Constant growth can be achieved through revolutionising ideas & technological advances and properly implementing them in the ideal business norm. Perpetual innovation and customisation of services to cater to the customers’ needs become crucial for the company’s evolution into a profitable organisation. One of the important aspects of business is customer experience. Organisations must keep up with advancements in expertise and effective innovation techniques to boost the company’s customer support arena. Increasing the customer satisfaction level can become an extremely easy task by efficiently installing tools such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems and customer relationship management software. However, integrating both these services can do wonders for the company.
What is an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System?
The technology allows callers to interact with a computerised voice response system which is automated in nature, providing various services and information to the caller on behalf of the company and accepting inputs via keypad. The IVR system is a utility feature of cloud telephony that functions to handle large call volumes at the lowest cost.
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?
The basic explanation of CRM software can be made as a tool that provides a complete depiction of all the customer interactions, tracks details of sales, systematising and gives precedence to prospects, simplifies collaboration between various teams, and offers a seamless and unique experience to customers by building a better relationship. When your sales team is equipped with CRM integration, their efficiency is increased as they can invest more time in focusing on the pitch to sale rather than getting involved in the documentation process for the database.
How does an IVR-CRM work?
Once an IVR is integrated with the CRM software, the customers or potential leads get calls from a predefined IVR number. In case the customer’s information is available on the CRM, and the IVR system can play a customised message about the details provided by the CRM when the call is received. The information provided by the IVR will be based on the customer’s selection from the menu provided. The information can include sales pitches, booking schedules, product launches, and new updates. After providing the information, the system can either prompt the customer to take the desired action or gather the required information for further interaction with the customer or lead. This process enables a much more engaging and easy customer service solution.
Apart from the ease of connectivity to the customers, the IVR-CRM integration also helps the organisation in achieve various other goals. We have listed below some of the benefits of an IVR-CRM integration.
1. Increased Up-sell and Cross-Sell Opportunities :–
Businesses must ensure the upselling and cross-selling strategies to increase sales and revenue. The term upselling refers to inspiring customers by proposing more features and upgrades to purchase a particular service or product with a higher value than the initially purchased product or service. Cross-selling, on the other hand, refers to assuring your existing customers to purchase complementary and supplementary products and services along with the primary product for which they are initially interested in buying. With the help of IVR-CRM integration, customers can easily be segmented based on their gender, location, age, interest, etc., which can help understand the customer requirements better and create a very targeted cross-selling and upselling. Also, with the help of a personalised database for each customer deciding to either make a upsell or a cross-sell for a particular customer becomes simplified. With the right IVR software and CRM system, the sales team becomes more equipped for better data usage and customer insights.
2. Better Sales Revenue & Management :–
Every company meets with evolving customer demand and competition at some point in time. Professional tools such as IVR and CRM help strategise and explore the possibilities of scaling a business. Businesses with a B2B and SaaS orientation depend on extensive communication with potential leads before an actual transaction. During these communications, the customers expect the salesperson to know them by their names and have proper background information on them. The IVR-CRM integration assists in consolidating customer data in a single location that includes the customer’s contact information, previous communication history, customer relationship details and much more. With such data in hand, the sales team can utilise the information to enhance communication with each customer and acquire an effective sales strategy, providing a better sales revenue and management system.
3. Improved Customer Experience & Satisfaction :–
Customers do not need to wait long or get poor responses with an integrated IVR-CRM system. The integrated system facilitates instant call routing to the correct department. Customer retention can also be achieved as customer service is prioritised through integration.
4. Enhanced ROI & Conversion Rate :–
The return on investment (ROI) can be determined through various metrics such as the upsell rate, the value of the customer and the cost of the acquisition of the customer, the number of deals finalised, the sales volume, the time invested per sales, the maximisation of the lead channel and net new revenue generated. The integrated IVR-CRM system focuses on and enhances each of the metrics to propagate an effective ROI and conversion rate by analysing marketing campaign effectiveness, customer retention rates, and other related data.
5. Accessibility to More Potential Leads :–
Lead generation is one of the top priorities for any sales team because more prospects create more opportunities, and more opportunities, in turn, generate more revenue. Tools that can facilitate more prospects for the sales team are probably best for revenue as well. An integrated IVR-CRM system automates the dialling process for potential leads. This eliminates the manual dialling done by agents, which further helps build the agents’ efficiency. So, the agents can connect with more leads by making quick and automated outbound calls taken care of by the IVR-CRM integration. Also, many of the agents forget to ask if a satisfied customer will be going to share referrals which the integrated system can easily prompt.
