Reduce costs. Sell more. Make your customers happier.

Reduce costs. Sell more. Make your customers happier.

News, Project Service

Reduce costs. Sell more. Make your customers happier.

Consistently great customer service is getting harder to achieve. Social media has enlarged a customer’s voice – good when companies are being praised, but damaging when they are being criticised. Since 2009, there has been a 12% decline in first call resolution. More complex questions means higher costs.

But the pressure isn’t just on contact centres. Cost cutting has meant field service agents need to see more customers per day. Project teams need to shorten the project length – with less and less personnel.

What’s needed is an intelligent, comprehensive solution. One that can increase efficiencies in the whole service division. It needs to be flexible enough to allow customers to find answers themselves, receive assistance remotely, or arrange for service personnel to come on site. And it needs to manage the process from first engagement right through to completion.

Welcome to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service.

It’s a comprehensive way of managing every service interaction. With its incorporation of machine learning, intelligent analytics, and the Internet of Things, it will enable you to stay ahead of the competition: saving money and increasing your up-sells and cross-sells. All the while, you can ensure your staff give a consistently great experience to every customer.

Have a look at what Dynamics 365 for Customer Service could do for your company:

1. Encourage Self-Service
84% of customers use web or mobile self-service to find answers – before making contact with a customer service centre. This trend is great for the customer and great for you.

 

Easily embed branded self-service portals into your website. Provide answers to frequently asked questions and allow customers to log their own service cases. If they go on to make contact with your service centre, your contact centre personnel will see all the information your customer has already logged in your portal.

Not only does this enable customers to engage with you in the way they prefer, it also reduces your costs. With more people finding their own answers and logging their own service cases, you’ll need less customer service personnel.

2. Simplify Assisted Service
Even with increasing use of self-service portals, some people will still need to speak to a contact center. Why not make this as straight forward as possible? Dynamics 365 for Customer Service does just that:

 

Track all customer interactions in one place. From any channel, on any device.  Use this information to capture service cases and then check the service entitlements a customer has, before proceeding.
Monitor the progress of each service case. See the stage of each case alongside every source of information they need across diverse environments. With each service personnel being able to access the entire customer record, you can ensure your staff provide a personalized and effective standard of service.
Ensure access to consistent, up-to-date information. Empower customers and employees to access a single source of truth. Ensure your knowledge is relevant by simply capturing and publishing across your content channels. Measuring the impact of this on service costs through rich analytics.
Learn from each customer interaction to continually improve: Identify trends, anticipate opportunities and gain insight through dashboards, deep analytics and powerful data visualization. Dynamics CRM Service comes with fully customizable, interactive dashboards. This allows it to provide you with real-time views of key service metrics. You’ll be able to Identify trends and forecast outcomes, improving agent performance and identifying best practices.

 

3. Achieve more with Onsite Service
Whether you need to ensure your field agents increase the number of customers they see in a day or you need to ensure your larger projects deliver on time, to cost, and at a profit, then Microsoft Dynamics 365 is what you need. Do more, at less cost.

Field Service: Dynamics 365 for Field Service is Dynamics 365’s complete field service management business app. It’s incredible. Once you have it, you’ll wonder why you ever settled for anything else. Read all about it here.

Project Service: Working alongside project management software, Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation can manage your project costings, ensuring that your projects complete on time and on budget, and at a profit.

So, whatever your service needs, let us see how we can help you. Contact our team now…
 

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What does a CRM implementation look like?

What does a CRM implementation look like?

CRM, News

What does a CRM implementation look like?

A refreshing new approach.

The real value of CRM is having a solution that is tailored to your specific business strategy. When you buy a solution from us, the first thing we’ll do is listen to your specific objectives. We’ll then plan an implementation that meets those.

Unlike traditional system deployments, we’ll get your team up and running on CRM very quickly. We know that time is money. The longer a deployment takes, the longer for you to experience its benefits and get a return on your investment.

How quickly can we implement a solution? It depends on the complexity of your requirements. Simple set-ups take a single week. More complex projects: 4 weeks.

Diagram showing the benefits of The CRM Team's agile approach to CRM implementation.
How do we ensure such rapid deployments?
There are two factors behind the speed of our deployment:

1. Our Solutions are Cloud-Based.
As well as faster deployment, we like cloud CRM because it is the securer option for your data. You can read all the reasons why we opted for cloud here.

2. Our Implementation Processes are Streamlined.
Our team have completed 100s of projects. This has enabled us to templatise a lot of the process. This doesn’t hinder us from tailoring a solution to your requirements, it just makes the tailoring process faster.

Another way we are streamlined is through carrying out early customer validation. In more traditional deployments, you’d agree on what you want up front. But the next time you gave input would be when the final product was presented to you. In our experience this only means one thing: extended project deadlines. In contrast, receiving regular customer input is the best way to ensure the project finishes on time.

On larger projects, we ensure on-going customer validation by using an agile methodology called Scrum. Scrum was developed to streamline software creation and we have adapted it for our CRM installations. It’s a process that ensures your involvement at every stage. This is extremely useful, because it allow for changes to be made during the install.

With complex deployments, customers only fully know what they need once they have seen a functioning version of the system. Scrum understands this and plans for it. When you opt to go for a CRM solution with us, it’ll be a process you’ll enjoy.

Want to see if CRM would be beneficial for you? Have a look at the business case for CRM.

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Increasing your marketing effectiveness with ClickDimensions & Microsoft Dynamics 365

Increasing your marketing effectiveness with ClickDimensions & Microsoft Dynamics 365

Marketing, News

Increasing your marketing effectiveness with ClickDimensions & Microsoft Dynamics 365

Increasing your marketing effectiveness

If you have Microsoft Dynamics 365, you’re probably using the marketing area to automate many of your marketing tasks. But you may get to a point where you need greater functionality. We recommend adding in ClickDimensions. ClickDimensions is an award-winning marketing product that runs inside Dynamics 365. It’s not a separate program, but lives inside it, so you don’t have to learn a new system.

We love it. And you’ll see many of our packages come with ClickDimensions bundled in.

We’ll outline the marketing benefits of Dynamics 365, followed by the extra ClickDimensions brings.

Dynamics 365 Marketing area

The marketing area within Dynamics 365 gives you the following benefits:

1. Speed up campaign creation. With accounts, contacts and leads all stored in Dynamics 365, it’s simple to create target lists for your campaign. Just chose the inclusion criteria and draw the records automatically from Dynamics 365. Lists can be static, or dynamic. If you chose a dynamic list, when information is updated inside Dynamics 365, your list will get updated also.

2. Easily co-ordinate team activity. Once you have planned your campaign, tasks can be allocated to team members. You can even require certain tasks get sign off within Dynamics 365 for Marketing before the next stage can be carried out. Campaigns can use a variety of distribution methods.

3. Track campaign effectiveness. Once campaigns are sent out, reports can be generated on status and progress. Because the campaign is tracked within Dynamics 365, the return on marketing investment can be calculated. Accurate insight can be gained into which deals resulted from which campaigns.

4. Hear what people are saying about your campaign. If you have ten or more users on Dynamics 365, you’ll have free access to the social engagement module. This is a powerful way to view what is being said across social media channels about your campaign (or even just your business). 

ClickDimensions Email Marketing and Marketing Automation for Dynamics 365 empowers marketers to generate and qualify high quality leads while providing sales the ability to prioritize the best leads and opportunities. Providing email marketing, web intelligence, lead scoring, social discovery, web forms, surveys, landing pages, nurture marketing, subscription management, campaign tracking and more, ClickDimensions allows organizations to discover who is interested in their products, quantify their level of interest and take the appropriate actions.

Adding in ClickDimensions gives all the benefits above, but in addition you’ll be able to…

1. Discover where your sales are coming from. ClickDimensions gives you detailed web analytics. Unlike other web analytics tools, ClickDimensions traces individual activity separately. Once a person identifies themselves, through filling in a form, downloading an article etc., ClickDimensions then allocates all their previous anonymous activity to the new Dynamics 365 record. Coupled with Dynamics 365, this means that every sale can be traced back to how they first made contact with you: which web page they first went to, whether they came via Facebook, Twitter etc. Consequently, you get detailed insight on what works, and what doesn’t. While you can work out your campaign Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) with Dynamics 365, ClickDimensions broadens this to allowing you to calculate your ROMI for all your marketing activity.

2. Send personalized communication that really converts.

Like many programs, ClickDimensions allows you to create beautiful emails effortlessly. Simply drag and drop content into preformed templates and autofill details from lists in Dynamics 365. Once you send out the campaign ClickDimensions tracks which sections of the email was viewed the most, presenting you with a heat map at the end of the campaign. As you learn which parts of the mailer people interact with most, you can continually improve the design to improve the interaction and click through rate. You can also do A/B testing during a campaign, and send the design that wins to the rest of your campaign list. ClickDimensions also allows you to send personalized SMSes in bulk, which people can reply to.
3. Never miss an opportunity to capture a prospect’s info. ClickDimensions allows you to rapidly create forms, automatic responders and landing page scripts so that your visitors have multiple opportunities to identify themselves. You don’t even need to know any HTML. All this information is automatically stored inside Dynamics 365, so you’ll never lose track of it.

4. Nurture leads until they are ready to buy.

After a lead makes contact, easily automate a follow up process. Set up multiple steps that activate according to certain criteria being met. This could involve sending an email newsletter, arranging a call, or sending certain product information. Form multiple options that react to what the lead does. Workflows and lists within Dynamics 365 will adjust automatically as the program progresses, and your lead should be feeling engaged with.

5. Never hand over dud leads again. ClickDimensions has an automatic lead scoring system that places leads in order of priority.  You can customize the scoring according to your specific criteria and then create thresholds that must be met before handing over a lead to sales. These can be tested and adjusted until you are confident that a lead with a certain score is of enough quality for sales to follow up with.

6. Understand your prospects better. Draw publicly available data from your prospects’ FB pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube, Flickr etc. into Dynamics 365. ClickDimensions will present the data next to the record, giving you a fuller understanding of your prospects.

7. Capture event information within Dynamics 365. ClickDimensions integrates with many of the popular event management tools (WebEx, Eventbrite, GoToWebinar etc.) This information will be brought into Dynamics 365 so that people who attend can be tracked, like any other prospect or lead.

8. Use surveys to engage more with your prospects. Surveys can be created and emailed to leads, accounts, and contacts to get valuable feedback. All responses are automatically stored in the account record in Dynamics 365.

If you want to find out more watch this brief overview:

ClickDimensions Marketing from ClickDimensions on Vimeo.

Want to add ClickDimensions into your current Dynamics 365?

If you already have Dynamics 365 for Marketing, ClickDimensions is extremely quick to deploy. Fill in your details below to see what this could look like. We’ll get in contact to arrange a demonstration.

 

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Need sales to excel?

Need sales to excel?

News, Sales

Need sales to excel? Drop the spreadsheets.

1985 was a big year.

Madonna and Wham! were topping the charts with their songs: ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Wake me up before you go-go’. Ronald Reagan was being sworn in for a second term. And Microsoft launched Excel.

Excel transformed businesses. Accountants crunched numbers and sales managers tracked their deals. It was a game changer.

“30 years later, the world’s a different place. Excel is still a great tool – just not for sales managers.”

Here’s why:

1. No single, reliable source of data

Deal information is spread everywhere making accurate forecasting almost impossible. Collaboration on complex opportunities or tenders is frustrating. And different versions of sales proposal documents are stored in multiple places. Vital information can easily be lost, but it becomes impossible to know when or where.

2. Reporting is painful and takes too long

Sales reps should be maximising selling time. Instead, they are wasting hours trying to update shared spreadsheets and collate data from different sources. Usually just before the sales meeting. That means it’s nearly impossible to have truly actionable insights.

3. Limited visibility of sales activity

Adding info to the “comments” column in Excel doesn’t reflect the true history of sales activity related to the deal. When was the last meeting? What emails have been exchanged? Are there outstanding tasks? What makes it worse is that there are no reminders for follow-up activities in the future.

4. Information isn’t mobile

No access to important customer information while on the go. Getting access to your customer’s important information right from your mobile device is painful when it lives in a shared spreadsheet. We’ve all tried accessing shared spreadsheets from a mobile device, it isn’t fun!

5. Sharing isn’t caring

Scaling a shared spreadsheet across a team creates nothing but frustration. Online and offline versions, failed attempts to save new information and corrupt files when trying to save are par for the course with shared spreadsheets.

6. Every customer is treated the same

Not all customers are created equal. Without previous purchase history on hand, prioritising deals according to their likelihood to convert isn’t possible. That means all customers and deals are treated the same, and they shouldn’t be. Spend time on the customers or prospects that really matter.

Are you stuck on Excel? Here’s how to drop the spreadsheets in 2016:

After the Microsoft Office revolution, the next revolution was CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

CRM give you secure access to a single version of the truth. With all your important customer data in one place, reports are delivered in real-time and the insights gained are instantly actionable. All activities such as email, appointments, calls and follow-up tasks can be tracked  against a customer record. Keeping a comprehensive history in one place. This information is available on the go via any mobile device which means you have access to the info you need, when you need it.

Since it’s designed to scale from small teams up to tens of thousands of users, your whole team can work in CRM without anyone being locked out.

Best of all, customers can be profiled to ensure your people work on the most important deals first.

It’s simpler than you think. See it in action now:

At The CRM Team, we’re experts at streamlining your sales process.

Request a demo today. We’ll import a sample of your data and show you a different way of selling.

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The Business Case for CRM

The Business Case for CRM

CRM, News

The Business Case for CRM

The stats from 362 companies

Investing in CRM makes great business sense. Don’t just take our word for it: have a look at the hard numbers from 362 companies. The stats are grouped according to three key CRM benefits: sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service automation.
Automating Your Sales Force
Automating Your Marketing Efforts
Automating your Customer Service Efforts
These results are from Nucleus Research Inc., a global provider of investigative technology research. They surveyed sales, marketing, customer service, and IT personnel from 362 companies. Company sizes ranged from 1-19 through to 10,000+, across twenty-eight different sectors.
At the time of the survey, the average time CRM systems had been in place was 14 months for cloud, and 25 months for on-premise. At this stage, 70% of the companies had already reached a full return on their investment. The headline numbers above are average increases reported for each department. Much bigger increases are possible with full interdepartmental CRM co-ordination – something we call operational/analytical CRM. If you do a CRM installation with us, we can get you to this operational/analytical level. It’s not something you can achieve overnight, but letting us help you makes the whole process a lot quicker. It’s something definitely worth doing. Nucleus Research estimates this unlocks a whopping four-fold increase on the benefits above. Want the full Nucleus report? Click here

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