“If only there were more hours in a day…” Is this something you tell yourself daily? If so, you’re not alone!
For 69% of business entrepreneurs, ‘more time’ is something they keep wishing all too often. (Aberdeen) Despite the earnest desire to check off all tasks on the to-do list, failure is achieved at the end, most of the days, which brings us to the MILLION DOLLAR question:
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How can Business Productivity be increased? The path to achieving productivity might sound difficult but in all actuality, it’s not. A converged CRM can help you achieve this. To better understand the benefits of a converged CRM and how this can transform your business into a productive machine, let’s take a closer look below.
1. 360-Degree Customer View Do you have your customer information stored in multiple offline and online applications? If so, do these applications propel you forward as an asset or push you back as a liability? On an average, you and your team spend (or rather waste) three to four hours on extracting, referencing and analyzing customer data. These labor-intensive tasks hinder the company’s ability to grow. New-aged converged CRMs streamline customer data from all touchpoints within the centralized repository. You’re able to see all customer information in one place. From your marketing targets and sales leads to existing customers and business contacts -- all information is contained in the CRM. Using a converged CRM, you bid adieu to the routine of spending hours trying to tie customer information from multiple databases into your CRM. You have real-time visibility and can easily get a comprehensive view of your customers in a timely fashion. Consequently, this increases productivity of your marketing, sales and customer service departments. Critical decisions are made quickly, based on accurate 360-degree customer information.
2. Email Communication
In an eight-hour work day, 2.64 hours is spent on emailing. (Management Issues) There are two reasons behind this -- multiple applications are used to fetch data and emails are constantly being checked. Both of these activities consume one-third of a day’s work.
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How do you stop emails from reducing your productivity? A converged CRM enables you to send and receive emails from leads, contacts, accounts and partners within its interface. Instead of repeatedly going to your email service to communicate, you can integrate email clients of your choice with the CRM and make it a one-stop hub for all your business communication. Sending and receiving emails directly within your CRM is a fantastic way to save time and effort and shoot up your productivity. While working in the CRM, you can check if your prospects and customers have responded to your messages. Furthermore, you can combine email with context and analytics present within the CRM. The analytics will help you write more powerful emails that foster better responses from your contacts and prospects. You can track the sent emails and get insightful reports on whether your emails have been delivered, opened, and read. This ensures that there is no room for guess work when you're sending hundreds of emails to leads, prospects, and contacts every day. ConvergeHub CRM perfectly illustrates this point. It allows you to manage all incoming and outgoing emails within its repository. You can also to view email history, track the status of the emails, reply all, and forward emails within the CRM.
3. Meetings
Money and time spent on the road and in face-to-face meetings cost UK companies a staggering £15,979 per head, every year. (powwownow.co.uk) Multiple surveys have been conducted which point out how physical meetings adversely affect the overall productivity and increase expenses in a business. Most businesses hold virtual meetings that avoid unnecessary travel.
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Scott Cairns, Chief Technology Officer at T-Systems states, “We are now conducting business in a digital age, where rapid innovations in communication capabilities make the world a smaller place day by day. Despite these innovations, our first thought is often still to arrange a physical meeting, even though technology could circumvent this necessity, and lead to a more productive and better facilitated meeting experience. Virtualization of the meeting experience is very much a cultural change, just as it is a technical change." Converged CRM solutions offer the functionality of doing quick web conferencing anytime anywhere! From screen sharing to HD video conferencing and audio conferencing, you can conduct online meetings with your clients, colleagues or business associates even if they’re across the globe.
How does this create value for your business? Increased productivity with ample time savings! Whether you’re at your desk or vacationing to a remote island, you can quickly conduct any type of business-grade web conferencing session with leads and customers or even your own team. All you need is an internet-enabled device to access the CRM and hold the meeting.
4. Call
When customers are looking for a quick resolution, phone is the preferred method of communication followed by email. (Kana) The good news is that most businesses offer phone support for their customers. The bad news is that it’s the most time-consuming form of communication for businesses. Businesses fail to provide immediate solutions to customers over the phone. Customer-facing agents hop back and forth across multiple business applications but still fail to get a comprehensive data view of the customer’s situation. Businesses can’t judge the context of the current interaction and provide a speedy resolution, in most cases. As a result, customers are forced to repeat their story, over and over again, to different customer service representatives. Here’s the statistic:
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69% of customers say they have to repeat themselves multiple times before reaching a resolution. Indeed, reaching a resolution takes an average of 3 tries. Almost 2 in 10 customers call their experience a “customer service death spiral,” requiring at least an hour of repeated explanations. (Kana) Prolonged customer conversations over the phone turn out to be dually-destructive. They impact the overall business productivity where a single call ends up totaling two to three calls. Plus, customer service falls apart as well.
How this can be resolved? During calls, support reps need to be equipped with the right customer information that enable them to provide immediate solutions, close the case quickly and switch over to next customer in minutes Converged CRM software solutions such as ConvergeHub provide in-browser calling capabilities to its users (Click to learn more). This seamless alignment of phone functionality with CRM shuns the tedious task of switching between your customer data platform and telecom system while calling a contact. You can directly make calls from the CRM interface and refer to contextual information and interaction history for better response and engagement. You and your team are in a stronger position to understand your customer’s problems. This helps you resolve issues quickly, make more calls, connect with more customers, and increase the overall productivity.
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5. Calendar
Do you have sticky note syndrome? Have you forgotten to complete a task or attend a meeting because you didn’t have the right tools to keep track of them? You’re not alone! Whether they’re events such as meetings, seminars or appointment; or tasks like emails to customers or reports, missing out on them put a damper productivity. Converged CRMs let you put an end to task and event mismanagement. They allow you to: • Create activities (associated with leads, accounts, contacts, products, invoices, quotations, deals, etc. ) for weeks, months and even for a year • Check tasks and events based on their due dates • Schedule, reschedule, organize, add and edit your tasks and events • Switch between day view, month view and yearly view of the calendar as desired • Share your calendar with the team
And most importantly...See your upcoming tasks and events. Manage your daily activities in a converged CRM and be ahead of time. Even when the day is hectic, you can plan and prioritize your appointments and tasks which lead to increased productivity.
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Next Steps…
Click here to download the Business Productivity Kit now!
Here’s what you get: • A personalized PDF copy of this full-length blog • Bonus Blog: 5 Tasks You Could Be Automating
Want more productivity in your business? Sign up for a Free Trial to experience the ConvergeHub difference. Comment below and let us know how you plan to be more productive in the new year.
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5 Tasks You Could Be Automating Running a small to medium sized business requires you to wear many hats at one time. Apart from being the head honcho, you’re also the customer service agent, sales associate, marketing manager, technology director, and so on. If you’re overwhelmed with different roles you oversee and don’t have the luxury of passing duties on to others, you can use a converged CRM’s automation feature to streamline operations. It carries the potency of performing some of the most critical yet time-consuming tasks while you uninterruptedly concentrate on the other important areas and keep the horizons of your business expanding.
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Converged CRMs They allow you to automate customer-related tasks that you may currently be handling manually. Whether it is setting internal reminders about follow-ups with high-value customers or developing standardized response protocols – you can do them all.
Below are 5 pivotal tasks that Converged CRMs can automate for you. 1. Internal Reminders You’ve generated a set of high-quality leads and added them into the CRM with the goal of following up. However, with all the tasks on your to-do list it’s easy for follow-up to fall through the cracks if there’s no automated reminder. Converged CRMs allow you to set workflow reminders in relation to a workflow rule. When you associate a workflow reminder to a workflow rule, the message is automatically sent to you when the rule is triggered for records meeting the criteria specified in the rule. Use this functionality to get automated follow-up reminders. The reminder can be in the form of an alert, email or notification – it’s up to you!
2. Customer Engagement
60% of companies lose leads and customers because they fail to promptly acknowledge their actions. (Optify) There is a way for you to send automated emails to leads, prospects, contacts and customers for specified actions. This could be anything from acknowledging support tickets to welcoming customers who’ve subscribed for a free trial of the product. Let's take a detailed look into this.
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Sample Scenario: A lead has shown interest in your product and subscribed to the free trial. Now you will manually send a 'thank you' email whenever you get time. However, if you have a converged CRM like ConvergeHub, you can program it to function the following way: An auto-generated thank you / welcome email is sent to the user. Lead details are captured and listed in the CRM. • • • • •
Day 1 - 'Getting Started' email is sent Day 5 - 'Feedback Information' email is sent Day 7 - 'Product Updates' email is sent Day 10 - 'Purchase Offer' email is sent Day 13 - 'Reminder' email is sent
Benefit: Without your actual involvement, you are able to engage the prospect, follow-up with the right email messages & collateral, and increase the chances of winning the deal eventually. ConvergeHub workflow automation empowers you to provide a consistent and positive customer experience which ultimately results in better marketing, sales and support.
3. Reports You can create sophisticated reports in your CRM to get an accurate understanding of the health of your business and make data-driven decisions.
But wouldn't it be great if these reports could run on their own and get delivered straight to your inbox? Or, better yet – get distributed to your employees and partners?
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You can automate how the reports are generated and shared in such a way that you’ll never have to do a single mouse click ever again (after the initial setup). Expecting your partners and associates to manually log into the CRM to view a report is cumbersome – especially if they’re consumed with other tasks. By using ConvergeHub’s automated reports, SMBs greatly reduce time spent on administrative duties and increase productivity in the business. In today’s workplace, 24 hours isn’t enough time to complete tasks and projects. Meetings, appointments, emails, and even reports get stuck on a to-do list – never fully coming to fruition. Many SMBs as a result, aren’t able to leverage the full benefits of their CRM’s reporting functionality. Either reports don’t get generated or they don’t get distributed efficiently and consistently to the end-users.
Does this sound like your situation? If yes, you should try a converged CRM. A converged CRM will provide pre-defined reports, let you customize reports, schedule them for delivery, and share them with the people who need it most in real-time.
4. Email Campaign Does running an email campaign give you anxiety? If your answer is yes, you’re definitely not alone.
78% of small businesses struggle with handling all the aspects of the email campaign. Issues like list segmentation remain pending till the eleventh hour and are done haphazardly which brings down the click through rates later. (Marketo)
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Email campaigns require attention to detail. Managing all aspects of the email campaign manually can be a daunting task. The most efficient way to manage an email campaign and make it successful is to automate – yep, that’s right (no MANUAL entry). To do this, you want to use a converged CRM. Converged CRMs allow you to create and schedule mass emails to reach and engage your customers and prospects at large. You can send it all, anything from monthly product updates to newsletters and special offers. Converged CRMs are completely different from your standalone email marketing platform. Standard email marketing platforms require you to toggle back and forth between your business tools because there isn’t a 360-degree view of customer data. This can slow you down in the long run.
Here are the benefits of Converged CRMs: • Save time in sending emails to an entire list of customers. • Do list segmentation and make your campaigns more fruitful in terms of generating opens, clicks, and qualified leads. • Schedule emails to send at a specific time, according to your convenience • Get in-depth campaign analytics to identify marketing opportunities and immediately respond to leads and customers.
You can easily set-up your automated email campaigns inside ConvergeHub. Here are the seven steps: 1. Fill-in the name, campaign type and start and end date. Describe the campaign nature and fill fields in relation to response %, budget, revenue and cost. 2. Choose email as the selected broadcast medium. Also fill in the name, cost and expected response % of the broadcast. 3. Create new lists who will be the target audience for the email campaign. Or select an existing list used for other marketing campaigns. Add more segments to it based on different criteria such as location and lead source.
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4. Choose from pre-designed templates and layouts. Customize them to suit your needs. Add personalized elements by changing images, fonts and the background colors. 5. Preview the entire e-mail before you send it. Choose the type of template preview by clicking on HTML or Plain Text View. Send a test mail before you deliver the e-mail to the targeted recipients. 6. Send the campaign immediately or schedule it to send out later. Say you want to send an email out at 9 am PST but you have an important meeting at that time, you can schedule the email to be sent at that specific time, even in your absence. 7. Track and compare the performance of your email campaigns. Get precise information on total mail opens, bounces or click-through rates. You can automate your email campaigns with the help of all the contextual data inside the converged CRM repository. This data helps you plan each stage of the campaign so that you can be strategic about what you send, when you send it, and who you send it to.
5. Auto Assignment Rules
''The effort that small businesses give on running lead generation campaigns gets wasted due to the assignment process.'' (Marketing Digest) SMBs still rely on manual lead assignment which slows down the qualification process and lead nurturing. In 9 out of 10 occasions, by the time the lead gets assigned to sales and marketing agents, the opportunity of closing the deal is already lost.
Are you guilty of manually assigning leads? Most business owners struggle with this. There’s a quick fix to this problem – automation. Your business will run smoothly once you get a streamlined way to manage the way you’re assigning leads. If you’re doing everything manually right now then you’re wasting time.
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Even if you’re not getting many leads now, it’s good to plan for the influx of leads that you hope to get. In an ideal situation, your leads should automatically route to the correct sales agent without you having to touch a button. ConvergeHub has a round robin assignment rule feature that lets you automatically assign leads to users in the CRM in a rotational sequence. The assignment rule is applicable for all accounts, contacts, deals, events, leads and tasks that are imported in bulk or get generated via automation.
How does the Round Robin system work? If you have four sales agents in your team, the leads get automatically assigned to them in the following manner: • Lead 1 assigned to Sales Agent 1 • Lead 2 assigned to Sales Agent 2 • Lead 3 assigned to Sales Agent 3 • Lead 4 assigned to Sales Agent 4 Rotation... • • • •
Lead 5 assigned to Sales Agent 1 Lead 6 assigned to Sales Agent 2 Lead 7 assigned to Sales Agent 3 Lead 8 assigned to Sales Agent 4
And it continues... The benefits are clear, equal distribution of leads to sales agents on an automated basis. Not only do you adopt a streamlined approach to lead assignment but you increase your productivity and free up time for more important business activities.
Next Steps You’ve learned what tasks you’re spending way too much time on and could be automating. A converged CRM can help you put processes in place to set your business up for success. Sign-up for a free trial, attend a live demo or send us an email if you have any questions.
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