A customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is an integral aspect of your organization’s long-term growth. In addition to improving customer service, it helps you streamline processes, increase sales, and achieve higher profitability. Since interactions with clients are essential to a successful CRM, your call center plays a role in meeting this objective. It enables the proper management of various parts of the customer lifecycle, including sales, e-commerce, marketing, and customer service.
How CRM Helps You Manage Your Call Centre
In addition to improving communication, your call center simplifies operations and controls the flow of vital data. You might have the best call center agents in the world, but they’ll experience severe limitations without a complementary digital infrastructure.
A quality CRM improves call center management in various ways. For one, it creates and maintains detailed customer contact profiles. Other than their contact information, it tracks past brand interactions, buyer preferences, and previous support interactions.
Accurate CRM records save your organization a lot of time. That’s because your agents don’t have to ask for these details every time the customer calls. A high level of preparedness motivates your support team to solve the customer’s immediate problem. Your contacts also appreciate the professionalism.
Ticketing is another integral aspect of a comprehensive CRM because it offers a scalable solution to complement phone, email, and chat support. Some customers prefer this convenient option because they can open a ticket at any time and monitor the progress.
They can also attach evidence in the form of screenshots and other media files to articulate the exact problem they’re facing. An ideal CRM solution can categorize tickets depending on the brand, type of inquiry, department, and other applicable classifications. Due to its scalable nature, ticketing can handle more customers than phone calls and live chats which require one-on-one interactions.
Finally, your CRM should be able to set up phone trees. This feature improves efficiency if your support team spreads over various locations. It allows your call center agent to forward a call to someone who’s better suited to solve a particular problem.
Call Centre Features That Enhance Your CRM
These must-have features and functionalities help you streamline your CRM workflow:
1. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Apart from automatically greeting callers, IVR also uses voice prompts to direct them to the relevant extension. It also answers frequently asked questions such as business hours and the caller’s account activity. Although all call center systems have aspects of this feature, IVR offers advanced flexibility and functionality.
2. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
This feature analyzes predetermined factors to direct inbound calls to call center agents. The factors include time zone, support staff’s skill set, and agent availability. For example, it’s easier to connect a customer to an agent they’ve interacted with before. Overall, ACD makes your CRM workflow more efficient by reducing call transfers and reroutes.
3. Third-party Software Integration
Third-party integrations improve the relationship between your call center and CRM. You can feed the information you collect from callers to CRMs such as Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, Hubspot, Keap, and SugarCRM. For example, it’s easier to track callers who are also potential leads in a sales funnel.
Some systems offer open APIs to build on this integration. Another specific example is contactSPACE’s 4flex and 4connect. These two plugins enhance agent interfaces, outbound dialing, and outbound data management for Twilio Flex and Amazon Connect, respectively.
4. Analytics and Reporting
After gathering data through your call center system, you can analyze and create visual reports to improve your CRM. These metrics include average call time, survey results, total call volume, and wait times. The accompanying graphs and charts help you identify opportunities for improvement. Some generate real-time reports to help you make better scheduling and staffing decisions.
5. Omnichannel Support
Although phone calls remain the preferred communication option for customer service, email, online chats, and web self-service are also popular. Your CRM strategy works best if you incorporate the channels customers are most comfortable using. Although this feature is standard for most call center systems, the flexibility varies depending on the type of plan you choose.
6. Call Presence
Also known as agent status, this feature allows managers to monitor call center agents more efficiently. It streamlines customer service by routing calls to available agents, which significantly reduces wait time. Although IVR and ACD systems also help with routing, they don’t always direct the caller to the most suitable agent. With call presence, you can transfer calls to a representative with specialist skills to solve unique problems.
Developing a CRM Strategy for Your Call Centre
Your call center is essential to improving your competitiveness. Customer experience training ensures your call center agents strengthen relationships with potential and current clients. Every interaction with callers presents various opportunities, including upselling, converting leads into sales, and improving ongoing relationships. These opportunities are essential to increasing your ROI.
The first tip in creating a CRM strategy is to have customer service scorecards that provide insights about agent performance. KPIs to track include compliance, outcomes, soft skills, product competencies, channels, and types of customer care inquiries. This data provides all the resources you need to monitor and train multichannel agents.
The next step is identifying your agents’ strengths and weaknesses. Apart from helping them improve their skills, it also enables placement where they’re most helpful to callers. Your agents are more likely to be more productive if you involve them in the quality monitoring process.
A learning management system (LMS) improves the effectiveness of your customer experience training by automating the process. It also offers a centralized tracking solution to help you analyze whether you’re achieving your objectives.
Your CRM development strategy also gains from some friendly internal rivalry between call center teams. Benchmarking them against each other using scorecards is one way of incentivizing them to improve productivity.
Finally, your CRM strategy won’t be complete without a reliable quality assurance tool. The ideal solution should provide comprehensive insights about sales, productivity, and customer satisfaction. ContactSPACE’s Diamond plan includes this feature, among many others. You can also opt for a custom plan that addresses your specific needs.
How Your Call Centre Benefits Your CRM
Your call center provides a detailed understanding of every customer that you serve. The benefits include:
Easy access to data: A CRM solution collects relevant customer data, ranging from contact details to service history. Your call center enhances this process through regular communication with clients.
Higher sales: CRM enables your call agents to have all the details they need for various tasks. They include answering presale queries, processing orders, and recommending products. Customers are more likely to purchase if they feel the agent understands their needs.
Cost-effectiveness: Your call center reduces CRM-related costs through optimization, collaboration, and overall efficiency. Cost-cutting measures include gradually shifting to less expensive channels, hiring qualified personnel, automating workflows, integrating AI chatbots, and filling skill gaps.
Constructive report management: CRM software helps you make sense of all the data your call center collects. It’s easier to analyze call volume and income per call, among other crucial metrics.
Final Thoughts
Your customers will willingly spend more for a high-quality experience, whose fulfillment starts with your call center agents. You’re more likely to reap the benefits of long-term growth if you incorporate your CRM strategy into your call center. A comprehensive solution such as ContactSPACE helps you design, manage, and optimize your blueprint. It’s also customizable to any industry, including telemarketing, finance, education, debt collection, lead generation, and charity organizations.
