Many of the business owners or managers considering a full-scale CRM solution as part of their IT setup understand that building fuller customer profiles and better interfaces helps all kinds of employees to better serve customers and clients. However, some of the very specific uses of CRM and other virtual call center software are often overlooked as leadership teams think about how an upgrade will benefit their operations.
Apart from facilitating better customer intelligence, helping a team reach out to existing customers, and building loyalty, CRM tools and similar resources can actually be a big help to new staffers, or to those who are training them. When it comes to showing new people how to get things done, having these modern tech tools on hand can help make a learning curve easier and allow newcomers to tackle their jobs with less initial time and effort.
A large part of the common staff orientation (aside from explaining policy and procedure) is simply helping new arrivals get to know the environment that they will be working in. This includes introductions to other employees who will become work colleagues, but it also includes a lot of introductions to important customers and clients. Think about how any kind of international or global business is represented in television or on the silver screen. Critical scenarios are often set up around knowing who’s buying, knowing about the cultural norms of the countries they come from, and knowing about exactly what they’re interested in, and then providing that exact service.
This is where CRM comes in. With better contact tools and fuller, more informative profiles of existing customers, new employees get introduced rather ‘automatically’ not to just names and faces, which is important, but to items like purchase histories and other clues to what clients will want in the future. This allows these relatively inexperienced people to handle customer relationships confidently from the very first point of contact, adding some of this “inside knowledge” into conversations. In many cases, having the right information on display can help a newbie sound like a seasoned pro, especially if they have prior industry experience.
To be sure, the best uses of customer relationship management and virtual call center software essentially boil down to training and professionalism. As Professor of Strategy and Information Management Don Marchand points out in a useful 2006 IMD International journal article, this kind of vendor software service is more than the sum of its parts. Without the right information handlers and managers, even the best tools fall far short of their goals.
This is why the best CRM vendors often provide handy tips and tricks to those who will be using their products and services. Just as it’s important to fit new technology into a ‘legacy system,’ it’s also critical to join these additional tools with the ‘operational legacy’ of the business, or in plainer terms, how people do things day-to-day. Much of the burden is on the managers and top-level staff to choose the software upgrades and how they will be used, but getting vendors involved can also help a lot, and taking time to brainstorm all of the right ways to benefit from business intelligence and customer intelligence tools will go a long way toward outfitting an enterprise for success in the future.
Justin Stoltzfus is a freelance writer covering technology and business solutions at Techopedia, Business Finance Store and Ringio, focusing on emerging trends in IT services.
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