Five More Essential Ingredients of Web-Based CRM Software
Friday, October 30th, 2009Cynergy software improves communications between Help Desk customer service reps and customers or employees with the Cynergy Web Based CRM ticketing system.
Cynergy Web Based CRM ticketing software can also be easily customized with multiple user defined fields, colors, labels and multiple addresses or phone numbers. If you need to be able to view only “your” help desk tickets, or if you want to be able to view everyone’s outstanding issues, Cynergy gives you Special Permissions that allow this.
Cynergy’s help desk and CRM suite of solutions can be modified to allow strategic permissions and security among your internal employees and external customers. We also allow three methods for submitting tickets and our new Project Management module allows conversing and benchmarking throughout the launching and completion of a project.
6. TIME KEEPING is as important to your bottom line as productivity levels are. Being able to justify time spent on a project or client’s site is paramount during these economic times. Cynergy keeps track of time on tickets, projects, and events.
7. DATA is what runs today’s world. That’s why we use MS SQL. We ship with SQL Express (good for 250,000 tickets) and upgrading is straight forward. Backups are easy and stable.
8. INTEGRATION into other systems and software platforms is accomplished with relative ease. We have build a Web Service that allows platforms such as PeopleSoft to update Cynergy on the fly based on changes that take place in the primary system.
9. KNOWLEDGE LIBRARY systems are becoming commonplace among most large or growing organizations. Our Cynergy CRM Knowledge Center Software can contain unlimited information easily searched on. Or you can link tickets to knowledge for content management and training.
10. ASSET MANAGEMENT is essential to any business or organization that has over 5 employees or customers. Cynergy allows unlimited User Defined Fields for keeping track of Assets.
This concludes ten pieces that any great Web Based CRM system should have. Cynergy Help Desk Software has much more than we listed above. Try out a FREE DEMO Today or Call 405 516 2420 and talk to one of our experienced Help Desk Professionals.
Five Essential Ingredients of Web-Based CRM Software
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
“Cynergy had more features available than any other Support Software that
I could find. We were able to mold the Software around our business.“ J. Trimble, Trimble Industries
1. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Cynergy Web Based Software offers a 3 tier structure. Company/Site/Contact that allows you to see the hierarchical relationships that exist in every organization. All communications have a user footprint and history that allows you to see detailed information.
2. WEB/Email: Should take full advantage of the Web and email in one CRM application. Email ticketing, response, and communication is becoming the norm, not the exception. Your ticketing system should center around this activity.
3. VISIBILITY into all interactions, be it external customers, internal employees, even vendors information should be viewed by your team. Cynergy also has a project manager to facilitate new projects and events and allow the team a horizontal as well as vertical view.
4. RELATIONSHIPS with independent contractors are important to many of our clients. We offer special permissions that allow sub-contractors the ability to view as well as modify tickets for “their” specific clients without the requirement of a named license. (saves you money, improves communication)
5. REPORTING is critical in today’s business environment. Having the right information on a timely basis is essential towards the decision making process that you need in your organization. Our 300+ reports can be automatically run and emailed on desired dates.
Cynergy Web Based Software Help Desk Solution can be purchased three ways:
- As a self-hosted solution on your server (you buy it, you host it)
- As a Cynergy-hosted solution on one of our secure servers (you buy it, we host it)
- As a “pay-as-you-go” monthly subscription solution on a secure server (pay monthly)
Purchase the moderately priced modules separately, as you need them, or not at all. End users have unlimited licensing.
Are You Missing the Majority of Your Possible Sales?
Monday, October 26th, 2009I recently came across these statistics about how frequently sales professionals follow up with their prospects. When I read this, I was shocked:
• 48% of sales people never follow up with their prospects.
• 25% of sales people make a second contact with their prospect and then they stop.
• 12% of sales people make three contacts with their prospect and then they stop.
• Only 10% of sales people make more than three contacts with their prospects.
• 2% of sales are made on the first contact with a prospect.
• 3% of sales are made on the second contact with a prospect.
• 5% of sales are made on the third contact with a prospect.
• 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact with a prospect.
• 80% of sales are made between the fifth and twelfth contact with a prospect.
If you are a part of that 90%+ who are not adequately staying in touch with prospects you probably have a myriad of reasons why you are unable to do so. And those reasons are probably not because you don’t know that you should. You’re probably not following up with prospects because:
1. You don’t have the time.
2. You don’t have a system.
If you don’t have time, you definitely need a system.
If you don’t have a system, do you know what web based CRM is? Find out more.
Help Desk Ticketing System Eliminates Wasted Time
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
As recently as 2002 Eastman Technologies was using a white board and a daily meeting to give assignments to their engineers and track their schedules and completed jobs.
By the time the engineers fought the morning rush hour traffic of Los Angeles, arrived at the office, obtained their customary doughnuts and coffee, greeted one another, and then got down to business, it would be 8:30 or 9:00 am. Then they had to attend a meeting for discussion and assignments of who was going where and when. Another hour was gone before they even got back on the road, headed for the customers’ sites.
“Watching all those overhead dollars go out the window was driving me crazy,” recalls Carol Spowart, President.
Eastman Technologies transformed the way the onsite engineers operate. Eastman Technologies customers log directly into the help desk ticketing system, answer a few quick questions, and give any other pertinent information. This generates a trouble ticket and initiates the assignment.
The job is assigned to an engineer and shows up on his personalized DashBoard® (on his computer) or BlackBerry® email system within minutes of the customer’s asking for help. The next morning (or even later that day) he drives straight to the customer’s jobsite. As soon as he completes the work for the customer, he can print off a ticket and request the client to sign off or he can collect the service fee on the spot.
From there, he reports the job complete and proceeds to the next job assignment. Meanwhile, the dispatcher can keep track of where each engineer has been and is presently and when each job is completed. All scheduling is done in advance. Carol reports that “having Cynergy Help Desk has saved the cost of an extra engineer. The cost of that labor, vehicle, maintenance, and overhead represents at least $100,000 per year.”
Read more about Cynergy Help Desk
Customer Satisfaction Depends on 5 Pillars of Customer Service
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
5 pillars of customer service
Service delivery can determine customer loyalty and profitable growth. The status quo is not good enough and it is not sustainable. It is essential for all businesses to constantly look at the next evolution of their customer service. Five areas are especially important for moving to the next level of customer service in any company:
1. Integrated virtual call centers
2. Integrated service networks
3. Proactive aftersales service
4. Customer touch-point management
By looking at previous blog posts on each of these (click on each one to go to the blog post), comment on which one is your “next big thing” to work on and why.
Sales People Embrace Web-Based CRM
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009Sales reps are excitedly embracing web-based CRM, also known as software-as-a-service (SaaS), which can be accessed from a Blackberry or iPhone as well as from a laptop. The ASP software of web-based CRM which makes this possible contains downloadable applications or gadgets for seeing a variety of important information bites that salespeople need: daily calendar, weather and time, top contacts, top accounts, current deals, and performance against target.
Web-based CRM is not simply a gadget from the techies; nor is it a “pushed-down-from-management” tool. Rather, it is the application of choice of those in the trenches, those meeting face-to-face with the customer.
Because sales people spend most of their time away from the office, certain features of web-based CRM appeal directly to them:
1. Mobile connectivity. Sales people do not need all the features of a full-blown CRM system. Instead, they need to be able to connect using their cell phones (Blackberry or iPhone) to pieces of the system that apply to products and services they sell, their customers’ information, or various aspects of deals in progress with customers.
2. Information sharing. Often more than one person is involved in negotiations on a contract or proposal. Each person needs to be able to see summaries of previous communications with the client, the changes to the proposal under consideration, and “what if?” analyses of various scenarios.
3. Essential information access. A sales person needs to access his or her own information at the click of a button: sales meetings, customer meetings, driving directions, sales forecast, pipeline, notes from last meeting with customer. And these need to be accessed from the road rather than from a desktop, or even a laptop, computer.
4. Social media integration. A sales person who wants to learn more about a prospect is anxious to log into LinkedIn or Facebook to do that. Web-based CRM often builds that capability into the application.
If you are a sales person who uses web-based CRM, why do you use it? Does it answer your needs? What else do you wish it would do?
Successful CRM is Web-Based Customer Relationship Management Software
Friday, October 16th, 2009Customer relationship management reigns supreme today. Customers are now in charge of the buy-sell relationship. They have the attitude of “do it my way or I will find a company that does do it my way.” Customers are internet savvy and use the internet to research products and companies and compare features and benefits as well as pricing. Thus, there is little loyalty to a brand if they find one with more features or a better price.
Product life cycles have accelerated. There is increased pressure for innovation. And decreased time between design and production. Meanwhile, companies are hard-pressed to bring in more revenue from potential and existing customers.
That means that companies need ways in which to access and view customer information. And managers need to find new ways to give employees better access to customer and supplier information.
Web-based Customer Relationship Management software allows a company to take full possession of all their customer information including notes that sales reps have traditionally made in notebooks, on cards, or in personal PDAs. This provides continuity and makes the data visible and accessible not only to the incoming sales reps but the entire enterprise as it may be needed.
CRM is a competitive tool, a key method for gaining a competitive edge in the game of winning and keeping customers. The success of the web-based CRM software is dependent on everyone in the company embracing it and understanding that it will make their lives better and simpler.
When the CRM software is web-based, it
- creates the same structure enterprise-wide
- ensures accountability
- creates and maintains history
- forces collaboration adn accountability
- provides visibility.
ASP Help Desk Software: 4 Must-Have Features to Compare
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009For any company which needs a help desk, the decision of what help desk software to use is major decision. Among the myriad of choices are a plethora of features. Each company claims various benefits and values for each of those features. However, there are at least four features you must compare on each software package: incident management, team organization, e-mail automation, and service level management. This assumes that each package comes with certain other features which are pretty common and standard, but vary in their depth and ability. These help desk software features are integration with existing user accounts, a variety of real-time reporting options, an SQL or similar knowledge base, and full language management and integration with your existing softwares and will be covered in more detail in a future blog entry.
1. Incident Management
Incident management must be seamless and it must contain methods for tracking every incident and understanding what happened when and which was cause and what the effect was. In order for that to happen, the software must register the incidents and must put date and time stamps on each comment, e-mail message, chat dialogue, or any other interaction. It must be simple for the client to log an incident and to follow the progress of that incident’s resolution. Both browsing and searching should be available. The incident should be “assign-able” to a group or person and prioritized in a method that is easily visible. Based on all of this, the software should automatically create incident work orders with trackable time spent by each person on the incident and history of what each person did.
2. Team Organization
Help Desk software should aid in the organization of teams. It should give you the ability to group support personnel in whatever way your company chooses. It should also allow you to assign permissions and accesses to each person according to his needs.
3. E-mail Automation
This seems to be an area that one would expect to see in all help desk software, but may not be as fully operational as you might want. It is fairly common for help desk software to convert incoming emails to incidents, but frequently there is only one email automation mode. A software that allows you to set the level of automation is the ideal. Registration of new users and blocking spam are also critical timesavers.
4. Service Level Management
Most help desk software has notification rules, but the most useful help desk software has customizable notification rules and incident escalations. The more customization that you can do, the more it will become part of the way your company works.
By comparing the functionality of these four features among the various help desk software packages, you will be able to begin to see the differences in how the various packages would work for you. It is important that the ASP Help Desk Software that you implement work in tandem with your processes and ideology and aid you in servicing your clients.
Single Help Desk Agent or Multiple Help Desk Agents?
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009I have a question for help desk supervisors: Is it better for a single person to handle an issue from beginning to full resolution or is it better to hand the client around to service agents that are best qualified to deal with the issue?
Here’s a little background as to why I am asking. I was recently in a meeting where one of the attendees was raving about how wonderful a particular company was. When asked why he thought the company was so great, his reply was, “No matter what I call to ask or I need help with, the person who picks up my phone call (in two rings or less – Always) is able to solve my issue and stays with me until it is solved.” This person works a one-man answer station for a small company, so he added, “That takes a tremendous amount of cross-training.”
Another person in the meeting piped up with, “I worked for a company that sold that kind of help desk agent as a ‘premium service’ and charge almost double what we charged for the normal help desk agent. For our company, each help desk agent had an area of expertise and when someone called with an issue, they were transferred to the agent that specialized in that situation — unless the company upgraded to the premium service which entailed much more training for each agent.”
So, what do you think? What does your company do? What would you like to do in an ideal setting?