During these challenging times companies focus more attention on retaining and increasing the sales activities of current customers. In addition, they rank new solutions that improve profit, market and competitive positions with a high priority. This means customer relationship management systems based on unified communications architectures can jump to the top of the list.
UC-based CRM solutions allow enterprises to create “virtualized contact centers” and offer their customers a choice of multimedia interactions and self-service options. With these solutions enterprises are able to maximize the accessibility of their offerings and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their customer sales/service representatives, while increasing their competitiveness and differentiation in the market place.
As a consultative solution provider, adding these solutions to your tool bag will open new doors where you can immediately add value to your clients. This value will address four key areas connected to your customers’ contact centers and CRM strategies:
- Improving agent productivity and enterprise workflow
- Winning the competitive game with personalization
- Accelerating the sales cycle and increasing up selling
- Quicker return on investments and asset utilization
Improving agent productivity and enterprise workflow. Traditionally a call center has been limited to the building, floor and four walls supported by the company’s TDM voice-based PBX/ACD system. With these technology limitations the call center had become a detached island in the enterprise.
In contrast, software-based UC CRM solutions, built on IP/SIP, are bringing the contact center back to the company’s mainland and creating presence-enabled virtualized contact centers without technology walls, network limitations or media boundaries. With UC-enabled presence and collaboration capabilities, contact center agents can work from different buildings, cities, even countries while acting as one entity. A UC-featured contact center solution in conjunction with an enterprise IT customer-workflow application can deliver functionality to home agents, remotely located agents, part-time agents and outsourced agents.
These new solutions not only bring contact centers back into the company, with significantly more flexibility, but also bring the total enterprise “online” to help drive CRM strategies. With presence — the desktop ability to see who is available to help — agents can find experts or other CSR agents in any department or city, contact center agents and experts with the skills required now to support the “virtual” contact center and the call for help from anywhere in the enterprise. When this is done in real-time, at the time the customer is engaging the center, a higher percentage of “first contact resolution” can be reached. First contact resolution, a critical part of any company’s CRM strategy, can be measured and has been proven to reduce operating costs, achieve new levels of efficiency and clearly improve customer satisfaction.
