CRM News

customerthink.com
October 22, 2007

::: Embrace Sales 2.0, or Be Left in the Dust :::

With most products and services, companies are faced with the prospect of dealing with a buyer’s market. The internet has expanded the seller’s reach but at the same time it has also tremendously improved the customer’s knowledge about what he is purchasing.

This is not to suggest that sellers have no meaningful part to play. Rather, I would argue that the most successful sellers are, and will be, those that embrace this shift. And that begins with communicating with buyers the way they prefer to be reached. And there may not be a single way for a specific buyer in a single instance.

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dynamicbusiness.com

::: CRM applications that deliver for SMEs :::

CRM software is useful for managing the three areas of sales, marketing, and customer service. SFA helps with tools like opportunity management and providing a wholesome view of current and future business opportunities. Marketing benefits from CRM by getting a better understanding about its campaigns and being better able to track leads from inception to closure.

One of the most commonly heard phrases in the CRM field these days is that with CRM you get a big business tool at a small business price. In the past, cheaper CRM applications lacked functionality and expensive ones offered functionality at a price SMEs simply couldn’t afford.

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1. A study by Ventana Research threw up the following interesting facts

• 50% of call centers target less than 4 minutes per call
• 48% track revenue generated by the call center
• 46% employ up-sell or cross efforts
• 12% of call center companies do not measure customer satisfaction at all
• 60% rely on the agent to assess the customers satisfaction

What do these points tell us – mainly that call centers are focusing more on extracting “volume” performance from their employees and customer satisfaction which they all harp about is essentially secondary. Not different from any other business!!

2. An IDC report states that the cost of a home-based agent is two-thirds that of the cost of an office-based employee.

Am sure they must be using different performance metrics too to judge the two types of workers. Going by this piece, telecommuters must be outperforming their office-going counterparts.

3. South America is set to be the dominant global flavor of call center pie according to a report from Datamonitor. The number of agents in Caribbean and Latin American based contact center agents servicing offshore customers to more than triple from 16,200 in 2005 to 44,900 in 2010. Mexico is set to emerge as a major force set to cater to the US Hispanic market.

It’s slow progress for these countries in my opinion; maybe they don’t have a pool of English speakers that an early mover like India had.

4. According to a study by the Yankee Group, 24% of call center employees are home-based and this number is increasing by 24% each year. On similar lines IDC estimates the number of home-based phone representatives in the United States, to grow from 112,000 today to over 300,000 by 2010.

5. VoIP has had a huge impact on how call centers function and according to an In-stat study Asia is where the action is. The study states that the VoIP market in Asia will be worth more than $10 billion by 2009 with a major chunk coming from the developed nations of East Asia.

6. An interesting find by Purdue University – an astonishing 92% of callers/prospective customers form an opinion about a company based on their call-center interaction and a very high percentage – 68% - will not hesitate to switch brands if not satisfied with call center performance.

7. A probable reason why many SMBs remain just that – don’t know the source of this but it says that a staggering 51% of SMBs did not think emails were worth responding to, they didn’t respond to them at all and 70% of these SMBs took more than 24 hours to get back. This compared to 41% of enterprises not responding at all and 61% not responding within 24 hours.