Tag Archives: customer
How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Helps Remote Workers Enhance Customer Relationships
One of the main benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is that the information stored in your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) / CRM (Customer Resource Management) solution will be accessible wherever and whenever your teams are conducting business. That has proved valuable in this time of quarantine and remote working. Even with the disruptions caused by the “new normal” working conditions, they can still provide your existing and future customers with exceptional customer service.
We’ve identified some specific ways Microsoft Dynamics 365 can benefit your organization, both now and in the days ahead.
Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics 365 – Strategic Partners
Your team is used to working in Microsoft Office 365. What can they do with Office 365 and Dynamics 365?
- Outlook and Dynamics 365 -With a click of their mouse, they can easily track emails and attach them to the customer record. They can look up customer information and interaction history without having to leave Outlook. They can work with Excel documents and graphs directly inside Dynamics 365 for convenient reporting options.
- Power BI and Dynamics 365 – They’ll be able to use Dynamics 365 data with Power BI for trend reporting and visualize the information with uncomplicated customer dashboards.
- SharePoint and Dynamics 365 – They can manage documents and collaborate securely using SharePoint and Dynamics 365.
- Skype and Dynamics 365 – They can connect with anyone over Skype from within Dynamics 365 and track all activity and call logs right into their customer records for detailed communication histories.
- Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 – They can collaborate more effectively across departments, share files, and exchange information via Chat on Dynamics 365.
Automated Workflows Keep Things Moving
Automating tedious and repetitive tasks keeps your business processes moving and frees resources for other value-added undertakings. Your teams will be more efficient and more productive even when working remotely.
Imagine that a customer emails your company’s support mailbox with an issue. A workflow can create a new support case in CRM, and an email can alert the team that a new case has been created. At the same time, notification can be sent to the customer, telling them that their comments have been received and someone will be contacting them soon. Workflows ensure that no critical steps are overlooked.
Make Sure Everyone is on the Same Page
Having access to accurate, current information is especially important when team members can’t just lean over the cubical wall and ask someone for an update.
Poor information management can negatively impact your business. With Dynamics 365, your valuable data is stored in a secure environment, organized in a way that makes sense for your organization, and available for whoever needs it and has the necessary permissions. When you unify data across your systems into a single source of truth, everyone can make more timely, more intelligent business decisions.
Dashboards provide an at-a-glance snapshot of the vital information you need in real-time. Dashboards can show you a summary of daily processes, the number and priority of reported service issues, or an interactive sales funnel illustrating sales pipelines for individuals or across the entire organization. You won’t have to wait for an end-of-week sales meeting to find out how your team is measuring against sales goals.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Having the ability to access information anywhere, anytime will enable your team to meet customer needs and win customer loyalty, which will translate into long-term business success.
including:
- Customization & development
- Functional design & best practices
- Reports & dashboard development
- Data migration & systems integrations
- Project deployment & CRM implementation
- Dynamics 365 version upgrades
our experts at Crowe to find out how Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you strengthen your customer relationships.
By Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
The WFH Model Is Changing Customer Service for Good
As the dust settled on what most have deemed the “new normal” of working from home, many industries — including customer service — rapidly shifted operations to be remote work-friendly.
At the same time, call volumes increased exponentially: During the last few months, airlines saw a 199 percent increase in customer inquiries, while grocers saw a 39 percent increase.
While the continuity of access to customer service is vital in normal circumstances, the sharp increase in customer demands during the pandemic has made it even more critical.
By overcoming reservations surrounding the idea of working from home in the customer service industry, many companies found real, upfront benefits from utilizing remote teams, including flexible business operations, lower absenteeism and increased productivity.
The implications of the shift to remote customer service teams aren’t limited to short-term benefits of business continuity and keeping representatives safe from COVID-19. There are long-term considerations for the customer service industry as well.
Call centers have been forced into overdrive to change business processes and policies on working from home — such as providing representatives with equipment they can use at home and scheduling staff in a way that ensures customers have access to service 24/7 — while keeping in mind the unique challenges of balancing work life with home life.
Despite the challenges, remote working has accelerated the pace of customer service transformation to digital, expanding opportunities for staff to work from the comfort of their living room (or kitchen!) — and it will occupy a permanent place in the call centers of the future.
Unique Benefits of Remote Working for Customer Service
Before the onset of COVID-19, many call centers around the world operated in an in-person environment because of the normal expectations within the customer service industry. However, with the push to remote working, companies have had to rethink their policies and turn call center support from an in-person job to one that can be done in a safe, home environment.
Many businesses generally have been successful in making this transition, but customer service representatives are in a unique position because of the need for specialized tools to pull up customer information, keep customer satisfaction high, and handle inquiries from a number of channels: telephone, digital and social media.
As it turns out, there are several benefits to having remote customer service teams:
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1. Time Savings and Productivity Gains
Companies and staff alike are saving money and time. Employees are saving money on commuting costs, and remote customer service teams can handle 13 percent more requests each day, according to
a study by Quarterly Journal of Economics.
2. Business Flexibility
The key benefits that make remote working for customer service worthwhile also go well beyond return on investment and meeting key performance indicators.
With remote teams, a business can become more flexible. Representatives working for customer service outsourcers can shift schedules to assist clients depending on volume spikes and where there’s a need. For example, there could be a greater need for representatives to be at the ready on Monday mornings, or Wednesday during lunch may be when call volumes hit a high for the day.
Whether working for an outsourcer or providing in-house customer service, working from home allows representatives to be “on call” in the comfort of their home vs. “always on” at the office, which allows for a better work-life balance too.
3. More Recruiting Options
Business flexibility is coupled with more recruiting options and an expanded talent pool to handle scale. Many job seekers are looking for flexible work as an incentive, with more than 40 percent of millennials saying that the
flexibility to work from anywhere is a priority when evaluating job opportunities.
Many companies, such as Amazon and American Express, boast a significant number of remote work opportunities. By taking location out of the equation, a remote customer service model makes it easier to scale teams, attract high-quality applicants, and increase the likelihood of new hire retention.
4. Improve Employee Retention
When companies see increased retention rates, it usually means they’re reducing absenteeism and increasing staff happiness — and remote work figures largely in these successes.
The
retention rate for remote representatives is 80 percent, versus 24 percent for those who work on site, partly because remote representatives are empowered to have control over their own schedules and create schedules unique to their availability.
5. Potential to Improve Customer Loyalty
More importantly, when representatives are satisfied with their job, it increases the likelihood they will provide excellent customer service.
At the end of the day, the goal for customer service is to ensure customers are satisfied with their experience, which leads to better loyalty. From a business perspective, when staff are engaged and happy with their work, they tend to be more productive, which can help them manage the increased call volumes happening across customer service departments right now.
Once businesses are able to reopen their offices, it might be wise to keep at least some customer service staff remote, as those representatives can fill in the gaps for on-site call centers to ensure there’s no disruption of service.
How Remote Work Forces Customer Service to Change
What will be seen over the next few months — and years — is that representatives will be more technologically savvy, especially as customer demand for 24/7 service grow.
Customers want to talk to a representative on multiple channels, whether it’s through chat on a website, direct message on social media, or through traditional phone calls. So, with the push to remote work allowing for greater usage of technology, teams will be that much more ready — and sufficiently knowledgeable — to use the technology at their fingertips.
Remote work has accelerated technology adoption of tools that allow staff to do their jobs seamlessly and effectively, all while giving a boost to employee morale.
Many companies are now aware that work productivity tools like those from Zoom and Slack bridge the distance between remote staff, and strengthen the relationship between staff and managers — which is a key component of engagement and improved productivity.
As for the technologies that support representatives in their roles, automation tools and dashboards are and will continue to be a necessity for keeping pace with customer demands and helping staff work efficiently. For example, automated chatbots can help customers get answers to simple questions while representatives focus on servicing customers who have more complex issues.
Looking ahead to how remote work will impact the future of customer service, companies can help ensure operations are seamless while addressing considerations such as how to train employees virtually and ensure the flow of information is secure.
There are numerous benefits to switching to remote customer service operations now and keeping these policies alive after COVID-19. Failure to take this transition seriously not only will cause business disruptions, but also will cause companies to be left behind the rest of the industry while changes are happening quickly — and for the better.
Fara Haron is the CEO North America, Ireland and Southeast Asia & EVP Global Clients at
Majorel. She leads a rapidly growing team of customer service professionals helping companies with their global customer service strategy, and providing topnotch customer engagement to some of the world’s largest and most respected brands.
Ways Microsoft Dynamics 365 Can Strengthen Your Customer Relationships When Everyone is Working Remotely
With Microsoft Dynamics 365, your information is accessible anytime, anywhere, on any device. Just because the office is closed doesn’t mean your ability to service existing customers or manage your pipeline of future customers should be affected.
Here are a few specific ways we feel that Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an asset during this time:
Office 365 & Dynamics 365 – Better Together
- Track email customer interactions with one-click. Access customer information and communication history without ever leaving Outlook. Use Excel directly inside Dynamics 365 for convenient reporting options, or securely export data to Excel for bulk updating of CRM information.
- Visualize Dynamics 365 data with Power BI for trend reporting or easy-to-use customer dashboards
- Manage and collaborate on documents securely and efficiently with SharePoint and Dynamics 365.
- Use Skype to call anyone from within Dynamics 365 and track activity and call logs inside your customer records for detailed communication histories.
- Leverage Microsoft Teams to collaborate more effectively across departments on Dynamics 365, share files, and easily exchange information via Chat.
Automated Workflows Keep Things Moving
By automating time-consuming manual tasks, you help teams develop more efficient processes and increase business productivity – no matter where you are working.
Let’s say a customer emails the customer support mailbox with an issue. A workflow can create a new support case in CRM, and an email notification can alert the team that a new case has been created. At the same time, an email notification can be sent to the customer, letting them know their case has been logged, and someone will be in touch with them shortly. Workflows make sure no critical steps are missed.
A Single Source of Truth
This one is especially important for people who are no longer able to yell over the cubical wall and ask someone for an update.
Poor information management can negatively impact your business. With Dynamics 365, information is stored in a secure environment, organized in a way that makes sense for your business, and available for whoever needs it and has the necessary permissions. When you can unify data across your systems into a single source of truth, everyone can make better business decisions. Dashboards are the go-to place for business intelligence.
Dashboards provide an at-a-glance snapshot of the important information you need to manage in real-time. They could give a summary of daily processes, the number and priority of reported service issues, or an interactive sales funnel illustrating sales pipelines across the organization or individuals – no need to wait for a Friday sales meeting to see how your pipeline is measuring against sales goals
Microsoft Dynamics 365
When you can access information anywhere, anytime, you will be able to maintain customer loyalty, long-term business success, and more predictable revenue. Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help.
Watch the recorded webinar:
Learn more about Crowe’s CRM including:
- Customization & development
- Functional design & best practices
- Reports & dashboard development
- Data migration & systems integrations
- Project deployment & CRM implementation
- Dynamics 365 version upgrades
Let’s start the conversation that can help you strengthen your customer relationships with Microsoft Dynamics 365. Visit www.crowecrm.com, email crminfo@crowe.com, or call 877-600-2253.By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
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Turn D365 into a Customer Relationship MAXIMIZING Solution
What do we really want out of customer relationships? Yes, we all want to ensure customer satisfaction. Yes, we all want to keep customers engaged with our brand and products.
But let’s cut the malarkey: we mainly all want revenue. (And satisfied, engaged customers are the revenue drivers.)
Today, we’ll share a few tips on tweaking the “M” in CRM from management to maximizing. And it starts at the very first touch point.
“We have received your inquiry and will get back to you shortly.” Talk about a missed opportunity.
D365 (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, et al) gives you every means imaginable to fire off an email to people who have downloaded a whitepaper, signed up for a webinar, filled out a contact form, or otherwise interacted with you. And there’s no better time to get an open for an email, so why do so many businesses waste what’s basically a guaranteed open with a robotic reply?
Make sure every autoresponder you create in D365 is relationship maximizer: did they download a whitepaper on economic trends? Send them a link to a webinar on economic trends. Did they contact you for a demo? Send them a link to a one-pager or other “demo-primer.”
Don’t just thank them for reaching out to you. Build on why they reached out: give them more than they expected, and you’ll eventually get more in return.
Have you integrated your Dynamics 365 CRM with your ERP system, connecting marketing info (contacts, geo’s, etc.) with critical financial info? Have you connected LinkedIn Sales Navigator to provide “career context” for every customer communication? Have you created compelling customer journeys in D365 Marketing that feed data to customer service and sales reps in real-time?
Microsoft has a greater depth and breadth of tools and platforms than ever before, and they’re almost all centered around empowering a business with a completely automated, instantly available 360-degree view of every customer. If you’re using only D365 CRM to understand your customers’ needs, wants, and behaviors, you’re getting only a sliver of the big picture.
Yes, technically, you’re “managing” those customer relationships. But once you roll in the data of, for example, each customer’s website and social media behavior, career details, and other demographics data the Microsoft stack can provide, you move from customer relationship management to customer relationship maximization.
As stated, in the end (and usually the beginning and middle, too) customer relationships are all about maximizing revenue possibilities. Which means your sales quotes are one of the most critical communications you have with a customer.
Yes, a sales proposal is, in many ways, just another customer communication… just like a contract is just another communication. I.e., it’s important.
Not only that, but in many cases, your sales quote will be the first communication you send your customer that reaches a wider audience of decision makers, so ensuring it’s a relationship maximizer is absolutely critical.
You want the quotes you send to both build your brand and reflect your customer’s as well. You want the in your quotes to be priced optimally for you, and fairly for your customer. You want to dot T’s and cross I’s and ensure no detail is missed and no reply is late. You want a system dedicated to these features and functions, and within D365, which is why companies are .
CPQ maximizes every quote, making it more professional and more targeted, and optimizes the quote tracking process as well.
If you’re serious about customer relationship maximization, it’s time to get serious about how you’re creating, sending, and tracking the most critical step: the sales proposal.
How to Create Valuable Customer Conversations
A pandemic, economic uncertainty and social distancing — what a kerfuffle we are in right now.
As marketing leaders, it’s an incredibly difficult time to direct our teams. Everyone is struggling to navigate our current situation. Yet, while we’re all figuring out how to juggle emotions, families, dogs, toilet paper shortages, and a calendar full of conference calls, the revenue team has to press on in building pipeline and establishing predictable growth. It can’t be done the way we did it before.
How Do We Engage With Potential Customers?
I’m used to having the answers and providing my team with a plan of action — but I’ve been stumped by our current situation. I mean, what direction do I give my team at a time like this? How do I tell them to keep engaging with prospects when things are changing every single day? It’s not as simple as saying “do your best” or “use good judgment” or “be empathetic.”
Yes, of course, those are all great things for your team to do. However, we must have a real strategy — with formulas to back it up (I love a good formula) — to navigate these unusual circumstances. This strategy must use tactics supported by behavioral insights. What you do next has to be backed by knowledge about what buyers actually are doing right now and who’s in-market for your solutions.
My team was fortunate in that these behavioral insights already informed our targeting and our tactics. With an ocean of uncertainty out there, insights have been our lighthouse illuminating our path to our prospects.
I’m passionate about having great insights into prospects on the buying journey. That’s what I needed to bring when I evaluated our current landscape — and I analyzed everything at least 100 different ways. Finally, I hit that a-ha moment: buyer insights are now more mission-critical for revenue teams than ever.
If you have a valuable solution, you have to continue connecting with your potential buyers. However, just believing your product has value is not enough. Sales and marketing teams need new confidence for their outreach and message. The standard message you used before almost definitely will get you blacklisted today. These days, you are one wrong email away from being the subject of a lengthy LinkedIn post calling out your company for being tone-deaf and insensitive.
Add to that the fact that industry events and tradeshows have been canceled left and right. What once seemed like sure-fire lead generators are gone for the foreseeable future. Yet just because events aren’t happening, that doesn’t mean we can lower our pipeline goals. We’re still responsible for predictable revenue growth. Does that mean we get to move event marketing money to another marketing function? Which one works the best at a time like this? Will we even get that event budget back to do it?
So, when industry events and tradeshows are gone and business operations are changing every day, how can we possibly connect with buyers and continue generating revenue without acting completely oblivious to the current climate?
Use the Three I Formula
Back in March, when the world was just starting to experience life during a pandemic, we held a traveling-turned-virtual CMO breakfast series. During our sessions, we asked more than 200 CMOs the same question: Where are you focusing your marketing budget now?
Their top three areas of focus (in order):
- Accoung-Based Marketing
- Executive Thought Leadership
- Sales Enablement
What does that mean right now? Where are we supposed to target our ABM tactics, thought leadership content and sales team outreach? Will we have to turn on a dime to avoid being written off by potential buyers?
Here is where the Three I Formula comes into play. I previously mentioned that insight into your buyers is mission-critical at a time like this, but there are specifically three types of insights that are key to creating valuable conversations with your target buyers.
The First I: Intent
First and foremost, when it comes to buyer insights, you must be able to identify who currently is looking to buy. Assuming your industry hasn’t been put on pause, there are still businesses actively seeking a solution like yours. The challenge is that most buyers choose to remain anonymous until late in the buying journey. That’s where intent data comes in.
Intent data gives you visibility into what your target accounts care about. It answers the very important question: “What does this account intend to do?” An account’s intent is extracted from a combination of first-party data, like which buying personas are visiting your website or interacting with a specific campaign, and third-party data, such as the topics they’re researching on B2B websites.
You can reach revenue-generating nirvana when you know the following:
- the exact topics your target audience is researching;
- which website pages your target accounts are visiting;
- which buying team personas on an account are the most engaged; and
- which customer territories are most active.
Armed with this information, your marketing team has a better understanding of the most important topics for your audience. On the flip side, your sales team can see who and what is most relevant to their accounts, allowing them to reach out to engage in valuable conversations with the right buyers. The best part? These insights are delivered in real-time — because, guess what, there are changes every day!
The Second I: In-Market
While you might be experiencing a decline in inbound volume, in-market accounts still exist. It’s your team’s job to uncover those accounts and establish valuable relationships. Intent data starts you on the path toward understanding which accounts your team should be working. Predictive analytics enables you to focus resources on the best accounts and contacts while ensuring outreach is perfectly timed.
Predictive analytics allows you to find patterns in a buyer’s activity so you can gain a better understanding of how an account compares to your ideal customer profile (ICP); which contacts are most important to engage; and where they are on the buying journey.
Predictive analytics solutions use a variety of different signals to find patterns. First- and third-party intent is an important source of data to fuel predictions, but your predictive analytics solution also should consider a prospect’s current level of engagement with your sales and marketing tactics — and how that compares to historical opportunity data.
When an account is predicted to be in-market for the solutions you sell, your team has a critical chance to reach out. When it comes to connecting with prospects, the early bird gets the worm. When you’re able to time your outreach to hit the account’s in-market window, you can be the first vendor a buyer talks to.
Being the first to make contact puts you miles ahead of the competition and allows you to build a solid relationship with your prospect before the other guys even identify their targets.
The Third I: Industry
Understanding your buyers’ industries is extremely important — especially at a time like this. How is an account’s industry positively or negatively impacted by the given situation? How does that situation affect the overall industry and business model? Having insight into the industry gives you an idea of how the account is adapting to the situation at hand, whatever that situation may be at the time.
For now, let’s use the global health crisis we’re currently experiencing as an example. Picture the impact of COVID-19 like you would the impact of an earthquake. How much has an industry been affected? The travel industry is smack dab on top of the epicenter, while your everyday cornflakes producers may feel just a slight tremor. That impact level — and how different industries are able to adapt to the situation — shapes your targeting.
It’s also important to look beyond the accounts currently plugged into your CRM. Depending on how much changes in a certain situation, the accounts you were targeting before may not even be relevant now. You must be able to recognize buyer patterns well outside your own CRM data if you want to fill your pipeline adequately.
Unlock Mission-Critical Buyer Insights
Together, in-market, intent and industry insights (try saying that five times fast) provide all the information you need to market effectively and sell to your target accounts — in any situation.
The Three I Formula supports the top three priorities for CMOs right now :
- A well-oiled ABM machine means you can capture insights for an entire buying team at an account level. When you know which accounts are in-market and can add value to their specific business needs, you easily can guide them through the buying process.
- Marketing teams use thought leadership content to warm up their target buying personas before having the sales team make any outreach. With the right buyer insights, marketers can ensure they’re delivering the content that not only answers all of a prospect’s burning questions, but also steers the prospect toward learning more about your solution.
- Enabling the sales team means giving them the insights they need to move accounts down the funnel: from wanting to engage with your team to wanting to purchase your solution. Sales enablement solutions driven by the Three I Formula provide sales with the account-level data they need to engage the entire buying team and move them through the buying journey.
Even in the best of circumstances, the three Is are crucial to creating meaningful, valuable conversations with prospects. As the revenue-generating function, every member of your team should always know what prospects want and how to target your outreach to land the right message.
When times are tough, using the Three I Formula will help you limit your missteps and put limited resources to work.
So, press on in your pursuits to build meaningful relationships with prospects and generate revenue. With insights about the accounts in-market, their intent and their industry, the Three I Formula will help you fill your pipeline and push through tough times with newfound confidence.
How SIBS Created New Customer Value With Open Banking
Reading Time: 2 minutes
In heavily-regulated industries, regulations can often be a barrier to new business. But SIBS, a leader in payments processing and financial technology services in Europe, saw increasing regulations as a major opportunity and used that as a starting point to increase its revenue streams.
SIBS provides financial, modern, reliable and secure services to more than 300 million users from different geographies, processing more than three billion transactions annually. That said, it needed the right technology to fuel its forward-thinking strategy to create a differentiated customer experience. Thus, SIBS leveraged Open Banking to delight customers and prepare for future requirements.
The company built a revolutionary API-led platform, the SIBS API Market platform, from scratch using TIBCO, changing the way two million banking customers and over two-dozen banks in Portugal do business. Additionally, it became a marketplace for all Portuguese banks and customers.
This innovation led to numerous positive business results; about 95% of all bank accounts in Portugal are made available to trusted third parties, 24 banks are consuming APIs from the open-banking platform, and nine million daily transactions are supported.
Additional benefits include:
- Creating an Open Banking marketplace for the Portuguese economy where users can find new services and banks can share their apps
- Staying ahead of regulations to lead the market by leveraging data with the help of a flexible, interconnected technology stack
SIBS API Market contributes to continuous technological advancement in the digital economy and towards a more cashless society. According to a recent study conducted by the European Banking Association, SIBS API Market is one of the top three most complete and comprehensive platforms, among more than 300 available. Moreover, in Portugal, all the members of the SIBS API Market were exempted by the Central Bank because they implemented a contingency mechanism that was compliant with the European requirements for safe communication with third-party providers.
Innovative companies, like SIBS, can stay ahead of new regulations to lead the market and provide new value to customers. This resulted in using cutting-edge, API-led technology to build the open-banking platform of the future, including an innovative open marketplace where banks and consumers can find and share new types of financial services.
To learn more about how SIBS created a best-of-breed solution to create a richer customer experience, see the full success story.
How to Adapt Your Customer Service When Crisis Strikes
Customer service doesn’t have to suffer while your company goes through a difficult transition. In fact, 78 percent of consumers said they
stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service. Now is the time to show your most valuable buyers how you’ll keep them informed, updated and respected throughout this crisis.
While your business may be facing a switch to remote work or a drawdown in services, you can maintain top-quality customer service by adapting your practices to the moment. Here are a few key tips to get you started.
Keep the Team Up-to-Date
In a rapidly evolving situation like the current pandemic, you don’t have the time to send out a new missive to employees nearly every day. At the same time, your staff needs to be updated and on board with any new developments within your company.
Having a central document available company-wide decreases the amount of time spent on making announcements while keeping everyone updated simultaneously. This document should be accessible online and updated regularly with any new changes. Think of it as your company’s internal crisis management manifesto — something you can point to when questions or concerns arise.
Don’t think of this “source of truth” document as the be-all and end-all for your crisis communication. It’s more like an internal resource you can point to and continuously update. Make sure it’s circulated via email and internal communications tools, and pin it on Slack so people know where to find it.
When major updates occur, send a company wide email that both alerts employees to the new information and creates an avenue for any concerned party to discuss their thoughts with you or another manager.
If employees offer suggestions, use that as an opportunity both to revise your internal communications and implement their ideas simultaneously, doubling your efforts at keeping the team connected, particularly when you shift to telecommuting.
Double-Down on Customer Relations
It takes just one instance of poor customer service to lose a customer: Thirty-three percent of consumers have reported
dropping a business after having an unpleasant experience with customer support. You simply can’t afford to lose any customers in a period of crisis. They’re the ones who will carry you through these difficult times.
External communications like email updates can assure customers that you’re doing your best to operate as usual. When the customer needs to get in touch with you, however, are you sure you’re up to the task? Times of crisis can bring in a larger volume of phone calls and support tickets due to consumer uncertainty and large-scale changes in the way we work, live and shop. You may not expect a surge, but you need to be prepared.
Investing in customer support staff may sound counterintuitive if you’re trying to scale back operations. However, it’s one of the surest ways to keep customers satisfied and on board for the long term. Next to email, phone calls remain
the most popular channel for customer service complaints and queries. Having more staff on hand to address issues is a surefire way to retain and perhaps even grow your customer base.
There may be an opportunity for your company to engage in some customer service retraining as well. Start by assessing your knowledge base as it was last year compared to now. Is any information lacking?
Aside from queries about any new features and services you may have rolled out, keep in mind the kinds of questions your customers may be asking in response to the pandemic. A new FAQ may be a solid starting point as you work to revamp your approach to allaying customer concerns.
Reassess Social Media
It’s estimated that 90 percent of companies currently
use social media strategies for marketing, recruiting and communications. Yet a cursory glance at local businesses, and even your competitors, shows there’s still a great deal of work to be done.
Far too many businesses run social media accounts that are updated infrequently and are entirely promotional, mismanaged or just plain ineffective. By simply having a Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account, some managers and executives think they’re already in front of all potential customers. Without proper social media management, this simply cannot be the case.
You don’t need an entire department running your social media. While a well-managed account benefits from experience, there are plenty of popular business accounts run by small or one-person teams. If you or one of your employees experience a reduction in workload, now might be the time to put some of your working hours toward amping up your social media strategy.
Social media has a number of noted benefits. Any leads you generate from social media are particularly lucrative because they can be run at little cost. You also have the chance to expand your reach and engage in conversations relevant to your industry, establishing yourself as a thought leader within a given vertical.
Yet there’s another strong advantage any company would be unwise to overlook at the moment. Tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn blogs, and even YouTube videos can be produced swiftly, allowing you to respond to events almost instantaneously.
While announcements should be vetted by the proper internal staff, the chance to get your message out quickly on a major platform establishes your reputation as a company that defaults toward action.
You don’t want to leave your customers, clients and partners questioning how you’re handling this crisis. By taking a new look at your social media accounts, with an eye toward how they can help amplify and create your message, you gain a powerful tool for your crisis communications strategy.
Reach Out to New and Old Acquaintances
Thus far, 2020 has been defined by layoffs, furloughs and slowdowns for nearly every business. More than any time in recent history, workers at all levels are experiencing a new availability of free time that is foreign to those of us accustomed to a 9-to-5 grind.
Even those of us fortunate enough to continue working throughout this pandemic are reevaluating which of our tasks and duties are most important. You may find you now need insights and ideas that weren’t even under consideration as recently as last year. The fact that these shifts are happening in the midst of a recession does not make change any easier.
This is the moment to reconnect with business acquaintances you’ve lost touch with over the past months or years. There’s a great deal of potential in reaching out. You may find a great prospect willing to freelance or even work as part of a skill exchange.
If your internal team doesn’t have the time or skills to boost your social media presence as suggested above, then finding someone outside of the company could be worth your while.
These messages don’t have to be explicitly about business. Just touching base to let someone know you’re available to talk (or listen) is enough to keep your business on their radar. It goes without saying that more changes are certainly on the horizon, most of which we can’t predict as fully as we’d like. Keeping close contact with others creates a wider network to share potentially game-changing information.
We’re long past the days of the rolodex, so try reaching out via LinkedIn to start creating a new network of allies. Don’t overlook the phone call as well. If you have someone’s number, a quick call to check up can be worth more than dozens of emails. It’s all about knowing your contact and making an effort to stay connected in a time of social distancing.
Prepare, Don’t Panic
Companies across the globe are searching for answers. Some are looking to the 2008 recession as a historical example, while others are going as far back as the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic for guidance. The moment we’re living in is largely without precedent.
You can view this moment as an opportunity to grow, particularly if you expect your competitors to recede. Alternatively, this may be a moment for reflection within your company — a chance to focus on values and return to your mission statement to reassess your 2020 plan. In either case, taking action now is the proper step. You don’t want to get swept away in the currents of change.
Steady leadership and firm guidance will act as a balm to your employees’ nerves. Your customers will appreciate being kept in the loop regarding any changes, and they may take a renewed interest in your business in response to dynamic new practices. Just ensure that your communication strategy keeps every interested party in the loop. A lack of information will cause concerns.
With the right plans in mind, tailored to your industry, you can weather the storm and find opportunities to create new partnerships and drive sales. You may find your marketing strategy evolves alongside this shift, but that’s OK too — just make sure everyone is kept apprised of every major change.
By adapting to change, your customer service department will do more than stay the course. It will thrive in response to your guidance.
Eric Schurke is VP Operations at
VoiceNation.
Media Industry Post COVID 19: Prioritize CRM & Customer Data
In the Post COVID-19 Media Industry, Customer Data Management Will Be Essential to Success
There’s no question that COVID-19 has created massive challenges for businesses around the globe. But while some industries are struggling to keep up, others find themselves in an opportune position. The media industry is dealing with both, and better customer data management is the solution.
Providing consumers around the globe with accurate, reliable information is more important than ever before, and media organizations are leading the way. At the same time, however, advertising revenue is down — and this can create revenue challenges for large media companies.
There’s also a transformation underway in the media industry. The consolidation of various channels and outlets that we’ve seen in recent years is accelerating. Once the COVID-19 crisis is over, the media industry is going to look very different. As we’ll see below, the ability to with the right CRM software solution will be essential for success.
Internet Providers Lead the Way
In the post COVID-19 media industry, internet providers will lead the way when it comes to information handling.
Of course, this trend has been underway for years. On the one hand, more and more people are getting their news and information via social media. Simultaneously, paid subscription services like Netflix are replacing traditional forms of home entertainment such as cable television.
But as a result of COVID-19, the prevalence of digital entertainment and news has only intensified. With so many people staying home and practicing social distancing, in-person events and experiences such as sporting events, concerts, movie theaters are being replaced by the ‘new normal’ of YouTube and Facebook live stream events. Once coronavirus abates, it’s likely that some of these trends will continue.
CRM Data Becomes Essential for Success
When it comes to generating revenue, media organizations rely on advertising. But in order to provide paying advertisers with maximum ROI, these same organizations need access to the right and customer data. In particular, they need to know who’s consuming their content, what platforms their audience is using, and how to keep their audience engaged.
With so many media organizations preparing to merge and consolidate in the coming years, there’s a real potential for larger companies to dominate certain channels and industry sectors. But doing so requires an in-depth understanding of who their customers are — and that means access to the right data via the most advanced CRM software tools. Simply put, large media organizations need to start investing in customer data management if they want to keep their customers happy, attract the highest paying advertisers, and deliver those advertisers the ROI they want.
Learn More About Customer Data Management, CRM Tools, and the Media Industry Transformation
On April 30th AKA Enterprise Solutions’ Media Practice Lead, Adolfo Ramirez, joined other for a live webcast. They discussed the coming post COVID-19 industry transformation, with a focus on how these changes will affect advertising. Topics included:
- Consumer access to content and advertising on-demand
- Social media network proliferation at scale
- Newly digitized media channels
- Effects of industry changes during crises, including COVID-19
Media Tech Trends – How Microsoft Customer Insights Can Turn Challenges Into Opportunities
ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!
Article by: Adolfo Ramirez | 212-502-3900
As AKA’s Media Practice Lead for more than a decade, Adolfo is an experienced consultant and project manager with a history of successful CRM and ERP projects across media and other industries. With 17 years of experience working with the Microsoft business platform, he is responsible for leading his team in designing, building, and implementing solutions that help media companies drive value.
Teradata Announces General Availability of Vantage Customer Experience
Partners with Celebrus to Deliver Personalized Experiences Across All Customer Interactions to Drive Incremental Revenue and Lower the Cost-to-Serve
“Delivering optimized experiences at the speed customers expect is a top priority for brands across every industry. But with the growing complexity of a fractured digital landscape, this has become increasingly challenging,” said Martyn Etherington, CMO at Teradata. “With Vantage CX — underpinned by Celebrus’ customer interaction data — we are able to address this challenge by giving enterprises the best possible data, in real time, from across all lines of business and customer touchpoints. This allows marketers to seamlessly operationalize insights across all their customer channels, delivering more value to their customers, and ultimately, increasing their bottom line.”
Providing a superior customer experience is the top priority for customer-centric organizations, yet many struggle to gain a comprehensive view of customer interactions that span multiple touchpoints and departments. With the rapid growth of martech tools and customer engagement systems creating more analytic silos, additional challenges arise in sensing and reacting to customer opportunities and pain points. This means businesses cannot explicitly personalize customer interactions in a timely manner. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are emerging to solve this challenge by enabling nontechnical business users to easily and quickly extend the customer profile, generate customer insights and deliver finely tailored instructions to the last-mile tools that execute personalized messages.
Vantage CX, the first enterprise CDP, overcomes the complexity through a unified view of the customer, easy-to-use advanced analytics that turn data into customer insights, and orchestrated messages across martech tools and customer engagement systems to turn insights into real-time actions. In addition, newly available features in Celebrus further ensure the highest-quality data possible for Vantage CX users because Celebrus is completely unimpacted by the digital challenges of today, including Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and other browser limitations.
“For over 10 years, Celebrus and Teradata have continued to innovate our partnership and technology integrations. Our ability to feed industry leading customer data into Teradata within milliseconds provides a point of differentiation for both of our solutions, which is evidenced by the long list of household-name banks and other global enterprises we are proud to call joint clients,” said Peter Kear, CEO at D4t4 Solutions.
Pricing: Vantage CX is available as a service. This means Teradata provides the hardware, installs the software and manages the day-to-day operations. Pricing is based on tiers of capabilities; the higher the tier the greater amount of capabilities. This allows for an entry level or starter license that then gives organizations the ability to start small and scale up as their needs and/or sophistication grows.
Related content:
What Midsize Companies Should Know About The Customer Experience In Times Of Intense Change
Part of the “Navigating Disruption Today, Planning for Tomorrow” series
Midsize businesses are known for understanding what customers want and meeting them where they are – in good and bad times. But what happens when a major event creates a wave of significant change that upends every aspect of our social infrastructure?
Within weeks, we have evolved from a society that routinely gathers in large numbers, values physical togetherness, and has access to products and services on demand. Now, we are bound by lifestyles dictated by social distancing, supply chain bottlenecks, and operational setbacks.
As these social norms break down and the longer such an experience persists, the more people reevaluate their role as consumers of an interconnected economy. This reassessment is not happening because consumerism is failing; instead, it’s a lesson of its fragility.
For midsize businesses, this is the perfect time to reconsider the effectiveness of their services and redesign them around customer needs – no matter how they change.
A shake-up in the customer experience
Today, customers are on the verge of a new trend: the isolation economy. Now more than ever, people are forced to travel less to complete everyday activities, from going to work and sending children to school to shopping at the local grocery store.
It is well-understood that structural social changes lead to how businesses should engage and serve their customers. But this transformation will require a deep, lasting shift in business models, so companies can innovate and build products and services that resonate with their customer’s lifestyle transformation. The expectation is that the goods and services come to the customer, not the other way around.
But don’t be fooled: social connection is still a basic human need that needs to be addressed. Fortunately, we live in a time when technology allows us to remain in constant touch with family, friends, and colleagues. And perhaps more surprising is the ease of creating new social circles that span generations.
A call for flexible, creative, and empathic experiences
This pandemic won’t last forever, even though it may feel like it. However, most of the buying behaviors and preferences that people are now adopting will become deeply ingrained in their expectations for the customer experience.
At some point, customers will one day resume traveling, going to the movies, participating in sports events and concerts, and even visiting their favorite stores. However, midsize companies must remember that such activities will not happen at the same rate and intensity as before.
So besides quickly putting up e-commerce sites and using social media to engage customers, there are other ways to adjust to this “next normal” for the customer experience. It just takes a little more flexibility, creativity, and empathy to achieve it.
Take, for example, chatbots. Albeit a relatively simple technology, the digital assistant provides a human-like experience that resonates well with customers. More importantly, artificial intelligence can help midsize companies analyze changing customer behaviors as the devices learn about them by engaging in very focused dialogue.
Another approach is the ability to provide an experience that complements a growing do-it-yourself (DYI) movement. No more than ever, customers are engaging in the world of DYI to occupy time their time being sheltered-in at home. The new trend is ripe for new spaces, services, and products that support doing things for oneself – such as events, classes, and educational resources.
Customer experience today, building block for tomorrow’s
Whether facing a government shake-up, natural disaster, or war, people naturally resort to survival tactics to ensure that their basic needs are addressed. But over time, those behaviors shape their expectations for the customer experience – sometimes with such speed and intensity that most businesses find challenging to adjust.
In many ways, the recent pandemic has unquestionably become a much-needed wake-up call for the customer experience. But midsize companies shouldn’t fear it. Instead, they should embrace it with the flexibility, creativity, and empathy that customers increasingly desire.
For further exploration of how midsize companies can meet changing customer expectations, we invite you to join our Webinar, “Evolve Your Customer Engagement for Business Continuity and Future Growth.”
This blog is part of a series offering suggestions to help small and midsize companies weather the pandemic challenges. We invite you to join the other blogs in the series as well.
This article originally appeared on Forbes SAP BrandVoice.