Session Recap: Wake Up, Sit Up and Turn Heads with CTI
Computer telephony integration (CTI) is the future of sales and service. The idea of a phone system that can communicate with your CRM is a powerful one. And our customers have used that concept to shape their business.
This Dreamforce we had the pleasure of hosting a panel of some of our top customers: Casper, Six Pack Shortcuts and Suit Supply. Here is a quick recap of their session:
Results matter – deals booked, sales closed, customers satisfied. But, it’s more than just interactions with your customers; more calls can still be bad calls. Here are some of the ways our customers use NewVoiceMedia to develop stronger, contextual relationships.
Taking the data dip
The difference between your run-of-the-mill hard phone system and NewVoiceMedia is that we provide more than just a phone. The future of customer/business communication is contextual information, and we offer our customers an opportunity to leverage data in every conversation they have.
We do this through a symbiotic relationship with the customer relationship management platform (CRM). Today, most companies store large amounts of information about their customer interactions, both instore and online, in their CRM database, like Salesforce. However, few companies use the database as anything more than a customer repository.
NewVoiceMedia leverages this data rich environment to empower your call system for dynamic workflows and automated, prescriptive customer care.
Nick Botter, manager of marketing technology at Suit Supply, says, “All our customer profiles are built on the Salesforce platform. When we were looking for a phone solution, I wanted to leverage all the data we had in Salesforce.”
He adds, “When I call a company, I hate to hear “if you want this press one, if you want that press 2, and then finally I’m talking to somebody and the first question they ask is what’s your order number, what’s your loyalty number, it’s ridiculous. You are not recognizing your customer. Your customer is just a number.”
Through NewVoiceMedia, Suit Supply is able to data dip – interrogate the CRM – and determine who each caller is. Similarly, Casper uses a call flow to attach to existing cases so that the case is screen prompted for agents before the call is answered. This tells the agent information like the name, location and last contact with the customer.
“We’ve used the call flow that NewVoiceMedia has laid out for us and we are really pleased with it,” says Stacey Dickinson, Casper manager of operational analytics and fulfillment. “If we get a call with a customer that has an existing case with us, that will pop-up in Salesforce before we even answer the call. So, as soon as you call in, I know your name, I know your information and I know how to best serve you.”
Scaling with success
Another benefit of the pure cloud solution is doing away with hardware. In fact, you don’t need phones if you don’t want them. You can use WebRTC to make calls through your browser, on any device.
Chase Larson, Six Pack Shortcuts sales operations manager explains, “We scaled at 185% this year. We wouldn’t be able to do that with hard phones, without the CTI system. Our website creates 50,000 leads per month. We have to get sales people to call as many of those leads as possible to convert that pipeline. Also, we’ve taken on other third-party clients, so we are selling for other companies as well. My team is placing 100,000 outbound calls a month. Cloud call quality is almost 100 percent of the time perfect, even internationally, and we have local presence so that we can call across regions, without issue.”
Dickinson says, “We did $1 million in sales in our first 28 days of business. It was important for us to have a system to scale, and we needed to implement quickly.”
In a similar story, Botter adds, “Our customer service team tripled in just a few months. A good part about the cloud system is that it’s easy to reshape and rebuild our call plans all the time to improve the system.”
Staying motivated
For Six Pack Shortcuts, our gamification system, Motivate, helps keep their sales reps on target.
“We see how many calls an agent is making, how long each call is,” says Larson. “Our sales managers can access those reports in real time and act on the data to stay dynamic. NVM provided a motivate dashboard that gave us a real time KPI to showcase throughout the day. Each object was able to move from static to dynamic so that we can remain efficient, competitive and energized. This drove our team toward more productivity. It keeps us focused.”
Multichannel approach
Let’s face it, people do business on more channels than just the phone these days. Text, email, chat – these are all mediums companies need to invest in. But the phone is still king. And if you are failing there, your other channels won’t save your business. The phone is the premium channel when you have something complex.
“Social channels are effective, but you need to fix phone first,” says Botter. “If you are doing all the channels we are doing, they don’t cannibalize each other. People hop across channels, because each channel has its own use.”
Dickinson adds, “We opened as many channels as possible. We didn’t worry about cannibalization; we just wanted each experience to be ideal. Email, text, phone – it’s about options. You get different inquiries in different channels. Text is more general. Whereas email is much more intensive – two or three paragraphs. Most customers communicate with our business in at least two or three ways.”
Larson echoes, “Omnichannel is great, but people are going to choose the channel they are comfortable on. We use all channels, but there is no substitute for the phone. You need to adopt every channel so you can adjust to their preference and deliver the best customer experience possible.”