Salesforce Helps You Manage Your Customer Interactions
You have no doubt encountered the term digital transformation. Most likely, you associate it with the Kenyan government, which has ‘gone digital’ over the last six years by progressively doing away with paper in favor of online portals such as eCitizen and KRA iTax. The benefits are evident. Queues at the KRA Times Tower building have all but vanished; more Kenyans are readily paying their taxes; and those who fail to do so are more easily tracked down by the tax authority. However, digital transformation is not exclusive to governments. Your business too can benefit from digital transformation — the application of various digital capabilities to improve products, processes and decision making. It is relevant to every facet of your business, from customer service to accounting to human resource recruitment and helps you create competitive advantage by doing things better, faster and with greater efficiency than your competitors.
One area that could use digital transformation in any company today is customer interactions. The internet, social media, mobile telephony have all increased the number of channels your customers can use to talk to you and about you. You are getting price inquiries on facebook, twitter or Instagram, complaints on email, text, whatsapp and via phone calls, questions on google maps or LinkedIn, negative reviews in the comment sections of online articles that happens to mention you, and on and on. If you do not have a handle on all these avenues, you have a serious problem. Not only are you missing out on opportunities to convert and retain customers, your long-cultivated reputation is steadily eroding.
And even when your customers are using a single channel to talk to you, data silos within your company may be preventing you from serving them effectively. Consider the frustration a customer feels when s/he calls your customer service line several times because of the same unresolved issue and is by default routed to the next available customer service representative. With each call, this already annoyed customer must go through an identification process, explain the issue all over again to a new representative, and then very likely receive the same set of unhelpful instructions. This intra-organizational blindness leaves your left hand not knowing what your right hand is doing, metaphorically speaking, The result is high customer churn, failing revenues and rising customer acquisition costs.
As you are well aware, customer retention is imperative to business sustainability. According to Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% increases revenues by 25% to 95%. Stopping customer churn is therefore, one of the many reasons to consider deploying Salesforce at your company. The world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Salesforce will allow you to undertake digital transformation with respect to all your customer-facing functions: sales, marketing and customer service. With Salesforce, you are able to bring together all your customer information in one place and make it available to all your employees, all the time, everywhere and on any device. Salesforce is a cloud-based platform; therefore, instead of purchasing or licensing CRM software and undertaking a long, error prone installation process on a local server in your office, you simply download Salesforce onto any device of choice (yes, mobile phones too).
On Salesforce, your customer service representatives would handle complaint calls quite differently and achieve better results. First, all customer service representatives would be able to identify any customer by name based on his/her phone number and immediately access a record of that customer’s previous calls as well as the actions taken by any previously involved representative. Second, the depth of analytics functionality offered by Salesforce would allow you to segment your customers by value to the business and put appropriate effort into retaining the most valuable customers. (A fact of business is that not all customers bring in as much revenue as it costs to retain them). Third, Salesforce would empower your customer service representatives to identify and capitalize on opportunities to make sales, by suggesting an upgrade service or product that better fits a customer’s needs, for example. Doing so is even easier when social media sites and other channels are integrated into Salesforce to provide deep insights into customer preferences, attitudes and behaviors. Nucleus Research estimates that a customer comes into contact with a service representative five times more than s/he is in contact with a salesperson. Therefore, the opportunity to upsell customers through your customer service team is significant.
But what makes Salesforce the best customer relationship management (CRM) system in the market?
It is 100% customizable to fit your particular business needs. It also allows integration with other systems such as email, accounting tools or the over 3000 pre-integrated apps on the AppExchange. Offered on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, Salesforce costs little in start-up fees and scales easily as your business grows. You also need not worry about upgrades. They happen automatically three times a year and are free of charge. Salesforce also has an in-built Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) known as Einstein which learns from your data and delivers predictions and recommendations relevant to your business processes, allowing you to, for example, identify leads that are likely to turn into real sales and spend most time on those.
These are but a few of Salesforce’s powerful functionalities. Reach out to Uwazi Consulting via email at sales@uwazi.co.ke to learn more about Salesforce and how has created value for our various clients.
