What is a CRM Call Center? What are the Potential Drawbacks of it?

Revenue generation is the most crucial driving force of almost every business, be it a small enterprise or a giant industrial house. However, while most business houses focus primarily on increasing sales to increase revenue, they tend to ignore one important aspect of business: improving efficiency and productivity.

Here is an infographic that shows different ways in which it makes the dual work of CRM for increasing revenue and cutting costs a breeze.

The above CRM uses make them essential for running any business in the modern world today.

 

How do CRMs work?

CRM software includes functionalities allowing businesses to keep track of all company interactions. These channels include social media, chat support, phone calls, emails, contact forms, and much more.

CRM software solutions offer the right insights to marketing and sales teams, offering several tools to manage the marketing and sales funnel.

They are helpful in several aspects of marketing, such as demand forecasting, opportunity management, lead qualification, and deal closure. In addition, customer service CRM team helps to automate service operations and manage customer requests smoothly.

CRM Explained: CRM solutions help standardize the processes leading to customer excellence and track features that record customer interactions online.

Additionally, CRM applications help firms automate routine processes and offer managers powerful CRM tools examples that help track business productivity and growth.

CRM applications: Help collate information from multiple sources, but they also offer analytics capabilities to businesses to provide regular forecasts that help firms generate leads and convert them easily. They also enable boost transparency, data sharing, and data monitoring.

How CRMs help Boost Revenue Generation

Customer Relationship Management systems primarily help businesses collect and store customer information and communicate with them digitally. However, modern CRM applications help organizations in the acquisition, development, and retention of customers.

These solutions acquire customer information from multiple channels, including personal information, purchase history, and purchasing patterns of buyers. This helps businesses learn about their customers, improve their marketing efforts, identify sales opportunities, and understand service issues.

Source: Benchmarkemail

As more and more businesses understand the value of CRMs, their popularity has been increasing steadily. In 2020, the overall usage of CRM systems and practices rose from 56 to 74%.

This is because they help businesses find new buyers continuously, win their trust, offer support and offer additional services to facilitate growth and strengthen customer relationships.

CRM software do the dual work of increasing revenue and cutting costs in the following ways:

(a) Enhancing customer satisfaction

Since most of the interactions with your customers can be carried out with CRM in an organized and systematic manner, your business house will build better understanding and relations with the customers. This will, in turn enabling increased customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

(b) Building up a focused and better marketing strategy

The key feature of CRM software helps you keep a centralized record of your existing customers, their requirements, and purchases. This database is a gold mine for the marketing team to identify their potential buyers and build up their marketing strategy accordingly.

Also, this customer database system can offer, suggest and promote other products of the business house to their existing buyers based on their previous purchases.

(c) Better planning and scheduling of tasks

CRM offers calendar and scheduling features to pinpoint the desired target, plan for days ahead, and allocate tasks to team members. This will help in improving efficiency, optimizing time, and getting better results for profit maximization.

(d) Mobile applications

Your team will have instant access to information and leads even when on their field trips with mobile CRM solutions. Mobile CRM applications offer various functionalities like creating, viewing, updating, and deleting records. In addition, one can send emails through the CRM and easily record communication made to leads and contacts.

(e) Timely Alerts

CRM allows sending email alerts to the top management on specific actions like lead generation, lead qualification, etc. Such alerts can include a recent communication made, a new reminder created, and such.

This makes marketing organized and makes sure that all reminders and instructions are sent correctly.

(f) Automated Marketing

Automated Marketing is a vital feature of CRM policies through which you run marketing and email campaigns around time-sensitive promotions and opportunities.

This feature helps you improve your marketing ROI by getting real-time information of what strategy is working and what is not, thus making improvements thereon.

(g) Online Customer service

CRM applications let you bond with your customers via their channel of choice across the web, social, chat, and mobile, with full multichannel service capabilities.

Also, with an online customer support system, you can minimize service response time, improve case resolution, and increase customer self-service with a robust Knowledge Base.

In addition, your customers can tap the functionality of Service Cloud to avail services anywhere, anytime, on any device.

(h) Identifying leads and growing business

With CRM applications, you can do away with time-consuming manual tracking of leads. Instead, these solutions extract all possible charges from various sources such as marketing communication, email campaigns, website visits, or outbound.

This will help you identify the promising sources of leads and ensure your marketing efforts are made around the same.

(i) Automated reports

CRM applications generate a wide range of accurate and automated reports, including specific sales territories, per MR, geographical regions, or demographics.

If used intelligently, CRMs can be a powerful tool for helping businesses improve customer relationships, campaign efficacy, and brand loyalty while curbing expenses and shortening the sales funnel.

Optimizing Customer Engagement Through CRMs

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is all about keeping an uninterrupted, fruitful communication with the customers with meaningful benefits to them.

The important idea behind it is to develop a relationship with customers that is based on mutual understanding and benefits.

Every conversation with the customers gives you clues about what can be done to keep an individual customer in the orbit of your service. And when we talk about Call Centers, they provide 24/7 round-the-clock support to the customers.

The core idea behind communication with the customers is to understand them better and make your business solutions more helpful for them.

Therefore, while designing the services, it becomes necessary to keep the customers and their needs always in your mind so that when the services are delivered, the customer should be highly satisfied and content.

Source: NoJitter

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is fast becoming one of the best ways sales departments can ensure increased customer engagement in this Web 2.0 era of information technology.

According to a recent study by VentureBeat 80% of businesses surveyed admitted that adopting legal CRM solutions has increased the number of leads scored. 

But how exactly do CRMs improve engagement levels? Let’s find out.

• Enables you to spend time in the right place

Time is a very crucial resource for every marketer. A customer relationship management system helps you manage your sales team’s workload and optimize your daily schedules. The software allows you to have a quick overview of the tasks ahead so you can establish:

• The appointments that have been made
• Deals ready to close
• The hottest opportunity that will give your sales team insights needed to close a sale and reports about the leads

A CRM system will help you generate reports for each activity and share the same with members of your sales team or the management. For example, you can extract and share information about the state of each lead along the pipeline.

As a result, your sales team will not only know where to focus its energies, but it also saves the time they will be spending tracking each lead manually.

• Brings customer opinion to your fingertips

CRM software solutions offer quick and valuable insights into what people are saying about your business. What makes the lead management system even more exceptional is the way it breaks down the information according to volume, sentiment, search topics, and the social media pages the information is coming from. That way, you can easily swing into action.

For example, let’s consider this case. Let’s say your company, ‘Smartserve’ (a fictitious company), provides cloud-based POS systems that help restaurants manage their inventory, reduce costs and unnecessary wastes.

When your company started receiving trend alerts about the negative comments your customers were posting, you quickly sprang into action. You patched the bug.

When Smart serve posted the news about the improved POS on social media platforms and profusely thanked customers for pointing the problem, it worked magic. Thanks to the insights, your company scored points for listening to the customers’ feedback system.

• Monitor on the competition

A CRM can also be used to spy on your competition to get a hold of the tactics they are using to retain their customers. The CRM application helps you track a list of the most recent blog and social posts where your competitors are mentioned to get a good hang of the competition.

Using these insights, you can easily gauge what content or approaches the moves their customers are contemplating. By viewing your competitors’ social activities, you will be able to pinpoint areas you need to work on to get closer to your customers’ nerves.

• Improved Customer Insight

You need to know how your customers (and, to some extent, your audience) are responding to your marketing efforts. You need real-time insights into the customers’ behavior.

If you send an email, for instance, a CRM application lets you know who opened the email and the click-through rates of different campaigns. There are a lot of insights provided by a CRM that will help marketers and sales teams alike to tailor their efforts to prospects’ interests, hence leading to increased engagement.

For instance, with such information, you can easily increase customer engagement by:

• Sending targeted messages

A CRM can easily lead customers from the initial awareness stage about the services or products you offer to the final purchasing stage.

Using the information on the CRM application, you can easily segment your audience and send them targeted emails containing content that is most relevant to their needs.

Why isn’t it in vain? According to an email segmentation study conducted by marketing Sherpa, segmenting emails improved about 40% in open rates.

• Create specific campaigns

Based on the lead-specific insights provided by the CRM, you can easily create a specific campaign that targets that particular segment of the prospects/customers.

For example, if you monitor your clients’ increased interest in a new feature you just launched, you can create a specific email campaign targeting that group. That way, you will be able to uncover even more sales opportunities.

• Better Lead Generation

Numbers speak volumes. The CRM software provides your business with real-time data so that you don’t burn your feet chasing unqualified leads.

A recent study by Demand Metric Research Corporation showed that CRM helped about 84% of the companies polled in determining lead quality.

Using the information provided by the CRM, the sales marketing team will create campaigns that motivate your customers to connect more with your company.

How CRMs Help Call Centers Make More Money 

A thorough understanding of the customers comes only with due course of time. And in this time duration, the relationship with the customers grows in a positive way only if you are consciously leveraging the insights coming from the customers. This is where a CRM application comes in handy.

Source: Outright CRM 

An apt Customer Relationship Management Software holds this idea to the core. And when CRM is combined with Cloud Hosting, this lethal combination can work wonders in terms of profit and productivity for a Call Center. Wondering how? 

Then detailed below are the major reasons why it is said that call centers can make more money with the use of mobile CRM apps along with Cloud-hosting. 

• Better Use of Data

Data is there at every step and it can be very rewarding if you deduce the results from it in a meaningful way. CRM uses data points gathered from multiple sources to offer you vital business insights.

So, when the customer gives you insights in the form of data, it is up to you on how you make the most of it. Better access to data in cloud hosting is one factor that helps the customer support environment to be more efficient.

In today’s times, you can not afford to keep away from it. A cloud-hosted CRM call center becomes a repository of data in itself, which makes the management of data more productive.

CRM Software for small businesses makes communication with customers highly effective. With the help of CRM techniques, you can easily track all the call history and analyze the call recordings too.

This will give you meaningful cues about how the communication with the customers should be carried on further, fruitfully.

In addition to this, the agents can always check the earlier communications that happened with a particular customer and bring in a personal touch to the professional approach. The idea behind this is to improve customer loyalty.

For a Call Center, it is highly imperative that its call representatives know the customers well. And good CRM software combined with cloud hosting makes this task quick and easy!

• Cost-Effectiveness

A cloud-hosted CRM call center can be managed in lesser time and without using more resources. Predictive dialing is such a feature that takes customer relationship management to a different level.

The customers are accessed effectively based on the analysis of the customer data.

While when it comes to a CRM software, if a call center is well integrated with the CRM of the company, every minute business requirement of your call center can be customized according to your need and subsequently executed.

And this makes every work process related to your CRM call center extremely cost-effective!

• Sales Acceleration

Source: RolusTech

An effective CRM call center leads to a better sales acceleration. The management of the customers becomes a lot easier with the help of the combined sophisticated key features of CRM software as well as Cloud hosting.

From the moment a pre-sales query appears to the moment a call is closed on a positive note, the customer and the agents interact with each other multiple times.

The point of sale depends on the fact that customers have well understood the benefits of the service that he/she is going to avail.

Most of the big companies work on their CRM policies rather than forcing their sales team to achieve a target that is set on the basis of numbers.

This is because a CRM software combined with cloud hosting takes care of customers’ behavior, interests, and insights. Ultimately, sales increase effortlessly as the customer is given more than what he is looking for!

• Greater Efficiency

The productivity of the CRM call center depends on the fact how well every individual is aware of the service and together works as a team.

For this, cloud hosting provides many avenues to the agents that help them to manage the time and customer relationship. Such customized features make the call center environment more efficient.

Lead management system is another benefit that comes with cloud-hosted call centers. This further leads to a greater number of customers.

Customer loyalty is the eventual result if the customers are approached and communicated nicely and purposefully.

Customer relationship management totally depends on how effectively you keep in touch with your customers and the scope of benefits for the customers in it.

With the help of CRM techniques, the service provider can become well aware of the customer behavior and also ensure that the actions taken are not just based on speculations but are statistically sound as well!

• Enhanced Customer Experience

If a conversation with the agent or call representative provides the customer solution in lesser time, then the purpose of the service is fulfilled for both parties.

And when the agent uses precise information related to the customers during the conversation, then the overall experience for the customer becomes less professional and more personal.

A personal experience is liable to take the customer into a long-term relationship with a CRM call center.

A good CRM software has immense possibilities for better customer retention, resulting in more loyal customers for a Call Center.

And when a CRM software joins hands with Cloud Hosting, it becomes a win-win situation for Call Centers as they stand to make more money!

10 Common CRM Problems and Their Solutions

Customer relationship management (CRM) software can be an excellent resource for you and your team.

Better forecasting capabilities, smoother customer interactions, and targeted campaigns are just a few benefits of using CRM. But, wait, there is more to it! All these things hold true only when

• Your team is actively using your system.
• You have the right tools in place that give you relevant, up-to-date information for your business needs.

While CRM software is a great tool, it comes with its fair share of problems. However, you no longer need to worry, as this blog post will discuss some of the common CRM problems and how you can fix them. 

Source: teamgate 

(a) Low User Adoption

Did you know, 65% of CRM projects fail due to lower user adoptions? 

If your team is not using the system effectively, they are not equipping themselves with the required knowledge to make informed business decisions. 

So, what can be the possible solution for this?

The idea is to get users involved in the CRM plan sooner and ask them what they struggle with within their workflows. 

The next step is to determine if these processes can be automated or simplified. Getting them involved in the design and user-experience testing processes can also help.

But, make it a point to implement suggestions your team members’ suggestions as it will be fruitful in the longer run. 

Willing to go out of the way?

Try gamifying your CRM. The reason? People are more willing to dive into learning and use the system if there is a reward. 

You can give out $ 10 gift cards to sales reps who complete their CRM work/training. Moreover, you can utilize CRM to run sales content and convert it into a leader board.

This will boost employee motivation, and resistance to adoption will quickly fade. 

(b) Scalability Issues 

Ideally speaking, your CRM should flow with your business. But, unfortunately, managers often choose a CRM that fits their needs today but may not 5 years down the line. 

To overcome such limitations of CRM, you must plan for evolution and other parameters.

For example, what would be the level of efficiency required if you decide to scale your business? Would you like to integrate it with other platforms? 

Have a clear conversation with your vendor before you sign an agreement and then only purchase a CRM.  

(c) Scope of the CRM

All said and done, you choose your CRM and decide on the functionalities you want it to have. Then, a few months later, you add a few more, and a year later, 15 more. But, gradually, you realize there’s no end to this.

These issues can be common if you don’t have a CRM plan or you have one, and you don’t stick to it. You can always make a planning phase and then agree on adding functionalities with your team. Phase 1 can be the initial work you do, and then you can move to phases 2,3,4, etc. 

(c) Wrong Vendor

In the ideal scenario, every vendor is perfect, and they have the best customer support. But, many times, it is also possible that you sign your paperwork, and they stop taking your calls. Yes. We get it. It can be very frustrating. 

One of the solutions to these common limitations of CRM is that you spend time knowing your vendor and analyzing their expertise, your estimated timelines, and your use case. 

(e) Lack of Support

There are times when your CRM project coordinator can feel overwhelmed. ] Implementing a CRM application is no easy task. Moreover, when you don’t have the executive team’s buy-in, getting all the more difficult to get your users on board. 

So, you must make it a point to reach out to both your executives and end-users for feedback. Moreover, make sure you offload your CRM project coordinator as it is a full-time job and cannot be considered as an added responsibility. 

(f) Bad Data

There are no two thoughts to it that data rules the business world. The same is the case with a CRM. Keeping data updated and user adoption are the keys to successful CRM usage. 

Source: Business2Community

While updating data is easy in the beginning, you will need to develop CRM techniques to collect and clean your data later on. 

(g) Siloed Departments

Are your processes transparent? How much knowledge does each department have about what others are doing? If they are not aware, it can lead to issues for your organization in the long run. 

So, you must make it a point to centralize information and break down the silos in your business and better align your departments. Besides, you should create detailed CRM work processes to show what everyone’s role is inside the CRM. This will help your team members perform better and know their roles. 

Source: tenfold

(h) Improper Implementation

Unfortunately, implementing a CRM system is not a one-time affair. You will need to assess how your CRM plan is working, create new functionalities, and provide ongoing training for users.

Often, companies offer training in the beginning but then let it slide as time passes. 

(i) Centralizing the CRM

Your CRM needs to be at the center of your small business. If your teammates still use email and spreadsheets to organize their data, it will not work in the long run.

To solve this, you can create a knowledge base and make it available to your team members. This way, they will have no hassles getting using your CRM. 

(j) Weighing the Customer’s Perspective

CRMs are built to improve customer relationships and provide better services. But, often, companies forget to consider the customer’s perspective and work on their own. But, what can you do to solve it? 

Well, you can conduct surveys and take feedback regularly to stay on top of customer demands. 

Bottom Line

CRM system is no longer a passive tool that simply collects prospect’s data. Adopting CRM in your company will greatly improve your sales process.

It makes it easier for your salespeople to negotiate with prospects and understand where they are in the sales funnel.

CRM applications also help your marketing team to qualify a lead before passing them to the sales team.

If you want your sales team to make better decisions, improve efficiency and become more competitive, adopt the best CRM system. You can also enhance the functionality of your call center CRM integration with other marketing tools.

That means it’s not only going to give you deep insights about your customer to drive your next wave of sales but also bring all your marketing data in one place.