The promised land
I bet you’ve all read plenty of articles (Like this one) about measuring each and everything in your marketing plans. Get your top of funnel metrics in place, so you can identify which channels work, so you can do some A/B testing and allocate resources to the most effective channels. Follow that up with articles (Like this one) which tell you to make your sales people aware of the the message that brought them the lead, to run sales like a process, to nurture the lead with emails, SMSs, follow up calls till you’ve lead them to closed lost or the more preferable a closed won status. And have you read articles (Like this one) that tell you that the cost of retaining a customer is much higher than the cost of acquiring a customer. Paying attention to customer success metrics, being responsive…
The reality
ВОТ ТУТ ТЕКСТ СО ССЫЛКОЙ
I had read them too, my team had read them. We were in the business and we had a phone solution that handled voice really well, but then we needed to get a Sales or Lead Management system that connected with the website to give us tracking on our potential customers till the form fill so we knew what they were looking for. Then we needed to get a separate chat system as the channel had gained a lot of popularity in removing the friction from customers reaching out to us. Then we got another ticketing system for customer service. Not to forget the our own phone system for actually following up on the leads to qualify them, and then receiving inbound calls to turn them into leads, and the agents calling customers for the sales process. Support folks needed to be able to make and receive calls as well.
The stringing together and costs and time
We got every system we needed. Then we spent the time to trying to link them up, and sync the contacts and push conversations we’ve had from one system to another. Needless to say it took up a lot of time identifying all the systems we needed. Figuring out how to link them together and even more time trying to get the reports that would have given us any meaningful insights into the 3 customer touchpoints with the company. What was even more frustrating was that the support team never had a clear picture how the customer came to be, and they were’nt able to send over information back to the sales team when the customer needed an upgrade without logging into another system. The sales team was passing pieces of paper to the support team letting them know what the customers main points were for on1600boarding.
CRM alternative
Why get specialized tools for each small task. You might ask, can’t a CRM do all the things. Short answer – yes, but no. CRM’s out of the box are more like an Operating System. You get Windows 10, but you can’t get productive on it till you customize it, and then install the programs which are known as plugins. The plugins are needed for the communications channels. Unlike the a normal OS though with programs, a CRM’s plugins must all work well together. After all they are all working on the same common contacts and workflows that you’re building. I have seen companies recruit CRM Managers because it is such a big task. Plugins are constantly breaking, they need upgrading, or conflicting with one another. Worse still, the CRM which could be cloud hosted now upgrades to a new version. Guess what you now have to make sure all the plugins are still working. We know all this because we do make plugins for enabling channels in CRM’s and we know how those changes and upgrades affect companies.
We thought about it
We were extremely frustrated with the actual outcome of all our efforts. We looked at the problem and all the solutions and noticed that all of the solutions have to go build out so many things that are basically the same. They need to build some kind of contact database system. They need a way to import contacts (Super painful), create agents, give permissions, build API’s, create reports and bunch of other things that are exactly the same. On top of that they build the key functions, email, tracking, chat, sales workflow, support workflow, social media interactions and the list goes on. Most of them offer some overlapping functionality. But none of them really offer it all, they never took the time to look at it holistically.
Conversation first but in context
Here we had a relative advantage – we were always conversation first. We sat down and looked at all these other tools and saw that they were process first or data first or something else. We realized that if you automatically enable and capture the conversation then all the problems can be solved, provided you record the right metrics from each conversation. The other thing about conversations is the context. You can have a conversation that starts on the phone, continues on to the SMS, then onto email and then back to the phone. We had to be able to capture that context. Which we did. We spent a whole year and thousands of man hours in perfecting that. The context makes it easy for our agents to continue fluid and meaningful conversations, by looking at past conversations in one place. The conversations allowed us to look at our customer holistically.
We won’t sell it till we love it
We had an early version of the system ready mid to late 2018. We started using it internally immediately. We said let’s focus on removing each one of the external systems one by one till we’re running on our own platform exclusively. It took us some time but we did. As we did we started seeing the results. The whole company was smiling. It gave us purpose because we could see what was happening and it gave us goose bumps. We’ve were very clear that we won’t sell it to our customers till we weren’t happy with it. We’ve since then slowly started upgrading our existing customers and have received increasing positive feedback. We’re ready to let you try it, because we know you’ll love it.
What we have now – Just a taste
I’m just going to write a few lines here for improvements in each of the areas. There are in depth blogs coming for each of the areas that will spell out the wins. None of these would have been possible without being multi-channel and truly unified. One system, one login for all communications.
Marketing
We now know and can tell where a lead came from, the channel, the source and whether or not it was qualified and whether or not it converted into a customer. In 1 report.
We can tell if our sales reps called the prospect within 5 minutes of the lead coming in from any channel.
Sales
The agents know how the customer got to us. Which pages they visited on the website, when they filled out the form. How many times they’ve visited the site again while the sales process is ongoing. They can send pre-packaged emails, make calls, send texts and all these channels allow them to be gentle but persistent without being too intrusive. They increase the number of touch points and make the customer feel more comfortable.
Hands off and Onboarding
Sales people no longer log into or walk a piece of paper over to the customer success team. They can create an onboarding request from within the system. The success team has full visibility into all the conversations that the customer has had from cradle till date. This allows them be much more fluent and the customers can feel the difference.
Support or Customer Success
There is never a case where the agent does not know what has been happening with a customer. They have access to all calls, emails, previous tickets, sales information and more. Allowing them to be efficient and in many cases even allowing them to suggest to the sales team that the customer may benefit from additional features available.
We love it, but we’re not done yet
We absolutely love how things are starting to work. It is giving us the insights that we’ve only ever dreamt of. We’re reaching the promised land. Now that we’re using it every day we want even more. We’ve become greedy. The framework that we’ve put in place is allowing us to add more channels, automate more, get more insights than ever before. The agents are never wondering how this contact got here. They love the system. We think you will love it too….The best is yet to come, and we’d like to you to be on that journey with us.
