Unfortunately, many companies don’t recognise the importance of this quality of interaction. Let’s run through some reasons for connecting your data to your telephone system, and how implementing changes like these can positively impact your entire business.
From The First Point Of Contact
The receptionist role is sometimes taken for granted. This is a big mistake. The receptionist is the first point of contact your customers have every time they interact with your company by telephone.
Making sure the customer feels valued at this stage is critical. It’s showing them that they are known to the business and are therefore valued. It sets the tone for a positive outcome and influences the next interaction they have, whether that is with your sales, operations or accounts teams.
As a first step this involves connecting the information in your CRM to your telephone system – allowing you to feed useful data points to your call agents about the person they are about to speak with. This immediately helps them jump into a conversation as if they know each customer personally. Also being able to tap into this at the first point of contact makes calls faster and more efficient, saving all of your teams time.
Good Connections
Whether your team’s based in a physical office with a manned front desk, or is part of a remote team with a distributed telephone network, in all cases the first person answering calls has a very real responsibility to provide a good customer connection.
Although implementing integrated systems can be more expensive for SMEs, the advantage it can give them over competitors is significant. Added value also comes in the form of custom widgets which show additional caller information that your teams may need on-demand – such as invoice history, recent orders, or even a record of previous call information.
Access to this kind of detail enables them to provide your customers with the best possible experience.
In the future, AI is going to play a bigger role in telephony systems. We’re already seeing this to some extent. AI’s real strength (as it currently exists) lies is in how it can be used to spot patterns – which is perfect in a sales environment where customer journeys can be mapped out to identify common pain points or opportunities to upsell.
For instance, AI can identify which point in the buying cycles customers are when they first get in contact to find out more information. It can differentiate between an initial call to what might be a complaint – helping the agent better prepare for each instance in the right way
With all this in mind, it’s clear that any company with a CRM system in place should have it connected to their telephone system. With the tools available at PeterConnects, the process of making this possible is easy – and the benefits are clear and immediate.
Ultimately making a customer feel known and valued is one of the best ways to build rapport – and if you aren’t doing it, you’re missing out.
