.

Brand advocates and influencer

Social media allows you to interact with real people. You can engage market and industry influencers and create a band of brand ambassadors to promote your services and gain leads.

Social CRM has made enterprises more community focused. It might take some time to fully understand and utilize the potential of social CRM but the revolution has begun.

Also Read – What is CRM

Is It Time To Upgrade Your Existing Workforce management?

Workforce management (WFM) has become the latest buzzword in the market. It’s not a new concept though. Companies since long have tried some or the other forms of workforce management to improve employee productivity.But it’s now been viewed in new light of changed industry context. Effective WFM is imperative to make your customer contact center efficient and profitable. WFM is about anticipating probable inbound and outbound calls for a contact center and applying right resources in managing the same. However, most WFM software applications are complicated to implement and operate. There was a time when companies could spare dedicated resource in managing the software system. But now when organizations are striving to become more operatively efficient they don’t want to throw money in managing redundant resources. Enterprises therefore are looking for WFM solution that is self-manageable and automated to help improving productivity of each customer care executive.

However, most WFM software applications are complicated to implement and operate. There was a time when companies could spare dedicated resource in managing the software system. But now when organizations are striving to become more operatively efficient they don’t want to throw money in managing redundant resources. Enterprises therefore are looking for WFM solution that is self-manageable and automated to help improving productivity of each customer care executive.

With the growing number of mid-size contact centers the demand for cost effective WFM solutions has increased manifold. Even large organizations are looking for less complex and less time-demanding solutions.

Keeping the changing horizon in mind, the newer WFM software applications are designed to be more effective in performing the jobs of traditional WFM solutions in less than half the time. The improved WFM solutions are less complex and therefore, minimize the time spent on training and managing the applications. These still have the basic modules, such as – forecasting, scheduling, intra-day management, real-time adherence and agent self-service, just like their older versions but through improved UI help in optimizing the functioning of a contact center. This post has discussed how the newer and improved solutions are better than the old versions to help if you decide if the time has come to switch to lighter and faster WFM.

What do the different modules of a WFM do?

Forecasting: The success and performance of a contact center is centralized around the efficiency of its WFM solution in effectively predicting call volume for days, weeks, months etc. The newer versions with embedded Web 2.0 technology are more accurate in forecasting the call volume for the future dates.

Using statistical tools and algorithm it helps contact centers to become more customer centric by accurately predicting call volume, resource engagement etc.

Scheduling: Scheduling helps organizations in distributing their workforce more efficiently between projects. It offers staffing solutions to contact center managers by allocating resources in better manner based on various determining parameters.

Intra-day management: To help contact center managers get visibility on the performance of the centre and its agents the intra-day management tools capture real-time performance data from different sources. It initiates trigger when the contact center performance sinks below acceptable level.

Real-time adherence: It’s the performance management tool that allows contact centre managers to monitor and track agent movements in real-time. The real-time adherence tool of modernized WFM management software helps tracking agent’s performance both on-the-call and off-the-call.

Agent Self-Service: The purpose of this module is to help agents in monitoring their performance and taking active part in streamlining the work flow process. This can help reducing pressure from the center manager and let him concentrate on strategizing contact centre policies to improve customer satisfaction.

The improved and newer WFM software versions are:

Faster: Take less time in management. The solutions offered through cloud have also eliminated the time involved in deploying the solutions. The cloud-based solutions are ready-to-use, customizable solutions to meet diverse industry requirements.

Nimble: The easy to use solutions have embedded WFM best practices in making the software more effective and accurate, thus, help optimizing resource allocation as per the volume of anticipated calls.

Ease of use: The solutions are designed to eliminate the learning curve. This would translate into more productivity as you would have to spend less time in training your workforce about how to run and manage the system. Moreover, the analytics offered are easy to apprehend and don’t require one to have degree in statistics.

Automation: The newer WFM solutions are aimed at automating work force management so that you can free the managers from tracking and monitoring agents and concentrate more on improving the overall performance of the unit. The inbuilt intelligence facilitates optimal allocation of resources.

Accessible: The cloud-based WFM solutions are accessible from anywhere. So, you can keep track of your agents’ movements in office as well as on-the-fly. It further helps organizing and managing offshore teams by offering a universal platform to work on.

As an end note the newer workforce management solutions are designed to help businesses in improving customer satisfaction quotient. With better allocation and management of resources you’ll be able to serve your customers better and efficiently. Moreover, you can improve transparency across the contact center by allowing agents to monitor their performance.

Why You Need To Align Your Business with CRM

Will your CRM start generating more businesses for you automatically? The answer is ‘no’. CRM is not a magic solution that will transform your business overnight; though it can put the lead generation cogs into motion. It would demand action from your end to align your business the proper way with the contact management system.

Why You Need To Align Your Business with CRM. Will your CRM start generating more businesses for you automatically? The answer is ‘no’. CRM is not a magic solution that will transform your business overnight; though it can put the lead generation cogs into motion. It would demand action from your end to align your business the proper way with the contact management system.

Aligning your business and strategies towards your CRM system is an important part of successful business CRM software implementation. This includes changing the culture and mindset of the workforce to embrace the new technology. Creating awareness among your teams is essential to encourage them make the software a part of their daily activities. A good number of businesses suffer from poor user adoption which greatly affects their CRM strategy.

A business adopting the customer management solution also needs to keep in mind that more comprehensive CRM strategy requires the system to be integrated with the remaining enterprise application suite. It is important to receive a 360⁰ view on your customer in order to offer improved and customized services.

Applying standardization in updating CRM data is as important as implementing best practices. If your objective is to receive proper insight on your business activities you need to implement stricter guidance that will ensure data uniformity. It is also important to conduct a regular health checkup of your CRM data to ensure it is updated and corrected with no duplicity.

You can standardize your reporting system using CRM reporting solutions. You can use the standard formats available or generate personalized reports using the many variable fields of the lead management software. The analytics offered by the software help you get an inside-out view of your operation to help you fine tune it as necessary. Reports can be generated using the software to present before the management, analyze and track performance.

Why is your email marketing failing?

2009, Wall Street Journal published an article claiming – email was dead. And from that day onwards till now – close to 1.5 million posts had been submitted online, echoing email’s demise. So what does this say? Has e-mail actually been a passé? Marketo’s “The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing” that weighs in a hefty 155 pages – states the contrary opinion – email is more important than ever.

Why is your email marketing failing, let’s learn it. 2009, Wall Street Journal published an article claiming – email was dead. And from that day onwards till now – close to 1.5 million posts had been submitted online, echoing email’s demise.

So what does this say? Has e-mail actually been a passé?

Marketo’s “The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing” that weighs in a hefty 155 pages – states the contrary opinion – email is more important than ever. The old way of “batch-and-blast” email marketing has given way to a more trusted, more relevant, more conversational, and more strategic e-mail campaign.

Read further as we bring for you key insights from the very same report:

The hysteria around the death of email has clearly proved the dominance/influence email has on our lives. While there’s no denying the fact that traditional and social channels are buzzing aloud, email is still the most preferred form of communication.

Image source: Marketo

Email is the quickest and most direct way to reach customers with critical information. In fact, email is the one channel consumers’ access regularly.

Do not believe?

Imagine: On any given day, you may or may not visit your blog, Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/or Google+ profile; but in all likelihood, you will check your email every day, if not multiple times a day. The same applies for your consumer too.

Illustrating the importance of e-mails further, here are a few key statistics:

Currently 3.3 billion email accounts are created in the world
94% of Americans age 12 and over use email as one of their regular activities
58% percent of adult Americans check email first thing in the morning
77% of consumers prefer to receive marketing communications through email
Email is the number one source for all age groups including 15-24
Email generates nearly a 2X return compared to other channels.

How successful are the companies in getting the desired success in e-mail marketing?

While every small and large scale organization has realized the benefits of e-mail marketing and is executing e-mail campaigns regularly – the success ratio is very minimal. Know why –

The rise of the New Buyer

1. Buyers have become empowered: The overabundance of information along with better search and sharing technology has made product information ubiquitous. Consequently, consumers are getting instant information gratification through the web. Whether, it is knowing the specs of the product, comparing the product pricing plans or going through other customer reviews – consumers are doing it easily and often anywhere anytime (thanks to the internet-enabled smart phones). Not to forget the rise of social media that has made information more transparent and flat for everyone to read, use and share.

All this has resulted in one thing: Buyers have become more self-directed. No longer are they depending on the company to provide information, based on which they will make the purchasing decision.

In most scenarios, they are already developing brand perceptions/product selection before making the first interaction with the brand.

2. Buyers are opting out speedily: While buyers have become both tech savvy and brand sophisticated – they have become fickle minded too. They are completely aware of the different ways of marketing and while they subscribe to receive company e-mails they have a hell lot of expectations. They expect companies to inform educate and entertain. And even a dot of irrelevant information can bore or worse, irritate them – making them unsubscribe quickly.

Moreover, consumers who unsubscribe from emails are only the fraction of the total opt-outs. Majority of consumers prefer to passively opt out – i.e. ignore the emails.

In short, buyers have become quick in tuning out the noise of today’s digital circus. And this inevitably has made marketing techniques (like e-mail) more difficult and challenging. The challenge of course is: to consistently send engaging e-mails to buyers.

3. Buyers have set high expectations: The big players in the market are enjoying the customer preference due to several reasons – one of which is providing a seamless experience to customers across all mediums. And it is this pampering that has made consumers demands the same level of experience from other companies too.

Result: today’s buyers expect (from every company) a unified, streamlined and personalized experience across all touchpoints: website, social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), email marketing, etc. With most of them having extremely busy schedules – they look for information in the medium that is most convenient for them at the moment.

Add to this is the demand of customized information. Buyers expect companies to keep track of their purchasing history, communication preferences, and desires and then feed them the exact information when they require.

The fourth factor

Imprecise Metrics: Majority of marketers use old-fashioned ESP tools for e-mail marketing reports. Unfortunately – these reports do not give correct insights on total number of unsubscribes, clicks, opens, bounces, and so on for each email campaign. Stuck with imprecise metrics, marketers do not a correct insight into the level of customer engagement lost or achieved.

Needless to say, in such a situation, email marketing gets reduced to being a tactical channel, relegated to the sidelines instead of becoming a strategic part of the company’s revenue plan

What is the solution to an effective e-mail marketing campaign?

Today’s consumers are always on, always connected, and always overwhelmed. An average customer is usually exposed to 2,904 media messages, in which he/she pays attention to 52 and positively remembers only four.

Experts speak – Considering the short attention spans and intelligent buying habits, companies cannot supply static information to buyers in a mass email campaign.

They are required to understand that traditional paradigms no longer cut it. It’s time for shifting the ways they’ve been previously engaging with the customers across online channels throughout their lifecycles. And this can only happen by following a two-step process –

Learning how to write compelling and personalized e-mails that engage each and every prospective customer individually and personally.
Investing in marketing automation software to deliver the e-mails and track the under-performance and over-performance of each e-mail campaign.

CRM the best tool to synchronize marketing and sales

The two most important teams within an organization are sales and marketing – most of you will agree to it. After all, sales and marketing together drive forward the company’s revenue and growth. While marketing identifies the prospects and reaches out to them, sales team puts in all the efforts to convert the leads to accounts. The functioning of marketing and sales departments makes them interdependent on each other. Most of the times, marketing and sales professionals encroach in each other‘s territory for carrying out their activities. Considering the above-mentioned fact, ideally it is meant for both these teams to work in one synergy.

CRM the best tool to synchronize marketing and sales, how use it, know with us. The two most important teams within an organization are sales and marketing – most of you will agree to it. After all, sales and marketing together drive forward the company’s revenue and growth. While marketing identifies the prospects and reaches out to them, sales team puts in all the efforts to convert the leads to accounts.

The functioning of marketing and sales departments makes them interdependent on each other. Most of the times, marketing and sales professionals encroach in each other‘s territory for carrying out their activities. Considering the above-mentioned fact, ideally it is meant for both these teams to work in one synergy. United working of marketing and sales teams influences an organization in a positive manner. Along with strong customer retention, it also helps an organization to have a higher rate of customer acquirement.

However, the question arise does marketing and sales team really work in harmony? If not, then what are the reasons that create a conflict between marketing and sales? Let’s take a look:

According to the experts, the misalignment between marketing and sales has been an old affair. While sales professionals have blamed marketing of not generating the right quality of leads; marketing professionals too have cited the inefficiency of the sales team for their marketing campaign failure. Though both the teams have got away by putting the blame on each other, it’s the organization that has faced the brunt of it.

While several enterprise policies and success metrics have been suggested to reconcile the differences between marketing and sales, in real it is nothing but a strong Customer Relationship Management system that an organization needs to enable fruitful collaboration between these two teams.

In what follows are a few examples to show how CRM promotes teamwork between marketing and sales:

1. Defined budget for marketing:

Often marketing teams fail to get a sufficient budget; reason – they are unable to show the success of their marketing campaigns through ROI. Moreover, sales team too finds it difficult to understand and measure the effort of the marketing team. As a result, most organizations hesitate to assign a large budget to the marketing team. Insufficient resource limits the activities of the marketing professionals.

Integration of the CRM software helps marketing team measure the returns of their campaign. By the use of several tracking tools (integrated in the CRM software), it helps marketing professionals asses the strategy and make changes to it. In addition to the convenience of the marketing team, sales people too find it easy to monitor the success of the marketing campaigns. Detailed information and results about the campaign helps them work upon the generated leads and opportunities accordingly.

2. Improved sales methodology

Most organizations do not prefer storing lead information in spreadsheet; reason – it is not adequate to store volumes of leads. Referring to the spreadsheet for lead information can result in several problems. For instance, two sales representatives pursuing the same lead or a sale-driven message sent to a wrong contact.

It is needless to say that the above-mentioned examples can generate indifference between marketing and sales team.

All in one CRM software provides a central documentation for the sales professionals. From history of past transactions to the account manager’s name (sales rep handling the lead), every detail is accurately provided in a common easy-to-use database. Easy access to all these details eliminates the risk of sales rep making double/wrong effort for the leads generated by the marketing team.

Does your CRM guarantee you more leads?

CRM has become an essential business tool for today’s customer centric organizations. The purpose of this software is to help businesses organize their activities around their customers and generate more revenue by doing so. A good CRM solution is a combination of many things. It not only helps in tracking customer interactions but also provides with complete sales and marketing solutions,

Does your CRM guarantee you more leads? It has become an essential business tool for today’s customer centric organizations. The purpose of this software is to help businesses organize their activities around their customers and generate more revenue by doing so. A good CRM solution is a combination of many things. It not only helps in tracking customer interactions but also provides with complete sales and marketing solutions, reporting and analytics. The purpose is to streamline operation, automate mundane and grow business by forming foolproof strategies based on the customer history offered by the software. So, in order to justify your CRM selection you must ask yourself ‘will it help me in generating more customers?’

The answer to the above question is more important for small businesses. They are not only resource strapped but need to be quick and responsive to close more sales to keep up with the goliaths in the market. A CRM strategy can make or break a successful small business.

SMBs need a business CRM equipped with smart lead capturing abilities. It must present an analytical view of the operation that will help them identify sales opportunities at the earliest. Small and medium enterprises therefore must stay focused on choosing contacts management software that comes with equally powerful sales tools.

Immediate lead capturing: Capturing leads from all sources – inbound calls, outbound calls, email solicitation, marketing campaigns, web-to-lead, social media etc. The CRM will directly capture the leads generated through web forms.
Social media leads: Best small business CRM helps you map your path on the social sites allowing you to capture more leads from social interactions.
Lead nurturing: The best small business CRM software allows you to form stronger bonds with your existing clientele at different stages of customer lifecycle.
Leads filtering: Effective lead filtering intelligence categorizes leads based on their ‘hotness’ so that you can focus on more interested prospects to optimize your sales efforts.

Read More – Powerful Marketing Strategies