CRM - January 2009 - (Page BPS6)

6 January 2009 Sponsored Content Putting Your CRM Data to Work for You and Your Customers Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have become a staple in today’s organizations to collect and manage information about customers, and SaaS-based CRM solutions have made it possible to quickly and easily deploy and manage these applications. Today, many organizations are seeking to share and leverage information from their CRM systems with other information channels to take these benefits one step further. One way organizations can optimize their investment, leverage the benefits of the SaaS model, and at the same time improve the customer experience, is to integrate their CRM system with their phone through SaaS-based voice applications. EMPOWER YOUR CUSTOMERS and generate truly personalized interactions and transactions. A key to successfully extending the selfservice CRM functionality to the telephone is flexibility. Your application must be able to quickly respond to changing customer or business needs. For example, if your organization has added a new product and you’d like it to be available via the phone as well as online, you must be able to easily add that option to your application. Today’s SaaS-based IVR applications, like those from Angel.com, make adjusting and changing your phone options a simple process; a web-based toolkit enables real-time adjustments through a simple web browser. GET YOUR SUPPORT AGENTS IN SYNCH WITH CALLERS INCREASE REVENUE POTENTIAL Organizations that leverage SaaS-based IVR solutions with their customer service functions understand that one key to generating a positive caller experience is providing self-service options, or providing callers with fast and efficient phone-based interactions to automatically deliver realtime information at their convenience. Information from your CRM system can be used in an automated fashion to provide the caller with personalized information at the start of the call. IVR systems can be set to read data such as whether the caller is a VIP customer, or may have recently ordered one of your products upfront and respond accordingly. By doing this you easily accomplish increased customer satisfaction A common frustration among live agents is not knowing who the caller is and what they may be calling about. This frustration is shared with your customers when they are transferred to the wrong agent, and have to repeat information they provided in the upfront IVR. By integrating your phone system with your CRM solution, the customer is recognized up front and can be routed to the appropriate agent based on data contained in their customer record in the CRM. And when they are transferred, their customer record is ‘screen-popped’ to the agent’s desktop so the agent has the identity of the caller and a record of why they may be calling. Additionally, any information that is captured in the up-front IVR, such as customer number or support case number they are calling about, is also ‘popped’ to the agent. Getting the agent and the customer in synch on each call saves time for both parties, and in the end leads to greater support center success and customer happiness. Your CRM solution is also a critical part of acquiring new business opportunities, and many organizations also have outbound lead generation or inside sales departments whose sole role is to make outbound calls to prospects. In conducting any outbound campaign, it is important to maximize the number of outgoing calls to increase the number of sales opportunities and, ultimately, drive sales. Today’s IVR applications make it possible for CRM users to place outbound calls simply by clicking on a phone number within a lead record. In addition to the time-saving benefit of eliminating manual dialing, this solution saves time for sales or lead generation teams by automatically logging the call, its results and follow up tasks directly into the lead record in the CRM application. Using this kind of application, you can simply bring up a lead within the CRM and click on the contact’s phone number, the application calls you, then connects with the client. At the end of each call, the application will automatically log call results, call details, new lead information, and can automatically add a follow up task. CONCLUSION CRM systems can play an enormous role in helping organizations understand their customers, and the software-as-a-service model has made these applications easier and more cost-effective to deploy and manage. Voice-enabling CRM systems helps take those benefits to the next level, helping organizations fully maximize the telephone as a sales, marketing, service and support channel. By integrating CRM technologies with SaaS-based IVR and call center solutions, organizations will help drive greater customer satisfaction by providing tailored, accurate and timely responses to the customers’ needs. http://www.angel.com http://www.Angel.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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