Happy New Year! Happy New CRM System!
What will give you a happy new year? One answer: MORE SALES.
What will give you more sales? A new CRM software system. Let’s look at three ways CRM can increase your sales in 2010.
Help your company help you. Create success. Create positive energy. Try something new for the new year!
5 Ways to Make 2010 Better Than 2009
Do you have a business plan for 2010? Is it different from the business plan you had a year ago? Is it specific? Or are you at a loss to know how to make 2010 better (or even different) than 2009?
If you feel beaten down by the economy, you need to take control of your company’s destiny. Create positive energy. Be like the losing football team that puts points on the board just before going to the locker room for halftime. Purposely do things that will positively affect the morale of the company and start 2010 on a high note.
Acknowledge the positive things you have been doing. Find new ways to use old strategies and tools to generate leads, to capture orders, to follow up customers, and to increase customer satisfaction. If you do not have the tools to do that, spend the time and money to put those tools in your arsenal for 2010.
For 2010 you need a CRM system that:
Explore the possibilities. Try free trials to see what fits your business and your working styles. Be ready to power up immediately when the new year begins!
3 Profit Pillars For 2010
The kind of business that will see positive growth in 2010 will have three critical elements which I will call the Three Profit Pillars:
1. Be person-based
People are going to increasingly buy from those they know, like, and trust. That’s not new. But you have to make sure you’re standing out by connecting with the problems they’re facing and delivering the solutions to those problems in an easy-to-digest way.
Quit thinking of your potential prospects as dollar bills and quit thinking of the bottom line. You need to be working with real people whose lives and businesses will be positively affected by what you can do for them. Think about how your product or service will help them in 2010.
2. Be solution-focused
Nobody will look for a different company with which to do business or a new product or service to try if what they have is working. They only look for other options if they have a problem. Learn what problems your service or product can solve.
Then market your service or product based on how it is a solution. In selling this is referred to using benefits and values to sell its features. Ask yourself why anyone would want it and how they would use it. The answers to these questions should be the focus of your marketing.
3. Help your present customers become better customers
Instead of focusing only on finding new customers for the same product or service you offer, your focus in 2010 needs to be on helping your existing customers in additional ways. How else can they use your product? What other services can you offer them? How can they become more satisfied? What would excite them so much they would highly recommend your company to everyone they meet?
Regardless of how you do it, you’ll find the Pareto Principle in effect: 80% or more of your revenue will come from 20% or less of your customers. And they’ll be excited about being in that elite group!
Put these 3 elements into your business in 2010, and you will love the way your balance sheet looks at the end of next December!
Help Desk Ticketing System – How it Improved the Relationships with My Clients
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 service agent and shows up on his personalized DashBoard® (on his computer) or BlackBerry® email system within minutes of the customer’s asking for help. 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 as seen on his computer screen or Blackberry. Meanwhile, the dispatcher can keep track of where each engineer has been and is presently and when each job is completed.
A system that is modular can easily be used alone or in tandem with other modules. Service agents can easily check the status of a current customer in Cynergy Ticket before they go to the customer site for upgrade calls. Not only have Cynergy Help Desk and Cynergy Sales Manager saved companies money, they have changed the way those companies do business, improved their customer relations, streamlined their sales processes, and improved communications throughout the companies. Take a tour today!
Customer Support Software : 5 Ways to Improve Customer Support
What have you learned from 2009? We at Cynergy Software have learned 5 Ways to Improve Customer Support and we’d like to share them with you:
The lessons of 2009
1. Businesses that succeeded in 2009 were based on trust, longevity, and personal branding. Abuse that trust and you were doomed!
2. Businesses that succeeded in 2009 provided real solutions to real problems. Remain connected with your customers in meaningful ways. Use CRM software.
3. Cheating, patching something together, or using workarounds are not viable strategies. Remember some of the tarnished names of the year: Bernie, Tiger, Sanford. Learn from them.
4. Simplicity rules. Focus on a narrow but significant problem and provide a simple, easy to implement solution to win in today’s environment.
5. Repeat customers are your gold mine. Put your time and money into relationships and customer service.
Companies that weathered the storms of 2009 did so because they over-delivered on what they sold and gave high quality service quickly. Repeat customers are eager to buy from them again.
Help Desk Software: 3 Humorous Things to Think About
If you are a Help Desk Agent, you have spent many hours waiting on the next phone call or e-mail and many more hours chasing down answers to customers’ concerns. What do you do during those idle hours? Have you got any really good or really funny thoughts or activities in which you engage?
Let’s take a look at three things help desk agents think about during their idle hours:
1. What does the customer look like? It is true the “customer” is probably a company in many cases, but the person who calls or e-mails is a real live person. What does that person look like? What is his role in the company? One great way to answer those questions is to start imagining Dilbert comic strip characters like dorky Dilbert, air-head Alice, awful Asok, elevated Ellen, or the diligent Dog. Check them out.
2. How am I supposed to get everything done that is expected of me? This one is a little like the recent For Better or For Worse comic strip. The kids and mom are Christmas shopping and see a Santa at the mall, one ringing a bell for the Salvation Army on the street corner, etc. One child looks at Mom and asks, “Mom, how come there are so many Santas?” Mom says, “maybe they’re all Santa Claus?” and the boy wonders, “Is that possible?” to which the Mom replies, “The job of being a Santa is pretty special . . . it’s just like the job of being a Mom. Everyone expects you to do everything and be everywhere at the same time!”
3. How could they break our product like that?! What did they do to it? Perhaps the thoughts turn to The Nutcracker and the broken nutcracker! Must have a been a jealousy thing. From there the imaginations run wild! Check out the story.
Give us some ideas about humorous things you or your help desk agents think about.
Fast, Effective Help Desk Responses Build Loyalty and Revenue
Responding quickly and effectively to customers’ concerns builds loyalty to your brand. It is well documented that customers who experience problems with a company’s products or services to which the company responds promptly and effectively are even more satisfied with and loyal to the company than are customers who never experience a problem.
- Fast, effective responses show that your organization views its customers’ concerns as high priorities.
- Fast, effective responses eliminate (or greatly reduce) the time your customers spend worrying about or wondering whether their concerns will be addressed.
- Fast, effective responses eliminate or reduce the need for your customers to investigate alternative solutions or workarounds to address their concerns.
One of the most productive and highest-payoff applications of corporate resources is responding to feedback from profitable customers and addressing their concerns quickly. The moment a customer expresses dissatisfaction is the very moment at which an organization, through its response, can most influence customer retention, recurring revenues, and customer lifetime value. A satisfied customer will become loyal and will tell others; a dissatisfied customer will broadcast far and wide his dissatisfaction, driving business away.
Your help desk or customer management software is your first line of defense when a customer expresses a concern or his dissatisfaction. That software must immediately open a ticket (sometimes called a case) and notify the correct team or person to deal with the issue. It must also make it easy for that person or team to include other team members from across the organization without re-explaining the issue or what has previously been done. Therefore, real-time alerts and real-time collaboration are key elements to fast, effective responses.
Having a KnowedgeBased Software can certainly take a load off your customer support agents and make their job easier. It will also give answers to your customers which can certainly increase their confidence in your willingness to deliver world class support customer service.
Your software must have escalation rules set up and must generate a deadline for resolution in order to keep the process moving quickly and smoothly to completion in a timely manner. It must provide quick and easy access to a well-structured knowledge base. By tracking who has done what (and when), your software will eliminate duplication of effort and streamline responses to the customer.
What Does Your Help Desk Need?
It is obvious that a Help Desk needs to help customers. But what are some of the ways in which a Help Desk should be helping customers? And are there ways in which a Help Desk can actually help your company?
Let’s look at five ways a Help Desk should help customers:
1. A Help Desk should speed and coordinate responses to customer concerns.
2. A Help Desk should build the satisfaction and loyalty of all customers.
3. A Help Desk should be able to save the customers who are at risk of discontinuing to use your products or services.
4. A Help Desk should disseminate information across departments and collect responses from various departments to speed effective answers to customers and inform the correct departments of potential problems.
5. A Help Desk should use software that can aid in the above functions without adding a great deal of cost to the company.
Since the Help Desk will be saving customers and answering their concerns, that Help Desk will be adding the future value of those customers’ loyalty and continued use of the company’s products or services. This increases the overall customer lifetime value.
The Help Desk will also be gathering information for future use on customer likes and dislikes and on what does or does not work well about the products or services. This translates to significantly increased profitability through new or improved products or services or different marketing of those products or services.
Through that process and the record-keeping that accompanies it, the company can make improvements to its products and services and cash in on the value of long-term satisfied customers. The Help Desk, therefore, adds long-term profitability to the company.
Knowledge Management for Customer Service
Is your Knowledge Management system working for your customers? Or do your customers spend a great deal of time searching through keywords and documents trying to find answers to their question? Do they become so frustrated they use more expensive channels or go to the competition’s web site?
In your effort to deliver self-service, you might have forced the customer to search so many documents for the answers that he sees your customer service as being content-centered rather than customer-centered.
Your customer is focused on his question, not on finding the most complete and detailed answer. He will search on keywords in his question, not in the answer! Your customer cannot find his tree in your forest.
In your Knowledge Base there may be over 10,000 pages. Some industries have more than 60,000 customer facing pages. Imagine trying to find the answer to a question in that forest! Can you imagine asking the Knowledge Base a question and getting 50 or more results, none of which appropriately answers the question? This is counterproductive, frustrating, and non-productive. It makes your company look downright inefficient.
Don’t let your document database bury your customers. Likewise, don’t let the plethora of documents bury your call center agents and make them ineffective.
Each piece of information needs to be optimized for the channel through which it is delivered. Remember that a customer may not want as much detail as the call center agent may need. Give them access to different answers. You may even need a third set of answers which are shorter for use on mobile and social media. No customer wants to read five pages to answer his question, especially if he is reading it on his iPhone.
Customer Relationship Management Solutions
Customer Relationship Management — or CRM — helps companies achieve business objectives that facilitate rapid responses to customer needs and lead to healthy and profitable customer relationships.
It is imperative for every organization to gather, retain, and use valuable information about their customers to enhance their business strategies, offer their customers faster responses, and provide better products and services. Today’s organization produces and collets information at a rate that far outpaces its ability to manage or share that information.
More information should mean more knowledge which should mean a greater competitive advantage. However, most companies do not have the power or resources to make sense of and apply that knowledge.
CRM solutions manage knowledge and information. They also enable companies to execute activities within and across value chains while supporting all facets of decision-making underlying those activities.
Most workplaces are now “connected workplaces.” That means the workers have computers (usually laptops to have at home and at work) and various other always-on technologies such as PDAs, smart phones (such as iPhones or Blackberries), and MP3 players.
Business has become globalized. Your business can access any business worldwide and any business in the world can find and access your business – often in real-time.
Corporate transparency and accountability is being demanded today as never before. These factors, along with the need to constantly respond more quickly and effectively to competition, are driving businesses to seek new applications that will affect their net profits in a short amount of time.
Performance is about more than just information quantity; it is about information usability. Increased information does not increase performance if there is not a corresponding expansion of the user’s ability to sort, apply, differentiate, and manage the information.
CRM solutions enable workers and companies to work together with efficiency and agility. They encourage information sharing and communication at all levels. And they streamline workflows to save time and improve performance.
CRM solutions sort information to make it easy to access information that is relevant and avoid that which is not. They mask process complexity by providing an intuitive and relevant user interface and simplifying multi-part tasks.
Phone: 405.516.2420
Fax: 866.340.5601
5770 NW Expressway, Suite 206
Oklahoma City, OK 73132
support@cynergysoftware.com
Cynergy Trouble Ticketing Software is very customizable for your business processes. Integrate Cynergy with just about every other business tool you can think of. Help Desk Support Software, Help Desk Ticketing Software, Customer Support Software, HRIS Ticketing Solution and much more.
