Tag Archives: Ways
5 Ways to Optimize B2B Customer Experiences
You just started your Software as a Service company. With hard work and dedication, you’ve created a solid product that solves the challenges your business-to-business customers face on a daily basis. With any new product, questions arise on how to get the most from it. Your customers want the best experience possible, and they turn to you to deliver that experience.
It’s easy enough for your first few customers. They all have your phone number — you’re a call or text message away to handle any and all problems. Then you get a few more customers — and more after that. Suddenly, you’re spending most of your day solving customer issues and less time building your company’s next great feature or product.
By now, it’s probably clear to you that you need some customer service experts. You’ll be building a SaaS customer service team and hiring agents to solve customer issues. As your team grows, with multiple support agents covering the same customer accounts, you’ll need a tool to streamline communications and keep agents updated on all customer data.
With the right technology and training, you can enable your support agents to tackle the biggest product challenges and provide consistent and excellent service to your customers.
Following are five ways you can empower your B2B customer service teams to deliver exceptional customer support experiences.
1. Solve Problems With Screen Sharing
To offer great customer support, you need to go where the customer lives. Both you and your B2B customers live in software, so it makes sense to use software to solve problems. Customer support teams equipped with the right software can make quick work of a long support queue.
The customer support software your teams use should back up your agents and offer ways to better resolve your customers’ issues. For B2B customers, visual support is especially useful. Pictures and video let your customer support agents show exactly where the problem lies and makes it easy to follow steps to resolve it.
Imagine your customer is having trouble using a back-end feature of your product. If your team had to explain it over the phone, think of how many steps that would takes: Click here, scroll there, look in the upper left corner. Wouldn’t it be much easier — and less time-consuming — to show your customer where to go and what to do?
B2B customer support software with screen sharing as a native feature solves plenty of pain points in real time for your customers. It simplifies their journeys from problem to solution. Your support teams complete tickets faster and with less frustration. Relying on the clarity that video and screen sharing can provide is a win-win.
2. Keep It Simple
Founders love to try to help every part of the business. They’re passionate about the products they’re building, and they want to explain as much as possible about how it works. That goes over well in new customer meetings and conference talks. It’s less helpful when customers are frustrated and need support.
Customer support presents an excellent opportunity for a founder to step back and let the team go to work. While a founder is well-versed in the tech speak relevant to the company’s product, that high-detail form of communication doesn’t translate well into closing customer tickets. Tech can get complicated, and your customers are looking for simple answers.
Empower your customer support teams to keep it simple. You’ve trained your agents well — now let them use their intellect to deliver great service for your product. The best hires on support teams can take the complex and boil it down to terms and steps that customers easily can follow.
Let’s say you have a customer who’s asking about how to activate the most recently debuted product feature. A founder excitedly might share the valuable technology operating in the back end to enable the feature and highlight its use cases.
A trained customer service agent would break down the issue itself and walk the customer through the activation process. By enabling support agents to keep it simple, founders can focus their time on building the next product feature. Customers get the specific answers they want while having a positive experience with the company.
3. Support Takes a Team
When you’re first building your product, it can feel like you’re a team of one. While sometimes that is the case, you can achieve greater results through collaborative team efforts. This is as true in customer support as it is in any other business function.
B2B customer support thrives on collaboration. Even if the answers your customers get are simple, arriving at those answers could take several complex steps. Having access to the right minds at the right times can create effective and memorable support experiences.
Perhaps a customer has a question about a highly technical part of your product. While your support agents are well-trained, they’re not equipped to answer a question with that level of detail. A great customer support software product can connect the agent to one of your engineers without needing to switch between technologies. Together, they can work out a solution and send it back to the customer in a matter of minutes.
To be successful, you need to create an environment of trust with your customer service agents. They should feel comfortable when they seek advice from specialists who can provide better answers to customer questions. A team-of-one mentality would have the agent trying to field every single answer. A collaborative environment instead encourages the agent to connect with fellow agents and other teams to lean on their expertise to solve problems.
Your support software should encourage collaboration. That kind of software includes resources that allow agents to share information quickly. If you can create channels for easy collaboration, then agents can jump right into them and solve even the most difficult customer challenges through teamwork.
4. Take an Omnichannel Approach
Your customers live everywhere online, and they expect you to be the same way. When they have questions for your support team, they’ll use all sorts of channels to make contact. It’s easy for agents to feel bombarded in short order without a system to maintain order.
Customers will come from everywhere with their questions: email, phone,live chat and more. Even in the digital age, phone calls are one of the most popular ways customers contact teams for help. Software built to manage omnichannel customer support approaches will enable your agents to answer customers quickly and decisively, no matter where they started.
An omnichannel approach lets your agents easily switch between channels and reply to customers where they are, not missing a beat or needing to ask them to repeat information. Solutions will need to be presented in different ways depending on the channel. Agents who can share solutions over the phone and through email with equal clarity will propel your success.
Customers won’t be waiting as long if they get the answers through their preferred channels. In addition, your agents will resolve issues faster and maximize their agility. When there’s slow traffic in the chat program but plenty of phone calls pouring in, agents can focus on the most active source and resolve issues effectively.
If you want to lessen the burden on your channels even more, then help the customer help themselves with self-service solutions. Oftentimes, customers can solve the problem on their own, given the right resources.
Developing an online database of guides to common problems can remove a lot of stress from service agents who must answer the same questions repeatedly. Video content is especially helpful, as customers can walk themselves through the solution before they ever reach out to customer support.
5. Always Follow Up
The job isn’t finished even after the customer service agent solves a customer’s issue. One benefit of working at a SaaS company is that with the right technology in place, customer service agents can see when and how customers interact with your software. Your teams are given insights into how your customers use your product, which creates opportunities to provide additional value through education and continued support.
For example, let’s say a customer service agent resolves a customer’s issue with a simple solution. The agent checks in after a while to find that the customer hasn’t logged back into the software to try out the solution. What can an agent do about that?
This is a great time for agents to follow up with the customer. If the customer still isn’t sure how to use the solution, the agent can share additional guidance or educational pieces, like a webinar about the topic. These additional touches can improve the customer relationship by showing your customers that you care about their success in using your product.
Use your customer support software to track and manage procedures to follow up. Ensure that your agents feel they can make that outreach to customers. Build and update a healthy database of support content that agents can plug into messages. Following up is a powerful method of demonstrating the value each customer brings to your company.
Reap the Rewards
When you’re starting out, SaaS customer support can seem difficult. It’s certainly a lot of information and traffic to manage. However, it doesn’t need to be a tough process.
Give your support agents the best software and keep solutions simple. Let them collaborate with other teams on solutions and talk to customers across all channels. Always check in after the support ticket is closed.
The right technology and training let your company’s customer service agents offer your customers easy and practical solutions to even the most complex issues. You can save customers valuable time and build meaningful relationships, winning loyal B2B customers in the long run.
5 Ways Cloud ERP Cures Furniture Retailers’ Biggest Headaches
Posted by John Goode, Senior Director, Channel Marketing
With annual revenues of about $ 114 billion, the U.S. retail furniture market has been on a steady growth curve over the past few years. Driven by a strong national economy, the industry is seeing healthy growth in its ecommerce sales as furniture shopping becomes increasingly popular among millennials.
The furniture industry is also facing its fair share of challenges. For example, delivering an omnichannel experience has become an imperative and online furniture retailers are eating away at brick-and-mortar profits. Historically focused on getting a certain number of people through their front doors, and then converting about 25% of them into paying customers, retail furniture stores have also watched that foot traffic dwindle over the past two decades.
“Closing percentages have gone up,” said Rich Rotman, Senior Solutions Consultant at 5-Star NetSuite Provider Centium Consulting, Inc., “but traffic has plummeted.”
These realities have created both concern and panic for furniture retailers, many of which are beginning to develop their first ecommerce storefronts.
Making the Move to the Cloud
Working with furniture retailers whose annual revenues range from $ 20 million to $ 500 million, the Centium team sees firsthand the obstacles these organizations face in the race to digitize their operations and serve their online customers. Exacerbating the challenges is a workforce where salespeople aren’t generally tech-savvy, and where customer databases are both outdated and stored in on-premises, legacy systems.
To overcome these obstacles, furniture retailers not only need robust, engaging ecommerce storefronts, they also need unified cloud technology systems that integrate well with other applications. Learn more by downloading the Centium kit.
“The industry as a whole has been dogged by legacy applications,” said
Brian Denham, Centium’s President. “It’s also using applications with industry-specific functionalities, with the end result being a lot of information silos and systems that don’t ‘talk’ to one another.”
These siloed systems can create major bottlenecks for furniture retailers. For example, Centium recently worked with one company that couldn’t even extract simple cashflow statements from its stores.
“They can’t even figure out their cash position, which is pretty unbelievable in this day and age,” said Denham. “The company’s applications are so siloed that even getting this very basic level of information is impossible.”
5 Ways Cloud ERP Supports Furniture Retailers
An industry where everything from purchasing to ordering to managing salesperson commissions is handled manually, the furniture industry is ripe for automation. Here are some of the biggest advantages that retailers gain by implementing NetSuite’s cloud ERP:
- Effectively manage stackable promotions. With NetSuite’s built-in functionality, the retail furniture industry can more effectively manage stackable promotions—those that include a certain product, a financing deal and free shipping, for example—which are extremely popular among furniture buyers. “Most software platforms can’t handle two promotions at the same time,” said Rotman, “let alone three or four.” NetSuite can easily work with multiple offers being applied to the same customer order.
- Take off the legacy system handcuffs. “We’re at a point where these companies really need to evolve, and their legacy systems are keeping them stuck in a box,” Rotman said. “The great thing about NetSuite is it allows you to evolve your business without being handcuffed. If you want to change your business model, alter the way you do things, or move from being a special-order retailer to one that holds more inventory, NetSuite can handle it all for you.”
- Manage multiple commission structures. Centium recently worked with a furniture retailer that used roughly 25 different commissions across multiple sales forces. All of those allocations and distributions were handled manually—a process that ate up time, money and valuable human resources. That company has since automated the process using the standard version of NetSuite, versus a customized solution that might have cost tens of thousands of dollars.
- Print and change merchandise tags on the fly. The cloud ERP system also features saved searches, customized templates and scheduling capabilities that allow furniture retailers to more readily print up merchandise tags for its showroom products. It also enables quick switching up of those tags when, say, a holiday promotion kicks in. “This is a feature that many retailers don’t catch onto until after the ERP has been implemented,” said Rotman, “and it’s a nice surprise for anyone who was handling the process manually.”
- Provide a better customer experience. Operating in an industry where a good customer experience is paramount—and where the nearest competitor is now just a single screen tap or mouse click away—furniture retailers also need good customer case management capabilities. “With NetSuite,” said Rotman, “retailers can customize their customer support to provide a much better experience than they ever could with a legacy system.”
Ultimately, these and other wins help furniture retailers cater to customers that are less likely to visit their stores and more likely to shop online when buying new furniture and accessories, and where providing the ultimate customer experience has become a vital competitive advantage. Download the Centium kit to learn more.
by NetSuite filed under
5 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Engagement
In a world where individuals are accustomed to having the information we need at our fingertips, social media has become an essential marketing distribution channel.
One reason social media is so effective is that it makes it fun and easy to consume and share information. Individuals can share ideas, pose questions, and have meaningful conversations with peers from all over the world without even having to leave their desks. And thanks to the rise in mobile usage that has occurred during this past decade, individuals now have access to social media pretty much everywhere they go.
Because social media is the place to be, however, it can be very easy to get lost in the crowd. To avoid having your target audience breeze through your posts, you need the perfect recipe to make your followers stop scrolling, check out what you have to say, and take action.
While it will take some work to fine-tune your social media strategy, the process is easier than you think if you have the right tactics in place. Today, we’re sharing 5 ways you can boost your social media game to earn more clicks, shares, and conversions.
1. Lean Into the Power of Employee Advocacy
Creating an effective social media strategy is not a one-person job. If you want to get in front of your target audience and improve engagement, it helps to have as many people as possible sharing your content.
Getting your followers to engage with your content is the ultimate goal, but that can only do so much if you only have a few followers to start with. That’s why encouraging employee advocacy is a great way to build your social media presence. Having your employees engage with and share your organization’s recent posts on their own social channels can help you secure better placement on social feeds so you can reach more prospective customers and grow your audience.
Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module makes it extremely easy to mobilize your employees to share your content. The tool allows you to use boards to organize your post by topic, making it easy for your employees to find and share posts that are relevant to them and their followers.
While you can’t force your colleagues to be active on social media, you can definitely encourage participation by giving them some sort of incentive. For example, you can create a leaderboard and give prizes to the employee advocates who share the most posts or generate the most engagement per month.
2. Be Consistent and Tell a Story
We often hear about posts that have “gone viral.” For many social media creators and influencers, those 15 minutes of fame are the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, businesses can’t expect one noteworthy post to lead to long-term social media marketing success.
If you really want to drive ROI from your social media marketing efforts, you should tell compelling stories that keep your followers engaged and coming back for more. If your followers know what to expect from you, they’ll be more likely to notice and interact with your content when it pops up on their feed. And, if they really love what you’re doing, they might even take the extra step to visit your profiles on their own.
But what do I mean when I say that you should tell a story? What I’m getting at is that your social media content should be curated to support campaigns highlighting certain customer pain points and topics of interest. Another important piece of this is that your social media efforts should align with the rest of your marketing efforts so that the messaging your audience is seeing is consistent wherever they go. So, for example, if you develop an email campaign aimed at top-of-the-funnel contacts in the manufacturing industry, you should create content that opens the door for this segment to continue to engage with you on social.
Adding another marketing activity to your day is probably the last thing you want to do. However, investing in an automation tool that allows you to schedule posts ahead of time, will allow you to easily deliver timely content that aligns with the rest of your marketing efforts.
3. Take Advantage of Current Events and Trends
Timeliness is key when it comes to getting your audience to engage on social media. Creating or curating content that is “trending” can also improve your chances of appearing at the top of social media feeds — making sure your audience sees your posts in the first place. So, latching on to current events and trends is an excellent way to get your content featured and capture the attention of your target customers.
That doesn’t mean that you need your eyes on social media at all times to take advantage of every potential opportunity. Instead, you can set up Google Alerts for terms related to your target audience and industry. You can also monitor relevant hashtags to see what your audience and competitors are posting. Then use their content as inspiration that informs your overall social media strategy.
4. Fuel Demand Gen By Leveraging Social Media as a Content Distribution Channel
A good portion of your social posts should direct your audience to a webpage or asset that will motivate them to keep progressing through the customer journey.
Using your social media channels as a content distribution platform is a great way to direct your audience to resources that provide the information they need to move to the next stage in the sales funnel. For the best results, we recommend that you use a mix of gated and ungated content.
Ungated content, such as blog posts, is a great way to get potential customers on your website so they can start browsing and learning more about your products or services. Conversely, gated content — such as eBooks that your contacts can access by filling out a form — allows you to collect important contact information that you can use to inform your marketing strategy and create more compelling customer journeys.
5. Use Data and Analytics to Optimize Your Efforts
While social media provides you room to get more creative with your marketing efforts, you still want your work to generate results. If you’re not already keeping an eye on your data and analytics and optimizing your social media efforts accordingly, you should definitely start.
A few social media KPIs to measure include:
- Impressions: Knowing the number of people who see your posts allows you to understand if your content is getting prominently featured on social feeds.
- Follows and Unfollows: You want to secure an audience that is eager to view your content and hear what you have to say. Tracking how many followers you gain week over week can provide you with an idea of whether your efforts are attracting new potential customers.
- Clicks: As I mentioned above, you should create opportunities on social media for your audience to engage with you through other marketing channels. If your social media posts are not motivating your audience to download an eBook, sign up for an email newsletter, or perform other actions that advance them along the sales funnel, you need to re-think your efforts.
- Shares: A share shows that a follower not only found your post interesting enough to stop scrolling but also to share it with their audience. On top of that, having followers share your posts helps you get more eyes on your content and improves your chance of showing up on social feeds. Keeping track of which posts are getting the most shares can help you see how to continue to enhance your social strategy for maximum engagement.
- Attributable Conversions: Social media should play a key role in your demand generation and customer acquisition efforts. Being able to trace conversions back to your social media efforts is a good way to gauge if your strategy is working.
- Attributable Revenue: Speaking of conversions, the ultimate goal for any company is to gain new customers and increase ROI. You should also keep track of revenue generated by specific campaigns and posts, and use your findings to optimize your efforts to help you meet your revenue goals.
Having access to these metrics will show you where you stand and where you can improve so you can continue to grow your audience and reap the rewards of this powerful medium.
Act-On Helps You Easily Tie Your Social Media Efforts to Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Investing in a robust marketing automation platform will help you align your social media strategy with top-notch execution and reporting. Act-On equips you with the tools you need to automate your marketing efforts, streamline processes, and measure results. Even better, the time you’ll save on tedious manual processes will allow you to focus your energy on innovating and growing your strategy.
If you’d like to take a peek into Act-On’s Advanced Social Media module and learn how we can help you implement your entire digital marketing strategy, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They can show you what makes our platform so unique and walk you through a variety of use cases related to your needs and interests.
5 Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Email for Better Results
4) New and Updated Product Launch Emails
Good businesses are constantly releasing new products, services, and features. Great businesses are able to disseminate that information to their customer base in fun and innovative ways that lead to better engagement and more sales opportunities.
Whenever your company releases a new product or updates an existing product, you should include a strong email marketing campaign as part of your holistic go-to-market strategy. Think about it: your existing customers are already invested in some aspect of your company and offerings, so there’s a very good chance that they’d also be interested in what’s coming next!
New and updated product launch emails are designed to do more than generate sales; when done properly, they help foster connection to your entire brand. You’re advertising your bright, shiny, and new offering, so you want to create a real sense of enthusiasm that you can transfer to your existing customers. This means using big, sharp images and clever, concise copy. Most importantly, you want to make sure your branding elements jump off the page while also tying seamlessly to your new product.
Use the subject line and preview text to let your audience know that they’re about to view or learn about something new and exciting, being as explicit as possible with the limited characters at your disposal. Include a prominent CTA that clearly states the desired action, and make it easy for your customers to access the new or updated product by redirecting them to a clean and simple landing page where they can request a free trial or purchase the new item outright.
5) Use Email to Gather Customer Feedback
Successful B2C companies are constantly innovating and improving upon their product and service lines. And one way they can do that is by understanding what is and isn’t working. Sending emails prompting customers to take a survey or leave product feedback can help your company gather the data you need to develop and deliver the best possible offerings and experiences.
Obviously, you want to make sure you’re sending survey emails to customers who have actually purchased something from you in the past. So, a common best practice is to send these emails as part of a trigger campaign following a sale or interaction with customer support. These emails empower your customers to voice their opinion of your products and services, which helps to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Further, it allows you to understand where you’re succeeding and where you might have missed the mark, so you can continue to improve your offerings with each new iteration.
In addition to surveys, which usually limit the interaction to objective yes/no or multiple-choice questions, you should encourage your customers to give more detailed feedback by inviting them to leave a review or testimonial. You can leverage great reviews by sharing them on your website, product pages, or social media platforms. Or, you could even follow up with the customer directly to see if they’d like to participate in a more involved case study or success story.
Even negative reviews can be extremely helpful as they give you the chance to improve your product and reach out to the reviewer directly to help make the situation work to your advantage. In some cases, these reviews (and your responses) can help your other customers solve their problem, which could save you from additional negative reviews in the future. For example, a customer trying to decide if they want to buy a pair of jeans might notice a negative review suggesting to size up, which would prevent them from making the same mistake.
If you aren’t getting much traction with your customer feedback emails, consider adding additional value to incentivize your customers to participate. This might include a standard discount with a simple user code or maybe a free trial to your next product release. Make sure the offer is included in the subject line to inspire your audience to click through to the email.
3 Ways to Build Positive Relationships with B2B Customers
For most businesses, meeting target sales goals and key revenue metrics are top priorities. While executive teams understand that building positive relationships with customers is important, it isn’t the easiest metric to quantify. For this reason, many companies end up ignoring the work it takes to build relationships with customers, and begin to focus on other, more easily-tracked metrics like deals closed and upsells.
In a business-to-business environment the lack of a strong customer relationship might cause a reduction in customer retention, a low number of upsells with existing customers, and a high overall rate of customer churn. This is important to B2B companies because churn has a direct impact on profit. To avoid losing customers and to help increase customer retention, consider the following three ways companies can build positive relationships with B2B customers.
1. Build Rapport Through a White-Glove Onboarding Experience
Nearly
75 percent of all B2B sales to new customers take a minimum of four months to close, the CSO Insights 2019 report indicates. Before closing a deal, companies provide B2B buyers with VIP treatment in the form of extensive brand awareness efforts, targeted marketing, conversations with multiple stakeholders, and personalized tactics every step of the way.
It’s clear that a lot of effort goes into securing a B2B customer — but all too often, all the effort and personalized attention put into the sales process go away once the deal is closed, leaving new customers to figure things out with no clear path forward from the vendor.
Rather than dropping off customers once they sign on the dotted line, be sure to take the time to
onboard the customer properly with your offering, and with all departments who will manage the ongoing customer relationship.
Onboarding provides companies an opportunity to align expectations for the relationship and ensure customers are fully aware of a solution’s capabilities. Beyond training or setting up accounts, the process also sets the tone for what the customer should expect when working with your company on a daily basis.
It gives you the opportunity to understand and cater to the customer’s goals better. By properly onboarding a customer, you will experience a variety of benefits like reduced customer churn, decreased support inquiries and increased internal knowledge.
The benefits of properly onboarding customers do not go unnoticed. In fact, some companies now offer to send an onboarding specialist to the customer’s location at a discounted rate. Through the specialist, customers can get one-on-one assistance to learn the product and set it up to be fully functional for the entire business. This is beneficial not only in building a relationship with the customer, but also in helping you ensure that timelines for getting the product up and running are met.
Apart from the onboarding process, be sure to maintain consistent and kind conversations with the customer on an ongoing basis. Customers shouldn’t hear from you only when something bad has happened, and they shouldn’t feel hesitant to contact the support team in fear of a negative or stressful experience.
Following a hands-on onboarding process, organizations should put additional time and resources into the customer’s post-sale experience. With proper attention, customers are less likely to leave, more interested in purchasing additional services and solutions, and more willing to provide positive reviews and ongoing feedback.
2. Personalize Interactions With Each Individual Customer
With multiple customer touchpoints in a single organization, establishing a unique conversation with each individual and trying to remember information previously discussed can be a major challenge. If it’s not managed properly, it can be harmful to the customer relationship.
Whether you have five, 50 or 500 customer support employees, different team members eventually will help the same customer. Fortunately, there are solutions available that can help teams of all sizes keep track of vital customer data.
Customer support software built specifically for B2B provides teams with one location to store customer information that all customer-facing employees can understand and utilize to build and maintain relationships. With this technology in place, teams can minimize mixups and miscommunications, reducing customer frustration.
It also helps customers feel like they have a one-to-one relationship with a unique employee on your customer support team — one who understands their business.
For example, let’s say a company wants to send a customer an anniversary note or gift. While the sales team has the start date in a CRM tool like Salesforce, if there isn’t an integration between Salesforce and the support software, the support and success teams are left in the dark without to access the info. By creating an integration, customer-facing teams can access this info automatically without needing to ask sales and wait for a response.
In addition to providing personalized gestures for each client or contact, companies must consider how customers want to communicate. If a customer support agent leaves a voicemail with every attempt to contact a customer, and the customer invariably responds with an email, the agent should take note that the customer prefers email communication. Taking the extra step not only to personalize information but also to acknowledge the customer’s preferences will help companies successfully build relationships and gain trust.
3. Listen and Learn From Your Customers
If you have strong relationships, your customers will provide positive and negative feedback on a regular basis. Listen to this feedback to both understand what you’re doing right and where you need to improve.
In addition to accepting and listening to feedback, be sure to have support agents keep an eye out for opportunities to make a handoff to the customer success team. If an agent just worked on a ticket that’s only the customer’s second ticket in the past six months, the agent can alert the success team to reach out and check in on the customer.
While this may seem unnecessary, companies need to keep in mind that a customer who goes silent could quietly be researching competitors.
Another way to listen and learn from customers is through tone of voice. While this is easy to do over the phone or in-person, conversations via email or chat can be read in different ways depending on the usage of words and punctuation.
Having the right customer support software in place can help you better craft your communication strategies with customers. One way this is done is through sentiment analysis. Through artificial intelligence technology, sentiment analysis automatically assigns a sentiment, such as “satisfied” or “frustrated” to each ticket.
In addition to assigning sentiment, it then goes one step further by adding a confidence score to each ticket. In doing so, agents can understand the accuracy of the assigned sentiment. This not only saves the customer support agent time, but also moves the process along faster for the customer.
For example, if a long email reaches a newer agent and the sentiment reads “impolite” and “frustrated” with a high confidence score, the agent can forward it immediately to the supervisor for fast remediation.
Additionally, sentiment analysis can help customer support teams better understand how customers perceive responses. You can do this by examining the sentiment of tickets that come in before and after the initial response from your team. Do you notice a change in the sentiment? Does it improve, or does your customer seem more frustrated or confused than before? How much did it change?
By having this information at hand, you quickly can find areas of opportunity to train agents to improve the tone of their responses and make your customers feel better heard and cared for. For example, instead of using a generic phrase like “Thanks for contacting us,” you can say “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. It’s important to me and I’m investigating it further.” This can shift the overall sentiment and strengthen your relationship with the customer.
Listening to and learning from your customers within your support software will provide you with a lot of data and information. While this is valuable, it can be hard to track and keep it all in one place. Through a customer distress index (CDI), you can aggregate your key data points to create a score that lets your agents know how happy or unhappy the customer truly is.
By utilizing a CDI, businesses can do a better job of crafting their overall strategies for working with customers. For example, if a team notices a customer has a high distress score, a ticket automation rule can be set up so that all tickets from that customer go only to experienced agents.
While building a positive relationship with B2B customers takes time, it does not need to be overly complex. B2B customers want personalized experiences and companies that will listen to (and hopefully anticipate) their needs. Listen to and learn from the feedback they provide. By incorporating these strategies into your day-to-day operations, you will be sure to build positive and loyal B2B customer relationships.
Developers and Administrators: NetSuite 2020 Release 1 Brings New Ways to Harness the Power of the SuiteCloud Platform
Posted by Erik Klein, Principal Outbound Product Manager, SuiteCloud Platform
Running an organization is a complex undertaking, mandating companies to derive as much value from their business applications as possible. Perhaps no capability does more to ensure that customers are able to realize distinct business advantage from NetSuite than the SuiteCloud Platform.
Software developers and administrators around the globe leverage the SuiteCloud Platform to customize and extend their organizations’ NetSuite environments, not only to solve the unique challenges they face, but also to maximize the return on their ERP, ecommerce and HR investments. They count on the NetSuite Platform’s comprehensive and evolving array of customization and integration solutions to address these challenges.
NetSuite 2020 Release 1 continues to deliver on this promise by delivering a number of significant enhancements to the SuiteCloud Platform. From updated software development lifecycle tools in the SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) capabilities to the new in-product SuiteApp Marketplace, NetSuite 2020 Release 1 raises the stakes, giving developers more options than ever to become more agile and productive.
What’s more, these newly enhanced SuiteCloud Platform tools can accelerate DevOps efforts, as well as streamline and automate develop, test and deploy efforts. To top it off, SuiteScript 2.1 supports the latest version of ECMAScript, includes a variety of new REST web service features, and a broad array of SuiteScript APIs that make it possible to customize, integrate and extend NetSuite as never before.
SuiteCloud Platform Highlights
Here’s a sampling of new NetSuite 2020 Release 1 SuiteCloud Platform capabilities available within your NetSuite environment:
- Generally available REST web services enable external applications to securely integrate with NetSuite, and includes support for custom records, expanded CRUD (Create, Read, Update Delete) operations, record collection filtering, and executable Record Actions.
- A new REST API browser provides developers with a visual overview of API structure and function.
- The updated SuiteScript 2.1 programming language supports the latest ECMAScript 2018 JavaScript syntax and is powered by Graal virtual machine technology, enabling developers to write powerful apps with less code. It also supports relative file path preferences.
- The SuiteQL API enables the creation of fast and scalable applications, and significantly improves query performance and efficiency.
- The updated SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) improves developer productivity and broadens support for application features. SDF-enabled SuiteScript customizations make it easy to create and modify forms natively in SuiteScript, and the new open-sourced Node.JS Command Line Interface (CLI) aids in attaining DevOps objectives such as Continuous Development and Integration (CI/CD).
- Enhanced auditing and change management features add robustness to core auditing functions in the new System Notes v2 implementation.
- SuiteFlow now features expanded support for expense automation, and workflow actions such as data validations no longer require custom scripting skills.
- The new SuiteApp Marketplace introduces a new consumer-like experience natively within the NetSuite UI for discovering, distributing and consuming SuiteApps.
In summary, the SuiteCloud enhancements in NetSuite 2020 Release 1 will help customers and partners meet the unique requirements of their organizations by enabling them to customize NetSuite by leveraging technologies such as SuiteTalk for extensible cloud integration, SuiteFlow for workflow process automation, and SuiteAnalytics for business intelligence.
Learn More About the NetSuite 2020 Release 1
These are just the highlights! There are simply too many enhancements to the SuiteCloud Platform in this release to cover in a single blog post. To learn more about the complete list of new Platform features, be sure to read the Release Notes.
New to the release process? Learn more about it here.
Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.
by NetSuite filed under
5 Ways Cloud ERP Helps Solar Installers Reduce Soft Costs
Posted by John Goode, Senior Director, Channel Marketing
The amount of solar energy connected to the national electric grid has increased more than 20-fold since 2008, as millions of Americans choose clean technology to power their lives. As solar use has grown, technology development, commercialization and the scaling of manufacturing processes have all helped drive down solar hardware costs, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).
The “soft costs” of going solar have not declined nearly as rapidly. Defined as the non-hardware costs associated with moving to solar, soft costs include permitting, financing and installing solar panels, as well as all the expenses solar companies incur to acquire new customers, pay suppliers, train staff and cover their bottom lines.
These soft costs comprise as much as 64% of the total cost of a new solar system, according to the DOE, and make up the largest component of any installation. When a solar installer runs its business using incompatible technology applications that don’t “talk” to each other—and when each area of that business has its own individual applications and data sets—the soft costs can add up pretty quickly.
Blu Banyan, a Berkeley, Calif.-based Solution Provider and SuiteApp developer with a dedicated NetSuite practice for the solar industry, recognizes the challenges of these soft costs and developed SolarSuccess, a NetSuite application specifically optimized for residential and commercial solar installers of all sizes. The NetSuite/SolarSuccess solution helps installers leverage the rapid decline in hardware costs over the past decade, while making the reductions in soft-costs necessary to improve organizational efficiency, profitability and competitive position.
5 Ways ERP Reduces Solar Soft Costs
Here are five ways that a unified, cloud ERP built for the solar industry helps installers effectively reduce their projects’ soft costs and improve their profitability on every project.
1. Replaces widely-used, off-the-shelf software. As companies grow, incompatible “point” applications that don’t scale effectively or profitably in combination—including widely-used programs like QuickBooks and Salesforce—all eventually have to be replaced, at ever-greater financial and disruption costs. In their place, companies are turning to integrated management solutions that support all the core company functions, including accounting, finance, project management, inventory/procurement, sales/marketing and human resources.
2. Provides reliable, real-time data. Without good data providing visibility across all company operations, scaling productively is next to impossible for solar installers. “When you’re working with incompatible, incomplete, out-of-date data, it can turn into a nightmare pretty quickly,” said Blu Banyan’s Chief Executive Officer Jan Rippingale. “To improve efficiency and profitability, solar installers must have real-time visibility into their entire end-to-end businesses.”
3. Breaks down information silos. Many installers continue to use programs like QuickBooks to run their businesses even as they scale up to meet the growing demand for solar power. Because QuickBooks doesn’t “talk” to Salesforce.com—and because Salesforce doesn’t integrate with job-costing tools—an installer’s procurement, accounting and sales teams are working from different playbooks. This siloed approach simply doesn’t cut it in today’s flat, collaborative world, where both internal and external partners need common technology platforms and data compatibility.
4. Integrates all aspects of the installation business. SolarSuccess brings sales pipeline management, CRM, accounting, purchasing, installation project management (including per project costing and profitability), inventory management, customer invoicing, universal financier connectivity and business intelligence all onto a single platform. The solution provides end-to-end visibility on cash flow, profitability, acquisition costs, project tracking and alerts, sub-contractor monitoring and other functions that are keys to a solar installer’s success. “When you’re aggregating a group of point applications—and regardless of how good each of those programs is individually—you really need them to be able to talk to one another,” said Rippingale. “The only way to make that happen, and to effectively reduce the soft costs identified by the DOE, is with an integrated application suite that provides reliable data and a common interface across all functions.”
5. Supports scale and growth. Using an end-to-end, fully-integrated software suite that was specifically optimized for the solar industry, installers can effectively meet the demands of their growing customer bases while also keeping soft costs to a minimum, ensuring profitable growth for the installer. “A lot of companies in this space are at a point where the acceleration in demand literally puts them in the position where they can’t scale or grow further,” said Rippingale. “In fact, many of them won’t even be able to sustain their current profitability levels and competitive position without switching to a system that allows them to use the same data across all of their departments.”
Blu Banyan’s premier end-to-end solar solution has been built on the NetSuite platform to give installers a software stack that’s specifically tailored for their needs. Optimized for residential and commercial solar installers of any size, SolarSuccess helps installers successfully leverage the rapid decline in hardware costs over the last decade with soft-cost reductions that improve margins even as overall installation costs decline. Access this whitepaper to learn more about Blu Banyan’s SolarSuccess product and how it helps drive down the soft costs in a solar installer’s business.
by NetSuite filed under
3 Ways a Digital Business Can Get Customer Experience Right
Reading Time: 3 mins 30 sec.
There is a secret to success shared by top digital businesses today, and it has to do with providing a positive customer experience. Happy customers are loyal customers, and loyal customers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. But what about those companies that go above and beyond to provide an unmatched customer experience? What is their secret to success?
Read about three digital businesses that are thriving due to the customer experience they provide and to get a glimpse of their common secret to success.
Grupo Xcaret
Grupo Xcaret is a family and environmentally-friendly all-inclusive resort made up of theme parks, hotels, and restaurants. The company takes a holistic approach in providing great customer experiences by creating an integrated ecosystem behind the scenes.
With the all-inclusive approach, visitors can pay for their stay all at once, then move freely throughout the various parks and accommodations without having to stop to pay, weigh decisions on additional spending for food or entry fees, or be held up in unnecessary entrance lines. Their secret to success is….a data-sharing ecosystem makes this all possible; it connects Xcaret’s lodging, restaurant, and park application systems together, combining data to better serve its customers. By analyzing the data collected and predicting next steps, Grupo Xcaret provides its visitors timely, personalized offers that let them know their experience is important to the company.
Caesars Entertainment
Also in the business of entertaining, Caesars Entertainment knows how to provide a great customer experience. But what is their secret to success? Caesars has created advanced engagement models to give each customer a personalized experience, from check-in to restaurant and show deals, to suggestions for making the most of their time on the casino floor. This is possible because they store all of their data in a shared cloud, giving 360-degree access to customers on every Caesars property.
Aeroporti di Roma
Whether you’re heading to Mexico for an all-inclusive family vacation or jet-setting to Vegas or Dubai for a more adults-only adventure, those leaving from Rome’s Aeroporti di Roma will receive a premier customer experience as soon as they reach the airport.
Aeroporti di Roma found its secret to success by integrating its data ecosystem to improve the traveling experience for flyers. From flight reservations to shopping in the terminal to boarding the plane, data is captured and analyzed, giving the airport a holistic view of its passengers. Heat maps detect passenger flow and help the airport streamline the journey from check-in to boarding based on data patterns.
A Data Sharing Ecosystem: The Secret to Great Customer Experiences
Have you figured it out yet? The secret to customer experience success is through data sharing. It allows digital businesses to personalize each individual’s visit and unveils a more thorough understanding of customer preferences. It also increases cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
All three of the companies mentioned rely on TIBCO to integrate their systems. To learn more about each business’s strategy, check out their case studies on our Customers’ page.
Connecting an enterprise is easier said than done, however. Integrating previously siloed data, sometimes bringing in outside data from partners or even rivals, requires careful consideration and coordination. But the end result helps digital businesses deliver an experience that only looks effortless to the customer.
For more on the importance of customer experience, specifically around airport strategies, read this piece by TIBCO exec/SVP Erich Gerber. If you’re interested in seeing how TIBCO can help you build a connected customer journey, learn more here.
Wait and See: Four Ways To Keep The Customer Experience Going When Uncertainty Looms
Part 4 of the “2020 Strategies and Insights for Midsize Companies” series
“Wait and see.”
That phrase can be like a huge, red stop light for businesses of all sizes when uncertainty looms. No matter if that uncertainty springs from the political landscape like the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election, or company leadership is changing, or a merger is happening, companies oftentimes pause on making big decisions around big technology purchases, staffing, and business initiatives until after the change.
Sometimes “wait and see” is just part of business when uncertainty looms. But that self-inflicted pause rarely, if ever, flies with customers. Customer needs, demands, and expectations don’t wait for elections, mergers, budgets, or internal onboarding to conclude.
So, as we face this new decade, how can you keep customer experience (CX) improvement efforts moving if you feel stuck on “wait and see?” Because you may not have a choice about following high-level directives to hold off on big purchases and decisions. But it doesn’t make good business sense to put customers on the back burner, either.
One idea: focus on what you can do. This could be the perfect time to revisit the CX basics at your company. Because customer experience is about much more than tech, initiatives, and big projects. It’s a mindset, or a way of doing things, to be interwoven into the fabric of your company’s culture.
Here are some things you can focus on to keep the company’s CX mindset flowing in times of uncertainty.
Are the basics really under control?
I’m going to get really basic for just a moment. When I say, “the basics,” I mean, are the phones being answered, and answered effectively? While the focus today may be on perfecting digital and online communication, the phone is still customers’ most preferred channel when it comes to contacting the companies where they do business. Fifty-seven percent of consumers used the phone to address a service problem last year. Seventy-five percent of companies believe they’re doing a good job with telephone communication, but only 48% of customers agree. Flames fly every day on social media from angry customers who can’t get a call answered, or when they encounter phone agents who simply don’t seem to care. Getting the phones right is a CX basic. Use “wait and see” time to secret shop your company’s phone systems or contact center. Assess, advocate for, and improve on the phone basics.
Is your website communicating well?
You probably already know website design is important to winning and retaining customers. But a customer’s experience with your site goes well beyond aesthetics. Bad, inconsistent, and confusing content leads to friction with customers. Two out of three customers in one recent study regularly had trouble finding answers on company websites. Here’s an example. I recently visited the website of a company where I had made a purchase and found that the customer service number posted on their site wasn’t correct. Their site invited me to chat online with agents “right now.” When I clicked to enter the chat, the page changed and said chat was closed, but I could feel free to e-mail them. I felt like a digital hot potato—passed around from source to source without getting anywhere. In the end, it felt like the company had deliberately wasted my time. So, secret shop your company website. Ask some communication-savvy colleagues to do the same. You probably don’t need a big budget or to wait for an election to pass in order to get the basics squared away.
How about a customer experience metrics and measurements refresh?
By now, companies who are more customer experience mature should have CX operational and experience metrics in place. Along with your senior team, you’re likely monitoring and triaging customers’ experiences with your application processes, customer wait times, website, and in your contact center, for example. But how long has it been since you challenged what you were measuring, how you were measuring it, and if those were the things that really mattered to customers? What mattered two years ago may not be what matters now. Most small and midsized companies don’t need a big budget to shift what they’re measuring and when. And if you’re not measuring, monitoring, and triaging data surrounding customers’ experiences yet, 2020 is a good time to get started, using systems and resources you already have in place.
Expand your thinking on customer feedback
No matter what size company you run, collecting feedback should be part of your business model. And hopefully by now you’re well on your way to collecting and reviewing feedback on a regular basis. If you get stuck in “wait and see” mode, go back and take another dive back into feedback you’ve collected. Challenge whether you’re acting feedback everywhere possible in your business. Sixty-three percent of companies that collect feedback don’t do a good job of using it holistically in their business. Think about using feedback in your policy and rulemaking work, risk management activities, marketing and public relations work. In the coming decade, you will want to maximize your current business processes, including how and where you use the customer feedback you’re already collecting.
“Wait and see” is oftentimes just part of the normal course of doing business. But that doesn’t mean your focus on CX needs to take a huge pause. With an entrepreneurial spirit and mindset, you can face the 2020s intuitively knowing what it takes to advance the customer experience dialogue, even if big projects go on hold. Small and midsize businesses have an opportunity to be nimble in ways where many large organizations struggle. Embrace and expand on the basics of customer experience management during periods of “wait and see,” and you will be embracing competitive opportunity.
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See IDC’s list of top trends for small and midsize businesses in the 2020s. Download the IDC infographic, sponsored by SAP, “The Roaring 2020s – Six Trends Midsize Companies in the Next Decade.”
And we invite you join our upcoming webinar for a deeper dive into each of these trends and what you can do now to take advantage of them. Register for Winning in the 2020s: Six Trends Every Midsize Company Needs to Know.
5 Ways Mobile Software Increases Field Efficiency
The goal of any field service company is to be as resourceful as possible, which proves more challenging when technicians don’t have access to a mobile device. Without a connected mobile device, technicians are wasting resources by dealing with unnecessary customer issues or traveling between the office to the client. If a team of 12 field technicians who work 250 days a year could guarantee one new service call per day, that would equal 3000 additional service orders worked per year.
Compared to other business models, running a field service organization can be especially challenging. In addition to the financial, customer service and administrative tasks involved with running a business, you also need to manage field service technicians, keep track of schedules and equipment, and ensure your organization continues to deliver fast, efficient and effective service to your customers. Here are 5 ways connected mobile software improves field efficiency and productivity:
Integrated Inventory Management
With integrated inventory management, technicians are not manually entering pieces every time they have to build an invoice. Field technicians can view stock levels at “warehouse locations”, mark inventory items as “allocated” at the time the Work Order is created, receive a warning when placing a Work Order for out-of-stock items and more. It also helps to ensure that technicians have what they need for each service call, resulting in greater first call resolution and more satisfied customers.
Effortless Time Tracking
With the click of a button, technicians can let the office know where they are and what their status is. Through their mobile device, techs can easily set their position as arrived, in progress, or done. Their time automatically synchronizes to the back office making payroll a breeze. With mobile capabilities such as time sheet input based on clock-in/clock-out, task status and more, tedious and error-prone time entries are eliminated, opening up time for additional work while freeing field professionals from administrative chores.
Smart Scheduling
Automated scheduling and dispatch together with a connected mobile device create a two-way connection between schedulers and technicians. Technicians can update their status so dispatchers see their availability and know the right person to schedule for each job. Technicians receive job details, addresses, and service information on their mobile device. Since many service organizations receive dozens of calls per day, saving as little as five seconds per call adds up to thousands of dollars per year.
Eliminate Duplicate Data Entry
An end-to-end field service software will ensure that once data is entered, it’s instantly synched across the company. The software connects your field service technicians to the back office, dispatch teams, and management to eliminate duplicate data entry and enable seamless data sharing. A connected mobile allows the technician to enter data once and eliminate thousands of man-hours of duplicate entry and re-keying errors.
Turn your Techs into Salespeople
Technicians that are approached by a customers for a quote on a new job or a new piece of equipment that needs servicethat are approached by a customer for a quote on a new job or a new piece of equipment can now communicate this to the sales team through their mobile device. Don’t throw away money that’s already in your pocket with lost paperwork, forgotten emails, and missed opportunities. With a powerful, cohesive mobile tool, your team can turn quotes around in hours instead of days.
Technology is propelling the field service industry in a new direction. How quickly and efficiently you implement these technologies and processes into your business practices will determine how productive your technicians are, how profitable you become and how satisfied your customers are. Contact FIELDBOSS or request a demo to see how mobile software can save your field service company time and money.