Year: 2020

What Is NPS And Why It Is A Metric That Every Sales Leader Should Use

Most leaders in sales have at least one thing in common, which is the challenge to keep a track of the performance of their sales teams. Now there are several articles that have already been written about KPIs and sales metrics found in easy to use CRM tools that can offer sales managers suggestions and advice about which metrics they should leverage to address this aforesaid challenge in sales. Nevertheless, in this article we as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions let us cover one of the metrics that we are specialized in- Net Promotor Score. Most firms use Key Performance Indicators of KPIs to track the performance of their teams, business, or people against their goals. Now NPS is one of those sales metrics that is used to measure how likely it is that your customer will recommend your brand’s offerings to someone else.

Most leaders in sales have at least one thing in common, which is the challenge to keep a track of the performance of their sales teams.
Now there are several articles that have already been written about KPIs and sales metrics found in easy to use CRM tools that can offer sales managers suggestions and advice about which metrics they should leverage to address this aforesaid challenge in sales.

91% of businesses with 10 or more employees now use CRM software. Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, in this article we as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions let us cover one of the metrics that we are specialized in- Net Promotor Score.

Easy to use CRM

Most firms use Key Performance Indicators of KPIs to track the performance of their teams, business, or people against their goals.

Now NPS is one of those sales metrics that is used to measure how likely it is that your customer will recommend your brand’s offerings to someone else.

Now, this metric is particularly interesting as it illustrates the customer’s perspective rather than merely explaining the sales figures in business.

This is because the salespeople who are competitive in their approaches might oversell an offering and even make promises for that which the product or service may not fulfill in terms of its features and functionalities.

This can happen because of the pressure that the salespersons often face to meet their sales quotas, earn more commissions, and more.

Nevertheless, whatever may be the case NPS found with the help of an easy to use CRM can serve as vital metrics to access whether the customer is satisfied with the offering that the company has sold to its customer.

Now a negative NPS score in an easy to use CRM cannot only occur just because of the person who sold or delivered the product. Rather it can also happen because the product itself is not what the customer expected it to be.

This is how NPS works…

To do a NPS survey with an easy to use CRM tool brands need to simply ask their customers to provide them a rating from 0-10 where 10 implies that the customer is very likely to recommend the brand to others and 0 if they consider that they do not.

There are three categories that the NPS survey participants fall into:

Promoters (9-10): You might consider any customer in the survey that provides this score as your brand’s best friend who is most likely to be a returning customer or will not hesitate to refer others to your company.

Passive (7-8): Customers who provide this score can be considered to be satisfied but not necessarily a loyal customer of your company. Therefore, they are likely to buy from your competitor if the opportunity is right.

Detractors (0-6): These are the customers who really do not like your company, brand, and your offerings, and so detractors can not only look elsewhere in the future to do their business but even might tell others not to buy and avoid your brand. Therefore it can be assumed that these people have a negative impact on your brand.

Sometimes NPS surveys even include open-ended questions whereby businesses can ask the respondents in the survey what is their primary reason behind providing the score. However, this question is often a conditional one meaning that it only appears in the survey once the customer provides a score below a certain threshold, such as below 5 (detractor).

Now if you are interested to know about the timing and the frequency of these NPS surveys, in such a case the answer is: it depends.

For example, one of our former customers and a car dealer who used our CRM software did send an NPS survey to everyone who did a test drive or bought their car.

While there are several people who might say that if a customer is new you should not send out a survey immediately, nevertheless while this opinion might have some truth, however, it really depends on what your brand is offering.

Now about the frequency for sending surveys, it is important to remember that you do not bombard the customer with multiple surveys and so we recommend sending an NPS survey to your customers every 3-6 months.

This is because sending a survey invite less frequently increases the probability that your customers will answer your survey, and thereby boost the response rate.

Finally, once you have done your surveys to calculate the Net Promotor Score you need to subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of the Promoters and associate them with your sales reps or sales teams, which can be automatically done once you use an easy to use CRM software as your NPS survey tool.

Conclusion

Therefore if you also intend to use NPS for your business growth , or if you would like to apply it in other areas of your business, we have written this article about how simple it can be to implement it from a technical perspective, so that you can leverage this important metric in order to improve your sales and customer service right away.

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How to Resurface, Reimagine, and Recover Your Business From This COVID-19 Pandemic 2020

It is time. While this COVID-19 Pandemic may still be lingering for a while longer, than it was expected, but there is no good enough reason anymore for you to wait around for some sign, or for something good to happen or circumstances to change ushering business growth. Hence, it is time for you to make good things happen just for you and so here is what you need to do to resurface, reimagine and recover your business from this ongoing Pandemic now.

It is time.
While this COVID-19 Pandemic may still be lingering for a while longer, than it was expected, but there is no good enough reason anymore for you to wait around for some sign, or for something good to happen or circumstances to change ushering business growth.

Analyzing the changes taking place in the homes of consumers, on their phones, and in stores. Reimagining marketing in the next normal... - McKinsey Report (2020) Click To Tweet

Hence, it is time for you to make good things happen just for you and so here is what you need to do to resurface, reimagine, and recover your business from this ongoing Pandemic now.

Refuse

To kick-off, you can begin by refusing to live in the past.
This is because whatever that had happened with us over the last quarter is gone. Moreover, nothing that you have left behind in your past is a subject of your influence, control or your opinion.

Therefore the temporal address, where you live, might be filled with regrets of the past, anxieties, and worries of the future or the present which is always looming over us now.

So it is best now to refuse to live anywhere else that is not right here (and right now) and thereby refuse to allow a recession or a virus to dominate any more of your precious time and attention thinking about faraway situations, events, or things.

Rather it is the time to do what you can make a difference, and leave these things behind you. Refuse to carry these burdens forward as there is no reason to bring anything into your future that is not going to be valuable to you when you get there.

Hence set down and find out what is no longer valuable to you by recognizing what you have learned or what that has benefitted you.

Reform

Now there is nothing more difficult for us human beings to shed off our limited and old beliefs and accept the new and empowering ones.

Just like this Pandemic and the events of the past few months might have caused you to believe in the fact that the year is over or that you cannot salvage your business goals, since if you have been paying too much attention to what other people think of as truth, no one is going to meet you face-to-face anymore, which is the greatest myth of this century.

In fact, if we look around we shall see that the new normal is already starting to show its face and in this new post-COVID-19 times there is has been nothing normal about it nowadays.

Nevertheless, as what you believe is always your reality, so it is time now that you must view the mounting evidence which shows that things are moving now and also gaining speed.

Well, as an escape you might want to believe that that you do not have time, but as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM in the marketplace, we can assure you that time is all you have right now.

You might even think that things are going to be more difficult when the truth remains that people are always going to need help, which is truer when they are passing through bad times.

Therefore, as the recent events have created an environment where change is is not only necessary but one that people are actively pursuing – you also need to reform your existing pre-fetched believes and actions that you should follow for your business growth.

Re-imagine

None of us in business can escape this Pandemic event, and this global economic meltdown unharmed. This is because every one of us, irrespective of where we are living has shared the adverse outcome of this global unrest, even if the damages might have been worse for some than others.

Therefore, whatever goals that did set at the beginning of this year and whatever initiatives that you started of 2020, need a revision now. For this you need to re-imagine your ambitions, your goals and even accept results that you can create now, sitting on the back of these unfavorable events.

Hence right now re-imagine what your customers might need from you, re-imagine what you are going to provide them and finally re-imagine how you are going to spend your precious time, since this end of this second quarter of 2020 is the perfect time to hit the reset button, and reboot your business operations with an optimistic mind.

Always remember the future never depends on your past and so every decision that you make today can move you forward towards something better or if not it can even leave you in a worse position once you fail to find a vision to pull yourself forward due to inactivity on your part for finding business growth.

Resolve

Resolve to do the works that are necessary to find the desired results that you want, even when it can be really difficult as your prospects and customers might not be able to move fast as they would also want them to do, or as quickly as you want them to buy your offerings.

Therefore, irrespective of the speed at which your business might be moving now, resolve to make a positive difference with your brand for the customers and prospects in your easy to use CRM database.

Resolve to be a force for good, and a force to show the light as there are not too many things around us now that cannot be changed for better with pure and unadulterated persistence.

Hence get after doing the right thing, and do not give up or give in since there is nothing wrong in acting as a positive pig-head when it comes to doing what is right.

Reemerge

Have your customers disappeared?
Do not worry – since you are not the one.

Many of the customers have left their offices or are presently working from their homes and so depending on where you live, your contacts might still be at home.

Now during this Pandemic, you might have also dropped out of their sight, ignored your responsibilities to the people you serve, and like them, decided to wait to resume your day-to-day works once all this is over.

Hence, now is the time for you to show up and reemerge so that you can be once more seen and thereby help people find a feel of your intentions.

As a sales-oriented organization, this is the time you should be in front of your customers. Let yourself think about what your consumers need, and help to pull them back into the light with you.

In fact, in most cases, what makes you the leader in your industry is your willingness and ability to go first.

Recover

Finally, the only way you can recover your business, your year, and your goals are by refusing to let the events of the past dominate your present and future growth- something that we as a human race have always done even before.

We fight. We overcome. We persist. And we win only to deal with another impending emergency, urgency, or crisis.

Hence reforming your beliefs and deciding that you still have the strength to act on your future is not only empowering, but it is a factor that decides everything that is going to happen to you in this post-COVID-19 era and so you have to strengthen your resolve to build your future now.

Therefore start today and act with a sense of urgency, since you can only recover out if this COVID-19 tragedy if you close your eyes and reimagine what is about to come next and then take actions that are necessary to bring what you see in your mind’s eye to meet the requirements of your consumers in the real world, and then take unrestrained action to bring your vision to life.

Lastly as one of the most popular vendors of easy to use CRM software, as our business revolves upon cultivating better relationships we would like to say that if you want to recover, the best thing for you to do now is to help others with their recovery.

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Golden Tips For Cultivating Customer Loyalty In Small Businesses And Startups

Pursing any new business is a pretty exciting activity. Especially when it comes to capturing new leads and then guiding them through immersive and compelling brand experience and customer journey using a business growth tool like an easy to use CRM that leads to a lucrative sale. Additionally, it is even a rewarding experience to know that you as an owner of an SMB is playing a major role in generating serious revenue for your company and keep it in motion to motivate you and your employees to keep landing new clients and customers. Nevertheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective leads is even a little exaggerated activity- at least in the grand scheme of things.

Pursing any new business is a pretty exciting activity.
Especially when it comes to capturing new leads and then guiding them through immersive and compelling brand experience and customer journey using a business growth tool like an easy to use CRM that leads to a lucrative sale.

Because CRM software greatly improves data accessibility, sales reps at companies using a CRM can shorten their sales cycles by 8-14%. - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

Additionally, it is even a rewarding experience to know that you as an owner of an SMB is playing a major role in generating serious revenue for your company and keep it in motion to motivate you and your employees to keep landing new clients and customers.

Nevertheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective leads is even a little exaggerated activity- at least in the grand scheme of things.
This is because there is a lot more to marketing that just focusing on acquiring new leads and customers, as most successful businesses are focused on the larger picture, which implies that they are focused on the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) of each and every customer.

Do not get us wrong. Even though lead generation and top-of-the-funnel marketing are extremely crucial for business growth in all companies, nonetheless your existing customers are always your most dependable source of revenue.

Therefore, retaining your existing customer base should be your businesses’ number one priority since you cannot grow your business if you constantly lose customers because your brand fails is providing poor experiences to the consumers of your offerings.

Hence as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools let us move past prospect marketing strategies and explore how you can encourage customer loyalty using three golden customer marketing tactics for decreasing churn and thereby boosting revenue growth.

1. NURTURING IS NOT JUST FOR PROSPECTS

In most small businesses and startups many associate nurturing with driving prospects through their sales funnels.

Now while that is certainly one example, nevertheless nurturing is not just associated with prospective leads.

In fact, since customers are already spending in your brand and offerings they are more primed for nurturing than even the hottest lead inside your easy to use CRM tool.

Hence here are just a few examples and means you can nurture existing customers to inspire their loyalty for your brand and boost business growth.

• Thank You, Welcoming and Onboarding Emails

Whenever you sign a new customer or make a new sale, ensure to follow-up immediately over email or SMS thanking the customer for their purchase(s). You might even also launch an automated drip email campaign that provides simple direction on how to get started with your offerings, and after that, as the campaign progresses you can add more details and conditional logic to that program to make sure your customers are getting the very most out of your sold offerings.

In the end, also be sure to include recommended content or additional products and services in your communications to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities and thereby further galvanize your seller-customer relationship.

• Celebrate Milestones With Big Promotions

It is extremely important to understand a few key bits of information about all your customers- such as their work anniversaries, birthdays, purchase history, and more. This is because armed with this knowledge you can easily send emails celebrating those milestones and thereby offer special perks and discounts on your offerings.

For example, if you are into a restaurant business or run a ghost kitchen you can provide BOGO promotions on your customer’s anniversaries and birthdays, or an auto insurance firm might offer discounted rates to ensure lower renewal rates after three or five years of safe driving.

These are not only great ways to stay on top of your customer’s mind, but it even shows that you care about your clients and customers and are ready to invest in their success and for continuing business with your brand.

• New Product and Service Announcements

Ambitious startups and small businesses area always diversify and add new products and services to their existing pipeline, since these sort of innovations proves that these companies are serious about improving their business and are ready to provide their customers the best possible goods and services.

Therefore whenever your company rolls out any new lunch, ensure that your existing customers are the first in the list to know about your successes.

Hence consider offering them discounts or free trials for early adopters of your new offerings even before you sell them in the marketplace.
For this, you can ask your customers if they are willing to sign-up in advance for a waitlist, which is great tactics that help in building anticipation for your new launch and even help your brand to gauge the demand of the offering yet to be launch in the marketplace for business growth.

According to surveys we as one of the most popular CRM for small and medium business have seen this sort of preferential treatment, which is often appreciated by customers. Hence ensure to show your customers that they are valued whenever it is possible which will help increase their loyalty for your brand.

2. PRODUCT EDUCATION AND ADOPTION IS CRUCIAL FOR LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS

There are several instances businesses are so used to their own products and services that they take the ease of use of their offerings for granted.

Now, this is just another most common mistake to assume that your clients and customers are using your products and services to their full potential.
However, to avoid this you can create different customer marketing campaigns to make sure sound practical knowledge and optimal usage of your offerings.

• Automated Trigger Campaigns

Well, if you might remember we talked about generating onboarding campaigns previously that can help you customers to get a basic understanding of your offerings.

But still, despite our best efforts as marketers, many customers do not open those text messages and emails, much less click on any informative or helpful links therein.

Therefore, persistence is the key to ensure proper adoption of your products and services.

Now if you are using marketing automation integrated into your CRM for SMB organizations, you can easily track the user’s behavior in your CRM app or on your website, after which you can segment these individuals based on their usage and/or purchase history and then launch an automated campaign to familiarize them with your offerings which can encourage adoption.

Remember to include concise and direct instructions in the verbiage of your campaigns and also add links and prominent CTA (Call to Action) buttons to helpful resources (if they are available online).

You can also encourage A/B testing of your emails to learn what is working and what is not to optimize your customer onboarding campaigns which will ensure that your CTAs, subject lines, and content are all resonating with the audience of your emails for rapid business growth.

• Pro-Tips and Training

Depending on your services and product line, your customers might need some advanced and on-going training.
Hence use progressive profiling and adaptive forms to make it easy for your customers to sign up for training sessions conducted digitally across your marketing channels (e.g. on your login page, website and apps), your monthly customer newsletters and even on your social media websites.

Remember not to overcomplicate the training materials, but ensure your customers find the fundamentals they need to get real usage out of your offerings and thereby remain loyal when the renewal date comes around or they are ready to make another purchase from your brand.

• Customer Webinars

Now if you want to raise the bar and go above and beyond, customer webinars are a great tool that can be extremely helpful in improving product education and the adoption of any offering.

This is because upholding digital events provides exclusive opportunities to dig deeper regarding some of the more complex features of your offerings and help to guide customers through several functionalities or use cases that they might not have implemented or tied even before.

We say this since a greater portion of your customers would rather acquire knowledge through viewing than reading, therefore webinars mostly attracts a lot of viewers, which might provide you a chance to promote additional offerings in real-time.

3. LISTEN TO WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING

Finally, the feedbacks of your customers are always considered as the proverbial ear to the ground, which allows businesses to identify their greatest fans and thereafter leverage them as advocates.

Customer feedback also allows brands to understand the pulse of dissatisfied customers so that they can reach them out directly and correct problems showing the customers that they care.

Therefore on a larger scale, the customer feedback loop is the most effective way to gather information about your brand’s reputation and the value and usability of your offerings.

In fact, it is also a good way to determine if any updates or changes in your business model are having a positive or negative effect.

Hence once you have a clear perception of the public’s view about your company, you can easily leverage this knowledge to boost that perception and your offerings.

For this, it is best to gather customer opinions via social media listening, surveys, NPS (Net Promotor Scores) and third-party review sites such as G2 and Yelp.

After this, you can analyze the information by identifying patterns in the responses of your customers and then start mapping solutions to the main issues- as well as capitalize on what you are doing right.

It is extremely necessary that your businesses’ customer feedback loop is both a model and an ongoing process so that you can apply this method repeatedly to promote a culture of excellence and thereby build a more positive perception in the minds of your customers for your brand for business.

Now as what works for one organization might not work for another, so be sure to research multiple feedback channels and thereafter use the one you feel works most accurately for your company for finding consistent business growth.

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Innovative Ways To Convert Obstinate Leads Lurking Inside Your CRM Software

CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software is a tool that permits your business to manage contacts in an effective way, which can have a positive impact on your businesses’ bottle line as you nurture leads and prospects through their sales cycle. However, the problem lies when some of these leads in your easy to use CRM just would not convert. These fence-sitting leads mostly click through your landing pages and even open your emails, but nevertheless, they do not click the buy button and become a customer. Now even though it can be really tempting at times to simply disregard these obstinate leads as duds, however from a business standpoint doing so implies losing out on potential revenue, in this ever-growing competitive marketplace.

CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software is a tool that permits your business to manage contacts in an effective way, which can have a positive impact on your businesses’ bottle line as you nurture leads and prospects through their sales cycle.
However, the problem lies when some of these leads in your easy to use CRM just would not convert. These fence-sitting leads mostly click through your landing pages and even open your emails, but nevertheless, they do not click the buy button and become a customer.

28% of millennials think CRM applications are “extremely critical” to their success, compared to 18% of Generation X and 9% of Baby Boomers - LinkedIn (2018) Click To Tweet

Now even though it can be really tempting at times to simply disregard these obstinate leads as duds, however from a business standpoint doing so implies losing out on potential revenue, in this ever-growing competitive marketplace.

Hence in this article let us explore some of the creative ways you can convert fence-sitting stubborn leads in your easy to use CRM and how you can make them your brand’s loyal customers for consistent business growth.

 

Use a live chat on your website

As one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM for startups and small businesses, we have often observed that there are some leads that take longer to get converted as they are still in the research phase, and so require additional information to help with their decision.

For these leads, businesses can make it easier for prospects to reach out by using live chat. Needless, to say, live chat is a chat box that any business can integrate on their website, which can allow visitors to type in a question and thereafter receive a prompt reply from a customer support executive.

According to studies it has been found live chat is extremely effective for converting leads as it is an awesome tool that 79% of consumers prefer as a method of communication.

This is because live chat allows consumers to receive an immediate response without having to pick up the phone for clarifying their queries or send an email.

Moreover, you can even send leads in your CRM database to contents on your website using email campaigns where they can get in touch with your support executives using the chat feature integrated into your software.

Get them on your email list

For any business, an email list is a powerful marketing tool. In fact, according to surveys, it has been noticed that email is one of the top-performing digital marketing channels even today.

Hence once you have an email list in your CRM you can easily build relationships with prospective customers and move leads down through the sales funnel using an email sequence as a part of your businesses’ sales cadence.

Now there are several ways that you can use to collect email addresses.
You can collect email addresses of your prospective customers through traditional networking activities like holding meetings or meeting contacts at conferences, or capture fresh leads visiting your business website with the help of sign-up forms that can automatically transfer the contacts to your CRM’s database and offer incentives to get prospects to enter their email addresses.

Now no matter how you collect your emails, it is the need of the hour that you must get them on your email list.

There are several easy to use CRM software platforms in the marketplace that can help you to track your email campaigns in real-time and see how well individual messages are performing right from the dashboard.

Therefore, using these business growth technologies and tools once you see that leads are opening your emails which implies that they are interested in your offer, you can instantly follow up to continue nurturing that prospect and try to get them closer to a sale.

Use a pop-up quiz

As we have said even before, there are certain leads in your CRM those who want to buy something, but they cannot make up their mind, which can be really frustrating for the sales reps as their goal here is to increase conversions.

Now another innovative way to approach this issue is to use a pop-up quiz on your website.

Now, these are not typical quizzes that you find in general websites that tell you what character you are from The Game of Thrones or The Office, rather these quizzes are created to make leads find out what they are looking for based on their selections.

It has been noticed that pop-up quizzes can be a silver-bullet to convert leads, especially if you have a plethora of products to sell on your website.

Deploy retargeting campaigns

In a perfect world, we can assume that each visitor will convert into your customer. Nevertheless, it does not happen in the real world.

This is because visitors and leads may get easily distracted just when they are ready to purchase or they may simply not be ready yet to buy.

Therefore, another effective way you can convert these leads in your easy to use CRM is by retargeting these prospective leads awaiting conversion in your CRM database.

Here how it works:

A visitor lands on your business website and clicks through your product page, but unfortunately, they leave without making a purchase. Retargeting is a technological wonder which allows you to reach the same visitors time and again by showing them ads of your product or brand on the advertising networks like Google or Facebook.

Recent studies have shown that retargeting is an excellent means to create a more profitable sales funnel, which is especially true for e-commerce websites.

For example, you can easily retarget your buyers who have abandoned their shopping cart with ads that display enticing offers.

Now if you are using an easy to use CRM you can even segment your list and thereafter make your retargeting campaigns more effective by targeting specific buyers with their preferred wish list and offerings.

Have a clear and well-defined call to action

Finally, if your leads are not converting, the problem could be that your CTA (Call to Action) is lacking what is needed to move the leads to a sale.

Now a Call to Action or a CTA is prompt, which is a button or a text that is designed to encourage visitors to take an action.

CTA specifies exactly what you want your visitor to do, which can be either a move to buy your product and services or even sign-up for a free trial.

Therefore, make the CTA button on your homepage or your campaign’s landing pages clear and well-defined so that visitors cannot miss it as it uses a prominent color.

You can even optimize the CTA buttons with a copy to say “Try for Free” or “70% Discount” instead of generic copy like “Click Here”.

Hence experiment with different types of CTAs on your pages and run A/B tests to measure which works the best for your company.

Takeaway- Follow up with your leads

As bonus advice, if you want to close more leads in your easy to use CRM platform, you need to reach out.

Now while this may seem obvious, but this is even true that research shows even less than 48% of sales reps never attempt a single follow up.

Hence, follow up on your stubborn and face-sitting leads with a phone call and thereafter even send follow up emails which can be extremely effective as a part of your sales cadence when done correctly.

The bottom line is, once you are using a CRM sending follow-up emails is one of the best ways to convert more leads in your CRM as many of our customers who use our CRM for small and medium business have seen as much as 18% boost in their response rates on the first follow up email and a 27% jump on the sixth email which is an effective tool for converting obstinate leads to customers.

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How Can You Successfully Convert Operations In Customer Care To A Work From Home Set-Up

In light of this recent COVID-19 Pandemic outbreak, several organizations across the globe are now opting to manage their day-to-day works remotely from their residence and homes. In fact, thousands of businesses across China, USA, India, Korea and many other European nations have recently adopted this measure in order to protect their employees and hence reduce the impact of this deadly Coronavirus that is spreading like a wildfire in most nations across the globe. Now, in this era of digital mobility, it might bring you some peace to learn that you make your customer care and support teams to work from their homes, attend to incoming support tickets and issues raised by the consumers without much of a hassle, and to do that all that is needed is access to the right easy to use CRM, a trouble-free internet connection along with a handheld or a mobile device to let your support employees manage their most essential support activities from anywhere and at any time across the globe.

In light of this recent COVID-19 Pandemic outbreak, several organizations across the globe are now opting to manage their day-to-day works remotely from their residence and homes.
In fact, thousands of businesses across China, USA, India, Korea and many other European nations have recently adopted this measure in order to protect their employees and hence reduce the impact of this deadly Coronavirus that is spreading like a wildfire in most nations across the globe.
Now, in this era of digital mobility, it might bring you some peace to learn that you make your customer care and support teams to work from their homes, attend to incoming support tickets and issues raised by the consumers without much of a hassle, and to do that all that is needed is access to the right easy to use CRM , a trouble-free internet connection along with a handheld or a mobile device to let your support employees manage their most essential support activities from anywhere and at any time across the globe.

How can you convert a support center to a work-from-home model at such a short notice?

Well, even though it might make you seem to be at a loss, nevertheless, the truth is that it is indeed highly possible and easy to convert your customer support operations to the work-from-home model and thereafter get it running in minutes.

We say this as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools in the CRM for SMB marketplace since it can be suggested that you can conveniently turn your support centers to a work from the home process if your business uses the necessary tools and route all incoming tickets (chat, emails, calls, and social media communications) to agents through a cloud-based CRM software that can be connected by anyone living anywhere near or far across the globe.

And all these ticket allocations can be done by creating triggers and rules in the CRM that are unique to your businesses.

That implies the support tickets can be easily allocated using an easy to use CRM based on the source of the tickets, type of the query, agent availability and so on.

After which the support agents can use their respective login IDs to log into the CRM software and thereafter attend to the tickets right from their homes and so successfully sustain their efforts in providing world-class support even in these troubled times that we are all are encountering across the world.

Approximately 5.2 percent of workers in the U.S. currently work from home. That works out to be about eight million people, and more folks are joining the work from home workforce each year. Click To Tweet

Golden Tips For Conducting Remote Customer Support Activities

Primarily to track the agent’s performance the Team Leads can track their agent’s performance and also monitor their agent’s SLAs (Service-Level Agreement) by going through the reports and analytics that can be made available using a CRM platform that includes an hourly ticket dashboard and “ticket aging report”.
The Team Leads can also find an “agent productivity report” and many other forms of reports that can easily be configured in a CRM tool’s dashboard based on hierarchy and departments in their organization.

Now even after reading all these hopeful information if you are still concerned about the implication of this process, we might recommend you to follow these understated five golden suggestions to ensure that your remote customer support teams are working efficiently:

1. Boost the flow of communication

It is really a matter of great concern that this sudden change of workplace can be stressful at times, for your
customer-facing support representatives.

Hence in order to keep their spirits high and motivated and to increase their productivity, you can introduce some simple processes, which can include a morning hurdle online, or announce the “performer of the day” for the best performing support staff of any given day.

2. Provide your staffs the right tool

Make sure that all your support agents are geared up with the right tools and software platforms that are essential to aid them to work remotely.

Now one of the most important tools that are needed for this purpose is an easy to use CRM, along with data management and web-conference software solutions, which can allow your agents to handle their daily workflows even in stressful times in an efficient manner.

3. Create an internal knowledge-base

Once you buy CRM for your organization’s growth you can use it as a centralized knowledge-base that can aid your support staff to access and refer to necessary information and data that are needed for resolving their customer issues.

4. Specify your performance metrics

We found that there is always a way long common but unuttered fear in the minds of the management that the work from home model might bring a sudden stop to the optimum productivity index that is required for their business growth.

Nonetheless, if you are using modern-day business growth technology and tools, you can easily prevent such things from happening in your organization by laying down a clear, well-defined and quantifiable metrics that can include:

• The specific length of hours that an agent has to work
• The specific number of calls they need to attend each day…and more

Additionally, you can even conduct regular review sessions with your support teams which can not only help in improving their productivity but it can even aid the agents to focus better on their work as they can view their goals easily.

5. Ensure rigid data-security policies

Finally, as data-security plays a critical role that all businesses must remain careful of in this CCPA and GDPR era, therefore, ensure that your support teams are attending to their customers without compromising on different aspects that pertain to the security of your customers.

Hence as one of the most popular vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses and startups, we suggest you establish rigid security regulations and guidelines and even double-check to find that all these rules are communicated to everyone in your remote teams.

For this, you can provide your customer-facing staff corporate access to important tools like a VPN, security browsing facilities and so on.

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