cloud crm Archives - Best Small and Medium Business CRM Software

9 Facebook Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid While Using Best CRM For Small Business

Now that Facebook has become the de facto social focal point for just about everything on the internet, it is more important than ever for users of best CRM for small business to harness the full power of this social media platform or be left behind by those businesses that truly make use of Facebook. Fortunately, there are a number of common mistakes that can be avoided by owners of best CRM for small business on Facebook, that if fended off can beyond doubt help your brand excel in your targeted Facebook audience’s news feeds.

Now that Facebook has become the ‘de facto’ social focal point for just about everything on the internet, it is more important than ever for users of best CRM for small business to harness the full power of this social media platform or be left behind by those businesses that truly make use of Facebook.

In our previous article on how to create a custom Facebook audience from your easy to use ConvergeHub CRM for SMB, we have described how small businesses can use their CRM database to send targeted Facebook ad, by creating a list of the custom audience, to draw in prospects to their business websites.

93% of marketers use Facebook advertising regularly, which translates to about 3 million businesses that use Facebook to market their business.- Facebook Click To Tweet

While it might seem like that, all you need is a good page, a sound profile and some regular posts to get your contents really stand out in the crowd. However, the deluge of contents on Facebook often makes it hard to achieve that.

Fortunately, there are a number of common mistakes that can be avoided by owners of best CRM for small business on Facebook, that if fended off can beyond doubt help your brand excel in your targeted Facebook audience’s news feeds.

Leaving Your Profile Incomplete

One of the most widespread yet easy-to-avoid mistakes that many small and medium businesses make is not filling up their profile diligently. Make sure that apart from appealing images your page has your organization’s address, hours, and other necessary contact information. While this might seem like a no-brainer stuff, but you will be really astonished to know how many businesses leave their profile incomplete and visually unappealing that ultimately makes them lose the footfall of many prospective visitors on their page.

Failing to Promote Your Content

It is known to many, that Facebook’s algorithm is a complicated and tricky one. Therefore, while it might seem that just by sharing your content people will magically flock to it, but in reality, it is far too easy for your posts to get obscured by the avalanche of contents that gets posted on any user’s daily news feeds. Fortunately, Facebook has a plethora of built-in paid and free tools to help you promote your content and drive customers to your page.

Ignoring Video Posts

According to Facebook’s own stats, it has been noted that business pages that regularly share video contents outperform image or text-based posts by up to 135 percent. However when you share your video, make sure that you are using Facebook’s native video player, as these video posts are ranked much higher by Facebook’s algorithms than embedding videos from other sides like Vimeo and YouTube.

Failing to Engage Your Audience

Just creating and uploading post regularly is not enough. As a social media platform, Facebook is a place where people come together and share information. Audience engagement, therefore, plays a substantial part in Facebook’s algorithm. Hence, to make your feeds to stand out in Facebook you need to engage your audience. One of the most common and easiest means to do this is to create open-ended posts that encourage audiences to reply and replying to comments posted on your post. Therefore, create posts that ask open-ended questions by using your imagination.

Posting too Sporadically

One of the main things about Facebook marketing is that owners of best CRM of small business who uses Facebook for fetching prospects and leads often forget to stay in the user’s news feeds. This means you need to upload your posts on a regular basis, maybe even multiple times in a day, depending on the demographic scale of your business. However, too many posts on Facebook can also make you to get un-followed. Therefore, look into how other businesses in your area are posting and then achieve the fine balance of how many posts you need to upload on Facebook everyday to keep your business growing.

Making Your Page Difficult to Find or Share

Your Facebook page just like your business website is essentially the “face” of your business. However, if you assume that users will automatically find your Facebook page, just after you have created it, you are wrong in your assumptions. Therefore, use Facebook widgets like “share” button of your Facebook page along with your Facebook page’s URL on your website, other official materials, and on your business cards. In other words, link your Facebook page in as many places as possible.

In addition, always remember that your website, Twitter profile, Facebook and other social media profiles use the same name, title or keywords so that your audience can easily find and share your posts.

Not Informing Your Followers Before You Go Live

Since Facebook introduced the Facebook Live feature in 2015, this has become one of the most popular ways to engage your audience. According to Facebook, the use of Facebook Live has risen 330% since its inception to the present times. Moreover, Facebook’s algorithm promotes live videos more than any other posts on its platform. Therefore, if you plan in advance and promote your Facebook Live posts you will certainly find more interactions and hence more engagements on your wall.

Failing to Harness the Power of Giveaway

Everyone loves free stuff. Hence, small and medium businesses must take advantage of this instinctive human liking for free stuffs by using Facebook as a platform for giveaways.

For example, not long ago, we at ConvergeHub developed a Free Lead Generation software and promoted it as a giveaway among our followers on Facebook, who likes our post as one of the best small business CRM software.

However always check out Facebook’s rules and guidelines for giveaways before you post your awards and contents online.

Not Having an Overall Strategy

If you are using Facebook for marketing for your brand, you must consider why you are using this social media platform over others. Hence, look before you jump right into promoting your posts, providing giveaways, buying ads or sharing your live videos online.

Conclusion

Many small businesses merely join Facebook because they know they should do it, but are not aware of their overall social media strategies and goals for marketing their brands.

Therefore, create your social media marketing goals before using Facebook. Are looking for retaining your existing customers, attract new leads, open a new market, or boost your online sales?

Hence, if you are already using the best small business CRM software for taking care of your customers and your sales and marketing leads, the best way to understand the complex world of Facebook marketing is to hire a social media marketer and then create a strategy for marketing, before you place your brand on this most popular social media website.

Reasons to Stop Using Your Inbox as a To-Do List and adopt an Easy to Use CRM

Even after using an easy to use CRM software, whether we admit it or not, using our email’s inbox can be addictive. After all, checking an email is as uncomplicated as refreshing a web browser or tapping on an app. Checking emails gives us the hope that our aspirations will be realized soon. Be it for an exciting business opportunity waiting for a reply, or an update on your shopping cart list etc. Nevertheless, keeping the addiction aside, email inbox, in reality, makes an awful to-do list. Unfortunately, there are still several business organizations those that use email to structure their day-to-day works. In spite of, the prevalence of affordable project management apps, there are many among us those that just cannot break free from the age-old shackles of email.

Even after using an easy to use CRM software, whether we admit it or not, using our email’s inbox can be addictive.

After all, checking an email is as uncomplicated as refreshing a web browser or tapping on an app. Checking emails gives us the hope that our aspirations will be realized soon. Be it for an exciting business opportunity waiting for a reply, or an update on your shopping cart list, etc.

CRM almost makes everyone in your organisation a sales person, since they are selling your business in one way or another. Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, keeping the addiction aside, email inbox, in reality, makes an awful to-do list. Unfortunately, there are still several business organizations those that use email to structure their day-to-day works.
In spite of, the prevalence of affordable project management apps, there are many among us those that just cannot break free from the age-old shackles of email.

In this article, we shall discuss a few reasons as to why you should discontinue using your email inbox and instead use the best small and medium business CRM software to manage your new to-do list:

Your Inbox Does Not Worry About Importance

As a small or medium business owner in a typical day’s work, you need to pitch new clients, deal with employee issues, develop game-changing marketing and support strategies, and others. With so much on your plate, you surely cannot afford to lose time and waste your work hours on non-value-adding tasks.
However, all these being said, why do you then spend so much time hunting between emails? Granted that it is truly impossible to make out when a vital email will arrive, keeping a close watch on your email’s inbox indeed makes sense from this standpoint. Nevertheless, we can wager that more than 90% of the emails that you receive every day are far less than important. Mostly your inbox gets a lot of stuff like these:

Promotional emails from your vendors
Industry newsletters
Emails from sales reps, who want to sell you things
Low-priority requests from employees, vendors, or clients
Social media alerts and others

Additionally, your email’s inbox does not put the most important task related emails at the top, and therefore, important request sinks down into obscurity as additional emails arrive every day.

Surely, you can keep the pace by archiving or deleting unimportant emails. However, is this the best use of your precious time? Probably not.

You Cannot Mark an Email as “Done”

Let us take for granted that you have somehow even managed to devise a process by which only “important” emails make it to the inbox. For this, you have unsubscribed all non-essential emails, have set filters to auto-forward any business emails to your assistant, and have convinced your customers and team members to reach you out sparingly.

However is your email inbox the perfect to-do list now- we still assume it is not so much.

To illustrate this point, let us guess you have the following emails anticipating your attention:

Email Subject: Finish Slide Deck for next week’s presentation

Email Subject: Select a venue for your company’s vendor meeting

Email Subject: Please Sign Up for ConvergeHub 14 Day’s free trial

Being an efficient businessperson, you may be able to complete all these tasks within an hour. However, sadly your all these three tasks are still in your inbox. What should you do with them now? Delete them? Move them to another folder? Do you need to answer to each person, indicating that your job has been done?

Would not it be nice if you can just mark your tasks as ‘done’ and move on with your work? Sadly, emails do not work that way.

Delegation is Messy

To include another layer of complication, not every chore fits precisely into a single email exchange tread.

For an example, let us take up this subjected email “Select a venue for your company’s vendor meeting”. Now, what seems like a relatively straightforward decision can very fast evolve into several separate email threads. Shortly after sending your email for approval, you can receive dozens of added emails from coordinating staffs at the venue. Even their accounts department may need you to make an advance payment by the close of your day’s businesses. You can receive a 20-page PDF document, containing all kinds of menu options, information on sitting arrangements, and other important details.

Will it not be more productive for you if you can allocate all these different tasks to some other members in your company? Nevertheless, here lies the lacunae of using an email inbox, since delegating tasks from your inbox can be really messy.

In the modern times, you virtual assistant may not take much time to forward messages to your marketing and accounting department, however, the problem is there is no guarantee that your staffs will remember to follow up on the issue, as their inbox is also overflowing with tasks. Therefore, using the inbox of your email, you have no way to check whether your delegated job has been accomplished within the deadlines.

There Is a Software Designed Specifically For Organizing Your To-Dos

By now, you must be agreeing with us that your inbox is indeed letting you down.

However, there is good news, as we alluded on the beginning of this post; there are several online SaaS platforms that can structure your company’s works. ConvergeHub CRM, which is best known for its sales management tasks, also provides a suite of integrated business productivity tools.

Let us find how this best small business CRM software can solve many of your headaches right away.

Sequencing important tasks: Unlike your email inbox, ConvergeHub brings clarity to your most important tasks. Using this easy to use CRM software, you can assign due date, the priority of the job, completion report, and status update of your important tasks with just a few clicks.

Tracking completed tasks: Tasks tracking best CRM for small business like ConvergeHub, will also fulfill your desire to check tasks off your to-do list. Using this customer information database software marking any task as “Done” is as easy as clicking a button on your computer or mobile screen.

Delegating tasks to others: Getting all the members of your organization working in sales, marketing, support and even finance departments into ConvergeHub, can be really beneficial for your company. Rather than delegating works from your email inbox, this convergence CRM provides a more structured workflow. Using this easy to use CRM software you can create tasks to occur on a repeated or single-time basis, which makes the very act of delegating your works more efficient.
To start assigning jobs to your other employees, just select the correct team member’s name from an intuitive drop-down in the CRM and connect the task to a larger project.

You can also add detailed notes as you allocate your jobs, to ensure that your teams find no more excuses.

Connecting Sales and To-Dos: For added context on sales and marketing related tasks, you can seamlessly link items to opportunities in your sales funnel. With just a click or two using an easy to CRM software, your team can have access to information that would have otherwise resided only in your mind.

Takeaway:

Leadership comes from the top, so by continuing to rely on email inbox dependent processes, you are just telling your employees to do likewise.

Therefore, take a bold step now and find a better approach to streamline your tasks for enhanced productivity.

Doing this you can be sure that your team will thank you- and so will your bottom-line.

How Best Small Business CRM Software Help Close More Deals

We all are on the lookout for the best small business CRM software because doing a business is all about creating and nurturing relationships. However, doing business with numerous people requires keeping track of multiple interactions, which occurs at different stages of the sales pipeline. This is a constant challenge that many businesses face today, and that is the exact reason why more and more business establishments are turning to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Indeed the best small business CRM software (like ConvergeHub) can be one of your most valuable assets for your SMB. According to Gartner, the estimated CRM software’s global market is now worth $26.3 billion and this figure is projected to reach $36.5 billion by the end of 2018.

We all are on the lookout for the Best Small Business CRM software because doing a business is all about creating and nurturing relationships.

However, doing business with numerous people requires keeping track of multiple interactions, which occurs at different stages of the sales pipeline.

Around 55% of top-performing small businesses are now investing in sales enablement technology like CRM software for generating better revenue. Click To Tweet

This is a constant challenge that many businesses face today, and that is the exact reason why more and more business establishments are turning to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software.

Indeed the best small business CRM software (like ConvergeHub) can be one of your most valuable assets for your SMB.

In fact, in a study done by Brainshark and Forbes last year, it was found that:

Around 55% of top-performing small businesses are now investing in sales enablement technology like CRM software for generating better revenue.

Moreover, this rise in CRM sell is showing no signs of slowing down.

According to Gartner, the estimated CRM software’s global market is now worth $26.3 billion and this figure is projected to reach $36.5 billion by the end of 2018.

This increasing growth in CRM software, especially by businesses looking for the best small business CRM software, is an undeviating reflection of the ability of this platform to create sales and bring a return on its investments. Although, even the best small business CRM software will only be useful for revenue as users make it.

Therefore, to show how priceless this software can be for your sales and marketing team, we have put together 5 ways to secure more deals with your CRM.

Let us get started.

Invest less time on data entry

Perhaps the greatest ability of the best small business CRM software (from the perspective of sales) is that it helps the salespeople spend lesser time on menial tasks and therefore they can utilize more time working with customers and prospects since CRM has an aptitude for automating data entry.

For example, instead of physically reporting every lead captured through a webinar or trade show, you can use your CRM software platform with its integrated web forms and other data importing tools that can record all data and information automatically.

This provides your sales team members more opportunities to work directly with the customers and push the customers slowly and steadily towards a sale, in addition to improving their ability to quickly follow-up with leads.

Get your timing down

Timing can often make a big difference between loosing and closing a deal. Understanding where your potential buyers stand in relation to their final sale is the decisive point in knowing when and how you should engage them. There will be many prospects who will just be interested in gathering information about your brand, while there will be also those who are ready to receive a price quote and iron-out a contract or make a purchase from your brand.

This is truly a delicate balance.

Best small business CRM software can keep your reps from being too eager or too sluggish from developing a lead. By illustrating the sales pipeline and highlighting, where your prospective customers are placed in the sales funnel, your sales reps can clearly understand when or when it is not the ideal time to get engaged with their leads, prospects and customers.

With most CRM software you can create custom stages based on the level of qualification such as leads, inquiries, MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads), SQL (Sales Qualified Leads) and opportunities.

Use analytics to improve your strategy

Your best small business CRM software is just not for storing customer data. CRM is also an extremely advanced tool that helps your sales track their performances and adjust their tactics accordingly. Most CRM platforms come along with a variety of built-in reports, such as:

Financial forecasting report
Profitability and revenue report
Sales cycle reports
Progress to goal report
Win/loss reports etc.

By keeping an eye on the metrics of these reports your sales managers can easily isolate the bottleneck and weaknesses in their sales processes.

Markets can also use these metrics to find which marketing campaigns generated more customers that are new and find their attributed revenue for generating more sales.

Understand your buyer’s needs

CRM can help to show you not only when your buyers are ready to buy but also the best way to engage them. Therefore, by integrating your CRM with a marketing automation platform you can collect metrics of the pre-sales stages that can help your sales reps deploy their skills more advantageously to close a deal.

This data can be:

Where your prospects are in the sales pipeline?
What channel you prospects came from?
What online materials they downloaded or read from your website?
Which selling techniques have been successful or have not been doing well with them in the past?

Build better relationships with customers

Your best small business CRM software is, therefore, a highly effective tool for improving the relationship between your brand and your customers.

According to a report published by American Express:

“Three out of four consumers say they have spent more with a company because of a history of positive customer service experiences,” whereas over half of consumers “intended to conduct a business transaction or make a purchase, but decided not to due to a poor service experience.”

Therefore, understanding the modern buyer and their requirements is the key to any B2B (Business-to-Business) sales in this digital world.

As a customer database, best small business CRM software is a platform that can hold invaluable information for understanding buyers, through their digital body languages, purchase history, communication logs, company data, and others, which helps in improving customer relationship and thus close more sales.

Conclusion

Although the traditional way to close deals has always been the handshake, but as your business grows in this digital world, you need tools like best small business CRM software that helps you scale up your outreach and develop your sales. It gives your sales team enough data that can help them make intelligent decisions, which are the keys to effective sales.

If you have liked this article, feel free to share any tips you have in the comment section below.

5 Ways To Increase Sales Productivity With Mobile CRM App

Every company wants their salespeople to be successful, which means- close more deals.
However, as the completion rises, it is crucial for your sales reps to remain on the top. So how do you do that? What can you do to improve the conditions of your sales and support people, with mobile CRM app so that they can close more sales?

Statistics have proved that easy to use CRM can become one the greatest productivity booster for your sales team.

Mobile CRM increases sales volume and business growth by 15%. - Nucleus Research (2016) Click To Tweet

Sales and marketing CRM platform can not only save hours out of your busy week but also help manage and follow up on your prospects and leads.

According to a study by Gartner, a well-implemented and affordable CRM software can increase business revenue by a whopping 41% for every sales rep working with any business.

How to stay productive while being away from office

Those work in sales would all agree that there is one magic formula for closing any deals. It is about being in the right place at the right time.

To get most out of your CRM, it is important that you log every single information and interactions with your customers, as you will certainly benefit from accessing those data when it is needed.

But what happens if you are away from your office desk?

As a successful and active salesperson, it is natural that you can mostly remain out on customer calls when a prospect reaches out to you. Turning on your laptop for browsing on information while you are on the go is not an option, which is convenient nor is it advisable to tell your prospects that you get back to them after you return back to your office.

Surely, you as a businessperson or as a salesperson will never want to consider your traveling hours as a nonperforming downtime or a window of complete ‘communication brownout’. Rather, you will always want to come up at a meeting equipped with all relevant and vital information that you require to nail down a sales-ready prospect, as well as be capable to update and record actions while traveling.

If you find this true, then say “hello” to a Mobile CRM app, which allows you to stay on the top.

Hence, having your team prepared with a mobile CRM provides flexibility and it is even a great way to enhance the numbers of your sales.

According to a research done by Innoppl Technologies in the USA, 68% of salespersons who work with businesses that have said yes to Mobile CRM adoption have reached their sales targets, as opposed to 21% of sales team members from non-mobile CRM oriented companies.

Moreover, in a study done by Nucleus Research, it has been found that mobile CRM increases sales volume and business growth by 15%.

Aided by a Mobile CRM app, you not only get the access to all CRM data you require but also with cloud based CRM tool you can speed up your abilities to act, respond and increase your conversion rates,

If you are still thinking about how this can be done, then here are 5 key benefits of using a mobile CRM on the go:

#1. Stay well prepared and focused all the time

You can always assume that you have everything under your control. Yet, this cannot be refuted that having your dairies, calendar, and contacts integrated into the mobile CRM is a huge time-saver. Using a mobile CRM, you can not only get yourself notified of an upcoming meeting but also have all the notes and information on the customer on the palm of your hand.

Mobile CRM gives a direct access to your customer’s database in the CRM so that you can get an immediate access to all the vital information that your company has on the customers, partners, prospects, suppliers and even your colleagues.

With a Mobile CRM, you can confidently leave your office knowing that you have access to all information that you might require whenever you need.

#2. Close more sales in less time

Mobile CRM helps you to close more deals with lesser interactions, which can provide you more time to work on new prospects or new sales opportunities.

Imagine you are out of your office and a prospect calls you whom you have been chasing down for a month and the prospect is willing to close the deal, provided you can give a quick summary of all the options that you can offer to the prospect before closing the deal. In this case, “I will email you the details tomorrow” will certainly not be a good way to respond. You know you have all the prospect’s offers and quotes stored in the database at your office, but unfortunately, you are miles away from your office desk right now. So when you are on the clock and trying to close a sale ASAP, having a mobile CRM system where can find all the vital information of the prospects is an ideal weapon to win the sale, as the CRM software can take care of the entire process via your mobile device.

#3. Capture new opportunities

Mobile CRM is an excellent tool to interact with customers and update all their information at the source. When you are in a middle of a meeting it may not be that convenient to open your laptop, but then again if you are incapable of entering the data immediately, there are chances that you may forget several crucial information at the end of the day.

Moreover, if you are on the go, and receive a phone call from your prospect or from your office staffs about changes regarding the sale in progress, you can even update the quote as you go. There is no need to delay it until u get back to your desk.

In the same manner, if you meet someone important on the road, you can add them to your contact list, create networking events, book appointments, or plan activities using a mobile CRM straight away.

#4. Share information across your team

Mobile CRM helps you to share information across your sales, marketing, billing, and customer support departments when contacting a customer or a lead.

For example, if you come across some important information or discover new opportunities during a customer meeting and then the information needs to be circulated quickly to your team, just in case the new prospect decides to contact you or your colleagues, having a mobile CRM can be extremely helpful under this circumstance. Since if your colleagues at the office do not know what you are doing, you may miss out on your next big opportunity.

#5. Stay on track and keep your management informed

With every new sale and contacts, you are gathering valuable information. Mobile CRM app lets everyone involved in the sales and marketing process to access information that they need and most importantly in real-time. Moreover, it also helps the user of the app to organize and present the data in a clear way.

Hence, Mobile CRM enables both the sales reps and their managers to take control over the sales pipelines and update sales forecasts with a few clicks, making you always ready to plan and answer the question about your sales targets at any moment or provide valuable sales coaching to your team on the go.

Conclusion

Therefore, to conclude, mobile CRM helps the users to keep in touch with a higher number of prospects and use the same tools that you have on your office desktop, which increases your own productivity with ease while you are away.

Do you use a mobile CRM app? If so let us know by leaving a quick comment below.

4 Ways Dirty CRM Database Can Hurt Your Marketing Efforts

Like it or not, are you spending your marketing budget on programs that bring poor or no results at all? Researchers have revealed that on an average 15% of a business’s annual profits are spend (read misspent) owing to bad data residing in their CRM database. And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. Here are how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them.

And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. For when scores are shared between duplicate leads, it implies that neither of the records gets a high enough score to proceed down the sales pipeline.

15% of a business’s annual profits are misspent owing to bad data residing in their CRM database as CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. - Gartner Click To Tweet

Additionally, pitiable marketing results along with time wasted following up with the wrong lead drastically lower marketing and sales productivity, increase CRM’s and other marketing software costs, and finally damages the reputation of the company.

Here are 4 how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them:

#1. Duplication

Data of the customers are gathered through several sources, which includes tradeshow lists, web forms, webinars or other third party sources. Hence, duplicates of records end up on most marketing lists.

Cloud-based CRM system and marketing software charges are most often based on the amount of data that is stored in its database. Therefore, retaining too many duplicates in your system inflates the cost of storage. Duplicate records stored in the CRM database also skew performance reports, making it complicated to base critical business decisions on inaccurate results.

The Fix:

Boost the performance of your system with CRM database duplication prevention tools.
Make sure that the likely places for duplicate entry, like manual data entry and data import, are duly covered.
Create a duplicate-free workflow for all teams in your organization, not just for marketing and sales departments in your company.

#2. Lead Scoring

There are several prospects who often use more than one email addresses or interact with your business in different ways (downloads, trail requests, email opens etc.) causing the CRM system or other marketing automation tools to create innumerable duplicates.

Duplicate entries in the CRM database affects lead scoring by:

Score sharing between duplicate leads, whereby neither of the leads scores high enough points to qualify either of the leads.
By treating each and every email addresses as a unique record in the CRM system, a score actually referring to the same lead can be split between two different emails of the same entity.
Shared email addresses, when they are shared between different members of the organization, all the addresses are saved to one unique lead.

The Fix:

Assess the quality of your CRM database and persistently track down all new duplicate records in the database.
Be thorough in cleaning your bad data and make sure that no duplicate records are left behind on a recurring basis.

#3. Inaccuracy

It has been found that CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. Hence, remember your CRM database’s quality always changes over time.

Outdated contact information, organizational changes, errors during entry, and also external data sources affects the quality of your existing CRM database.

Bad data unnecessarily stored in the CRM database, escalates storage costs, which results in creating a devastating effect on your marketing plans. This is because; multiple communications with the same prospect or lead and wrong targeting can have a crucial effect on the reputation of your brand.

The Fix:

Verify and then enrich all customer data.
Verify all third party data sources before adding the contacts or other related information in the CRM database.

#4. Limited Visibility

Most businesses depend on several systems for gathering their customer data, where CRM is just one of these sources marketers use in building the customer profiles that help them in targeting.

To access the customer information across, on-premise, cloud and also third-party systems, marketers need to be capable of finding data easily and quickly, regardless of errors or differences in form (like acronyms, nicknames, or misspellings).

The Fix:

Find a 360-degree view of your customers using a Converged CRM (like ConvergeHub) for creating more personalized campaigns resulting in better targeting of your customers.
Integrate every customer-based data into a unique workflow.
No matter where it resides, make data easy to be located in your sales, marketing, and support teams.

Conclusion

Are your campaign rates dropping?
Evaluate the current state of your CRM database with data quality report of your database from professional CRM data cleaning services in your city.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what your biggest takeaway was!

How to Find Salesforce Alternatives- As Bigger Is Never Always Better For Your Business

Salesforce CRM is a first-rate cloud-based CRM solution, but several businesses are also there those that are not that happy using Salesforce and hence they look for Salesforce alternatives, as- ‘Salesforce is not for everyone.’ So if you are considering replacing Salesforce or just starting out on your search for buying a Customer Relationship Management platform, but is not sure of which one will be the best for your business, it is a good idea to try our several Salesforce competitors available in the CRM marketplace.

The main reasons why small and medium businesses looking for Salesforce alternative are:

Cheaper prices
More customizability options
Simplistic features for easy adoption and learning
Ease of use to meet their CRM requirements.

So if you are considering replacing Salesforce or just starting out on your search for buying a Customer Relationship Management platform, but is not sure of which one will be the best for your business, it is a good idea to try our several Salesforce competitors available in the CRM marketplace.

Much like Salesforce, there are also several (practically all) Salesforce alternative CRM that provides a free of cost trial of their services. Some of them even offer a free account. Hence, go ahead, use these risk-free and safe alternatives, and attempt to evaluate as many Salesforce competitors as you like, and then after your search, select the winning CRM that fits your sales and marketing team.

Salesforce CRM holds just 21.1% share of the global Customer Relationship Management software market.- IBM developerWorks (2017) Click To Tweet

Here are some of the parameters that can help you to find the right CRM that you need for your business:

Price

Of course, for all businesses understanding your budget is an important element of any purchase. Moreover, do not always consider the upfront cost, but do your research on the long-term costs versus the benefits that your CRM solution is going to deliver over time. Consider the cost of upgrades, training, and ongoing services, which generally comes out of the same fund allocated for the initial payment. Apart from this, you also need to take into account the cost of software customization, system integration, and the price of additional equipment, like PCs, server or notebooks. Avoid buying a cut-rate Customer Relationship Management application that may suddenly inflate your overall price tag while looking for Salesforce alternatives in the marketplace.

Clearly-Outlined Business Objectives

Before purchasing your CRM, involve your sales, marketing, and customer service departments to provide you a compilation of wish lists and their mandatory requirements so that they can champion and support your decision. In addition to the IT department, you should secure buy-in from one of your C-level executives for your selected CRM platform, so that the person can provide the required capability needed for the yet-to-be-acquired software.

Apart from these, create a checklist of weighted, measured, and prioritized requirements for your CRM software selection, which can act as a benchmark for follow-up analysis of the success of the new software and its return on investment before looking for Salesforce competitors in the marketplace.

Scalability

While finding a CRM for your business always measure the scalability of the software, to ensure that your present choice will not become next year’s lament. You need to understand that you are buying the CRM for helping it to make your business grow, and so the CRM also needs to grow unless you are ready to buy a replacement system a few years down the road.

Ease of Use

Consider the expertise level of your office staffs before purchasing your Salesforce alternative CRM platform. Since, if your chosen CRM software is extremely complex and cumbersome to operate, your employees may shy away from using the software that will at once decrease the software’s value and therefore hit hard on your ROI.

Vendor Strength and Reputation

Scrutinize the reputation of your selected vendors on your short-list. Check into social media networks which give user reviews and independent analysis of CRM software. You can also speak directly to existing customers of your short-listed CRM software and know about the brand’s strength and weaknesses; especially how well the CRM support staffs helps their customers by keeping them in the loop on future developments and updates of the CRM platform.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist, never be in a haste to clinch a new CRM solution. To find your Salesforce alternatives, always carefully consider your objectives, expectations, and requirements and then meticulously plan your purchase to ensure your purchasing decision delivers both savings and improvement in your business’s workflow, by truly living up to its promises and benefits until the end.

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CRM and the Role of AI for the Future of Businesses

Everywhere that you see today, customer data is blowing up. People (and all their modern devices) are sharing data, which even refers to household products. This is happening, as behind each device, interaction, and products there is a customer, which equates to a first-time opportunity for organizations to delight their clients and customers with unprecedented experiences that are most intuitive, predictive, and relevant than ever, upholding the role of AI for the future of businesses in this modern world.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) embedded in trade and commerce and CRM platforms are creating striking new possibilities for the customer experience and beyond.

Out of more than 1000 global companies analyzed by IDC 28% of companies already use Artificial Intelligence and 41% are planning to use AI in the next two years. Click To Tweet

In December 2016, President Obama released a detailed report on the role of AI for the future of businesses, automation, and the American economy. The report endorsed technology being the primary driver of growth in GDP per capita, overruling labor, or capital in the U.S. However, it also warned that the larger economic gains that can be found by AI could remain to a selected few, as the winner-take-most nature of the IT markets means that only a few may come to dominate the markets that hold the role of AI for the future of businesses.

Recently the pioneering market intelligence company IDC, in collaboration with SFDC, released a report on the economic impact of using AI for Customer Relationship Management activities, ranging from marketing and sales to customer support and retention. Whereby they confirmed, out of more than 1000 global companies analyzed 28% of companies already use Artificial Intelligence and 41% are planning to use AI in the next two years. Hence, 2018 is expected to be a pivotal year for AI adoption for enterprises, paving the road for the role of AI for the future of businesses.

Within CRM specificity, it is a known fact to many that 50% of business activities in the Customer Relationship Management platform are already in the cloud. No wonder vendors of cloud-based SaaS CRM ranging from IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and even Google have doubled down on the war for acquiring lion’s share of the market of the enterprise cloud.

The term Artificial Intelligence or AI is an extremely broad term that defines a wide range of technology that includes machine learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing), computer vision, and several other predictive analysis approaches that heralds the role of AI for the future of businesses.

The challenge in this golden age of AI revolution is to determine how we can develop the right expertise and process for collecting data, as well as build AI algorithms and models fast enough to reap the benefits of this technology.
Given the fact that most companies do not even know where and how to begin, building AI based new systems, apps, and capabilities or having AI already ingrained into CRM, will significantly hike any companies’ skill to deliver high-impact and smart customer experience quickly and effectively.

Customer intelligence in a CRM starts with the cluster of rich data that resides in one location and caters to a single comprehensive view of each customer. Without this data, AI algorithm (no matter how advanced it is) will not be able to present a meaningful predictive analysis. Additionally, this approach not only turns CRM platform into an ideal technological choice for managing customer relationship but it can help to build all kind of apps like the one that can predict late payments, accounts receivable, supply chain management that can predict stock level according to expected demands and more.

E-commerce firms can also use the CRM database to elevate buying experience by providing personalized and automated recommendations and special offers that can help draw shoppers to their e-commerce websites. Thinking ahead of times, embedded intelligence can even learn from conversation history and coach sales agents in the next steps they must take to reach out with their best offers to the customers.

To conclude, with all trends that are transforming the ways we do business and interact with customers, the role of AI for the future of businesses will surely show us even more exciting and innovative developments during the upcoming months in 2018.

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Benefits of Cloud-Based CRM Vs Other Types of CRM

No matter whatever that you may sell, managing your customers is important for the success of your business. This is where exactly choosing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) comes into play. There are mainly three types of CRM. All these CRM systems support your business from different angles, which helps you to accomplish different goals. Therefore, choosing the best CRM system for your organization requires identifying your objectives and determining the main customer management problems that you need to resolve by adopting a CRM for your businesses.

No matter whatever that you may sell, managing your customers is important for the success of your business. This is where exactly choosing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) comes into play.

There are mainly three types of CRM. All these CRM systems support your business from different angles, which helps you to accomplish different goals.

Therefore, choosing the best CRM system for your organization requires identifying your objectives and determining the main customer management problems that you need to resolve by adopting a CRM for your businesses.

The CRM industry has seen staggering growth in recent years. Cloud-based CRM revenue will likely make up almost 50% of the 2017 projected $31 billion CRM sector.- Gartner Click To Tweet

Operational CRM

This kind of CRM system centers on using software apps, which help to incorporate a different set of information that is available on each lead, prospect, and customers into one useful file. For instance, this type of CRM system brings together customer’s contact details, purchase history, and any other communications that the customer have had with the users of the CRM on one window so that employees can provide the customer with fast response and service. Operational CRM provides support to marketing, sales, and support reps across different departments in an organization.

This type of CRM system can also be useful to help Sales Force Automation:

Sales Force Automation

SFA or Sales Force Automation help to keep a record of every stage in the sales process, aiding marketing and sales departments to automate activities like scheduling calls, making reports and creating email campaigns for relationship management and drip marketing campaigns.

Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM systems help in looking into the lead, prospect and, customer data from an analytical angle to come up with unique marketing strategies that can be implemented for harnessing future sales. This type of CRM views data points from different databases and then use techniques like data mining to come up with patterns and trends. Using Analytical CRM, companies can create better and long-term strategies for customer management and sales.

Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM systems focus on integrating contacts with external agencies, like distributors and vendors, and cater this data to its customers through an extranet. This type of CRM system helps customers to get proactive about the services they get from the company, by providing them with a support center, along with technical support and new tools (e.g. instant messenger).

Furthermore, a CRM platform is divided into 2 types:

On-Premise CRM

An On-Premise CRM system puts the onus of security, administration, control, and maintenance of the CRM’s database and information on the company itself. Users of this CRM systems purchases licenses upfront for implementation of the CRM system, instead of buying monthly, quarterly or annual subscriptions. The On-Premise CRM system’s software and database resides on the company’s server and it requires a prolonged installation process for integration of the software with other existing and traditional software (if any), used by the company. In general, a very large business organization with highly complex Customer Relationship Management needs benefits more from this type of CRM.

Cloud-Based CRM

Cloud-based CRM like ConvergeHub which is also an on-demand or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) CRM system, is a platform, where data is stored on a remote, external network that users of the CRM can access anytime, with the help of an Internet connection.

In many cases, third-party services are deployed to oversee maintenance and installation of these CRM systems.

The Cloud-based CRM system needs relatively easy and quick installation and is so adopted by companies who have limited expertise, technology, or resources. Cloud-based CRM is also more cost-effective as vendors of these CRM systems charge users on a subscription basis with the option of yearly, monthly, or quarterly payments.

Why small businesses and salespeople prefer Cloud-based CRM?

One of the primary benefits of Cloud-based CRM software is its scalability. All SaaS or Cloud-based CRM systems are designed to be flexible, which means, it can expand its capacities, depending on the organization’s needs. Moreover, as the cost of this CRM platform is based on the number of users and storage requirements, which can scale up and down as your requirements change, hence this CRM solution is often the most preferred CRM platform for small and medium businesses in today’s world.

Apart from this Cloud-based CRM, also most often include integration with commonly used email systems and office applications along with integration with social media data and automatic backup tools.

Lastly with the growth of mobile technology, we presently also have Cloud-based CRM system applications that are built for tablets and smartphones. Mobile CRM apps use features that are unique to mobile devices, such as Voice-recognition capabilities, GPS, and others in order to better serve the customers and essentially provide access to the sales employees for using this technology on the go.

If you have liked this article, we would like you to post your ideas and suggestions in the comment box below.

Increase Holiday Sales This Year by Understanding Your Customer’s Purchasing Behavior

Each year something exciting happens, as we want to spend endless hours looking through retail shelves in search for the perfect gifts for our loved ones. Based on the forecasts for this year, it has been predicted that this year’s holiday season sale will be a blast, as US consumers are planning to spend 3.5 – 4.5 percent more than they did in 2016. While in another research, it has been pointed out that more than 82 percent of shoppers in the US are planning to buy their gifts online.

Each year something exciting happens, as we want to spend endless hours looking through retail shelves during holiday sales in search for the perfect gifts for our loved ones. However, holiday season for business owners is a time, which is marked by ceaseless frustrations and anxieties. There are way too many things to deal with and things worsen when you find your customers jumping ships and fleeing to your competitors because you have neglected some valuable insights about customer preferences.

But fear not, since there are myriad of information and research online, which can reveal the wants and needs of your customers.

Based on the forecasts for this year, it has been predicted that this year’s holiday season sale will be a blast, as US consumers are planning to spend 3.5 – 4.5 percent more than they did in 2016.

How the US Consumers plan to shop this season

According to a forecast by Forrester Research, it has been suggested that online sale will increase by 12 percent this holiday season compared to 2016. While in another research, it has been pointed out that more than 82 percent of shoppers in the US are planning to buy their gifts online.

According to a forecast by Forrester Research, it has been suggested that online sale will increase by 12 percent this holiday season compared to 2016. Click To Tweet

While this may seem to be a positive trend for online stores, there is another insight that you should also be aware of. According to Forrester three-quarter of all holiday shoppers expect to buy their gifts from Amazon. This means although e-commerce sale is expected to grow, Amazon will take a large chunk of the sale.

Another interesting trend revealed by Forrester shows the consumer’s tendency to procrastinate. The said research has brought out that in 2017, shoppers are expected to wait even longer before buying their gifts, which means, that in-store pickups and expedited shipping, will be most valuable from the customer’s perspective.

As an e-commerce business owner, you probably already have a 2017 Holiday Plan in place, but still, it is worth reconsidering the plan to see if it aligns with these recent researches.

Here are a few more suggestions based on the research findings:

Tips on how you can increase sale during Holiday Season 2017:

#1. Get an online store

If you have not yet tapped into the power of online selling, get on the bandwagon now. Although it is true that people still love to touch and feel their products before purchasing them, however, holiday season purchases are more about giving others, which means that generic product mix will sale moreover personalized items.

#2. Review your product assortment

Consumer’s mindset changes radically once the trees change its hue. While consumers try to stay wary of their finances in the early fall, they start buying lavish gifts and start throwing money on unnecessary items as the holiday season approaches every year, and mostly their choices are not thoughtful ones. This is the time to review your stocks and dig out those most costly gifts and pricey toys. Remember, the more creative, pretty and decorative your product offerings, the more sales you can expect during the holiday sale.

#3. Incorporate recommendations

According to Forrester Research, 64 percent of online buyers try to view recommendations or suggested products while they shop. By adding recommendation functionality to your e-commerce website, you can make you of the collected data to find out your customer preferences. To enhance customer experience, you can even allow your shoppers to like and save their favorite items while surfing for their desired products in your online shop.

#4. Provide expedited shipping and pick-up in store

For early buyers consider offering free delivery, since ‘free delivery’ ranked high as a consideration factor in the stated surveys. Moreover, as mentioned even before there are an increasing number of customers those who are postponing their purchases this holiday season, therefore, such services that make sure of guaranteed delivery will be much appreciated.

#5. Update marketing communication across all channels

For this holiday season, remember to align all your marketing materials and website landing page imageries with the holiday theme. It has been observed on several occasions that holiday themes put customers into a buying mode. As most customers have a mental budget of how much they are going to spend during the holiday season sale, therefore, put out your holiday merchandise at the earliest, and create an atmosphere of a joyous celebration online.

#6. Improve customer support

Even when the craze and rush for holiday shopping get out of your control, it is important that you stand apart from your competitors by providing a high level of customer service. According to Forrester Research, 68 percent of online shoppers expect their desired brands to answer their queries within a day and 26 percent wants to receive a response within 2 hours.

As this kind of customer expectations often puts tremendous pressure on business owners during the holiday season, consider streamlining your customer service processes by adopting latest technological solutions such as Chat-bots and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to cater to your customer’s needs.

#7. Optimize mobile experiences

In a report published by Adobe Digital Insights, mobile visits have risen by 33 percent compared to what it was in 2016. Therefore make your e-commerce website mobile responsive and create a speedy mobile checkout process. As everyone is pressed for time during the holiday season, people are more willing to shop online using their mobile device. Offering different payment methods such as credit cards, and digital wallets help in generating more sale and process faster checkouts.

Summary

Hence, in a gist, while data provides a complete picture of personal preferences and behaviors of your customers, but as holidays are centered on the idea of gift giving, holiday promotions are here to stay for this year and times to come.

What Is The Impact That Big Data Technologies Will Have On CRM?

Every business by now has heard about Big Data and its growing importance as many businesses are drawing their attention to it. However, nowhere is the use of Big Data technologies more important than in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. By continuously keeping track of data, any small or big business establishment can learn more information that they can subsequently use to improve its brand’s customer satisfaction and experience.

Big data is projected to grow into a $53.4 Bn market by 2017, up from $10.2 Bn last year and this is how it will help the CRM industry today. Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, despite the benefits of Big Data, there are several companies who avoid or do not use Big Data to develop a precise and clear CRM strategy.

How can you manage Big Data challenges?

Here are our advice and suggestions for managing “Big” data:

Archive all unused or sparely used data.
Use time-honored RDBMSs (Relational Database Management System) for your transactional data.
Use NoSQL (non Structured Query Language) for those extremely large and practically non-shrinkable data volumes.
Tier your data storage to make the most of cost efficiency.
Divide data sets into manageable-chunks as per their function or need.
Use Indexes.
Store your data in more efficient formats to speed up queries and save space.
Do not over-normalize data.
Query subsets or rather to say representational data sets.
Use ‘disk-to-disk’ backup for enhancing reliability and speed.
Use the state-of-art available technology for storage, networking, and retrieving data.

What are the most used Big Data tools?

Apache Hadoop
Apache Samoa
Lumify
Talend Open Studio for Big Data
Apache Storm
RapidMiner
Elasticsearch
R-Programming
HPCC Systems Big Data
MongoDB

In a recent survey done by Forrester of British businesses, it was found that more than 66% of establishments used their CRM either on an “ad-hoc” basis or “without any predefined plan”.

Data without any planning is just useless and similarly, a plan without any data is just a matter of wish fulfillment. Therefore, if business leaders are required to build loyal customers, they must build and rely on successful CRM strategy along with Big Data, just like, as it was when Social Media got integrated with CRM technology in the past.

Understanding Big Data and CRM

On a primary level, all business practice Customer Relationship Management to a certain degree. Even before modern day computers came into existence, businesses used to keep data of their important and steadfast customers on a ‘Rolodex’ or simply on cards. This data would encompass basic information like the customer’s contact information and also what business the person has done with the company.

There are several companies, which still do a similar thing today, only with Google Docs and Excel worksheets replacing a Rolodex. However, there is so much more information in this digital age about customers, which businesses can gather from social media apps, websites and so on, that today’s businesses need CRM platform to store all that multitude of data.

While all these information may not directly provide to a business, yet still this information is still in public and is extremely useful, as it shows what the customers really think or what they are trying to tell to the business.

For an example, of how Big Data can keep customers and their interests, let us look at Walmart. It has been rumored that Walmart is constructing a 40 (PB) Petabyte or 40 million Gigabyte of Cloud Data to keep track of the inexhaustible number of products they are shipping across the globe. While this retail giant in the older times could have to wait for several days or months to know the condition of their sales in a selected sector or area and then make adjustments accordingly, now they can do it instantaneously, that have made them a retail Titan.

You can always think that your small or medium business does not need a Cloud storage facility that large, and hence you might as well view Big Data as something, which is not required for it exceeded your business’s technological capabilities and needs. However, in reality, Big Data is for everyone, and that is the exact reason where CRM software platforms like SFDC (Salesforce) or Hubspot can be of your help.

Aided by Big Data Technologies a salesperson can store all information of any client in one place and then use CRM software solution to efficiently share the data with everyone. When this process is multiplied by every other sales representative in an organization, and keeping track and sharing data with everyone else becomes a routine activity, then higher-ups in the organization can note trends and fruitful approaches, which can keep the customers happy.

What is Big Data Technologies — Big Data

Integrating AI

This explosion of Big Data Technologies is going to be further facilitated in the future by the spread of IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence). The challenge in this technological innovation is not just collecting the data, but as well as processing it. CRM software can help over here, as in the present times there are too much of information out on the Internet and kudos to machine-learning, CRM software when integrated with AI technology can continue to grow and come up with superior conclusions as they analyze this flow of ever-increasing data.

The Future is now

While not every business can build a data cloud akin to Walmart, yet CRM software like ConvergeHub and others can provide an affordable means to keep track of your data, which everyone in your organization can access and help managers draw conclusions by analyzing and processing data, which is too vast for our human minds.

Free Lead Generation Tool for CRM Integration of Social Media

According to Google, Facebook is quickly closing in on its 2 billion users mark and it had 1.86 billion users per month at of the end of 2016. LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft and Twitter has 500 million and 330 million users per month respectively, as of the third quarter of 2017. This ever-increasing multitude of potential buyers presents the small and medium business community with easy opportunities to score. Hence, we can easily say that the CRM integration of Social Media is one the decisive factors that presently determines how much revenue and growth your business will experience in the days to come.

The unique thing that social media platforms offer to its users is an arena to boost their sales in a clever and restrained way- by hearing rather than talking and answering rather than hawking and pitching their products and services directly on these platforms.

ConvergeHub allow single click accumulation of information through personalized lead capture application with Free Lead Generator Tool. Click To Tweet

Is integration to social media important for a CRM?

In the recent times, we have witnessed several CRM giants like Oracle and Salesforce acquiring social media startups. While Oracle (ORCL) purchased Vitrue, Salesforce (SFDC), another leading vendor of CRM technology bought Radian6 and Buddy Media, which are sentiment tracking and social media performance evaluation companies.

Therefore, not only big organizations have realized the importance of CRM integration of Social Media, but also for small and medium businesses, having a social media presence is vital for several reasons.

People nowadays like to understand more about the products, services, or brands they use and the companies they purchase their stuff from. In a recent study conducted by Forrester, it has been noted that apart from checking out on the websites, buyers also prefer to look into the internet to search on social media sites about their vendors online.

Social media platforms open up new vistas of interaction between the companies and their customers, be it in terms of lead generation, publicity or in the field of customer support. In a gist, businesses use social media based CRM for reaching out a wider array of audiences in lesser time as compared to brands that use traditional CRM systems for their business needs.

Traditional vs. Social CRM

Customer Relationship Management software primarily comprises of three basic elements: Marketing, Sales, and Post-sales Customer Support. The basic purpose of CRM is to move the leads, prospects, and customers through a pipeline, repeatedly. Hence, traditional CRM essentially focused on data that the software collects from its leads and customers, as all decisions or strategies regarding marketing, sales and support activities are based on this data.

However, CRM integration of Social Media has recently changed the whole paradigm. In the recent times, the crucial point of an organization’s operation is the customer itself. Hence, instead of accumulating data by pushing messages or marketing to the customers, business establishments nowadays collaborate directly with their customers to solve the customer’s issues, which empower the companies to build stronger customer relationships that make an ideal selling scenario for small and medium businesses.

The alliance between email marketing and social media

To help almost any type of businesses be it a large or small, to achieve its goals, email marketing, and social media makes a killer combination.

With the advent of new technology, brands can share their email campaigns on social media platforms in order to reach out even to people who are not on their mailing list. Additionally, this also increases the chance of more people signing up for their emails. By encouraging people to share the emails with their followers and fans, companies can widen their reach of reaching out indirectly. Apart from this, there is also another option of adding social buttons on your website and app, through which people can like or follow your brand’s social page.

How does it work?

Different CRM has different approaches when it comes to CRM integration of Social Media platforms. However, the most used approach is, seeing updates and capturing information from your contacts, prospects, and social circles, right into your CRM’s dashboard.

Normally, primarily you have to authorize the CRM system to extract data from different social media websites.

More advanced CRMs like ConvergeHub allow single click accumulation of information through personalized lead capture application e.g. Free Lead Generator Tool, that once activated from your web-browser pulls in details like name, phone no, address, company information, other personal data of the targeted leads and more into the CRM.

Some of the Web 2.0 sites and social media apps include Flicker, GitHub, YouTube, etc. However, most CRM platforms like ConvergeHub focus on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Gmail, Yelp and Twitter for lead generation to increase customer base and revenue.

Steps for setting up ConvergeHub Free Lead Generator Extension in Google Chrome:

Navigate to the Extension in the Google Chrome App Store

For adding the Lead Generator Chrome extension, navigate to “Customize and Control Google Chrome” in top right corner and click on “More tools”. Next click on “Extensions” to see all the extensions installed in your Chrome Browser.

Search “ConvergeHub” and then install or “Add to Chrome” the ConvergeHub Lead Generator plug-in

In the Chrome Extension tab, click on “Get More Extensions” and search for ConvergeHub or ConvergeHub Lead Generator. After the search is done, select the extension “ConvergeHub Lead Generator” and then click on “Add to Chrome”.

Advantages of using a Knowledge Base for your CRM

KCS or Knowledge-Center Supports which in ConvergeHub CRM we call Knowledge Base is a solution that primarily focuses on knowledge as a critical asset to any organization to help service agents mitigate digital challenges of our modern times. It has been found by us that businesses that employ knowledge-center support methodology are capable of resolving 5 to 10 times more customer cases, as well as identify viable opportunities to improve their company’s products and services based on customer feedback.

Digital revolution has transformed the way we do business, add value, and engage with our customers today. In addition, technology has created a huge opportunity for innovation in productivity and modernization for organizations in several industries. Nevertheless, technology has also added complexity and created new challenges especially for support agents to provide their clients with top-level service, every time.
KCS or Knowledge-Center Supports which in ConvergeHub CRM we call Knowledge Base is a solution that primarily focuses on knowledge as a critical asset to any organization to help service agents mitigate digital challenges of our modern times.

It has been found by us that businesses that employ knowledge-center support methodology are capable of resolving 5 to 10 times more customer cases, as well as identify viable opportunities to improve their company’s products and services based on customer feedback.

The Knowledge-Centered methodology is based on a double-loop process “Solve-loop” and “Evolve-loop”, which creates unified knowledge repository that enhances the user participation and also improve the quality of the content for resolving customer complains.

Benefits of KCS or Knowledge Base adoption

Reusable well-structured contents, which are generated by three main stakeholder groups: Customers, Company, and Support Agents, is the core of any well-defined problem-solving processes. Hence, with the help of the agile Knowledge Base support can help businesses to resolve customer-facing incidents by providing more precise answers to customer requests and complains.

Moreover using Knowledge Base or Knowledge Center, as you may call it, businesses can make substantial savings in their operational costs- as knowledge-center support helps organizations to deliver exceptional customer service experience without acquiring additional third-party software or hire extra staffs for delivering quality support to its customers.

In other words, KCS is not something that you do in addition to solving issues, rather Knowledge Base does not replace the experience and knowledge of your support reps, but it complements them. Hence, businesses that have implemented KCS report have seen unforeseen improvements in incident/request resolutions, operating costs, a significant reduction in training times, customer satisfaction, and therefore, job satisfaction at the end.

How does it work?

KCS follows a continuous loop of capturing, structuring, and reusing contents.

Step #1

Capture Knowledge

Knowledge begins with the customer. When complains and requests come in, contents are created as by-products of the problem-resolution process. This means your content writers create appropriate customized contents, making relevant information easily searchable on your CRM and other apps.

Step # 2

Structure Knowledge

The best way to write content from the customer’s perspective is to work on a Form. This keeps things easy for the service agents and promotes consistency in the Knowledge Base.

Step #3

Reuse Knowledge

While working on customer issues, support agents can search through the Knowledge Base and then link multiple incidents to relevant articles, making sure that the team works from their collective knowledge.

Step #4

Improve Knowledge

The final step is to improve the quality of the content. When your support agents reuse articles in their problem-solving endeavors, they continuously review the content at the same time. This keeps the contents of the Knowledge Base up-to-date as it shares its ownership across the entire support team.

Thus, briefly, the collective wisdom of the Knowledge Base not only provides resources for the service desk, but it also provides an intellectual asset for organizational learning and aids onboarding new agents as they come and join the organization.

Now that you know about the utility of having a Knowledge Base ingrained in your customer support endeavors, write to us if you have any further suggestions in the comment box below.

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