The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. When faced with information overload such as this, it can be easy to let your guard down and fall for a phishing attack. Phishing is one of the largest security threats out there. They take many different forms and often resemble the types of communications you receive every day — internal team communications, special offers from your favorite companies, or specific emails that pertain to your role (support tickets, leads, incidents, etc.).

Sales reps can spend hours scouring channels like LinkedIn for potential leads to add to their pipeline. Even then, there’s no guarantee they’ll find the right contact information for the leads they do generate. All that time spent researching and chasing potential customers can lead to a frustrating dead end. The good news is, lead generation doesn’t have to be time-consuming or fruitless. All you need is a lead-enrichment tool, like Sell Reach.

Ask any business leader, and they’ll tell you that yes, of course, they want loyal customers. But the path from prospect to loyal customer is not a straight line. In fact, it’s fraught with twists and turns, and one wrong move could cause people—even repeat customers—to wander in another direction.

If you asked someone 30 years ago what customer relationship management (CRM) meant, you’d get a very different answer than if you asked that question today. Back then, says Jon Aniano, vice president of product at Zendesk, CRM was a process for tracking sales. It was simply a way for your sales team to get visibility into their sales pipeline and understand how the business might be doing over the next quarter, next month, next year.

Congrats — you have a product or service that people appreciate enough to pay for. But your offering, even if it’s the very best, is not enough to guarantee that your customers are going to keep on being your customers. In order to cultivate customer loyalty, an essential component of your success, you have to also cultivate solid relationships with your customers. A huge part of any relationship, of course, is communication.

Work from home has us feeling isolated and stir-crazy. We hope you can nerd out and lose yourself in this month’s integration bonanza.

You probably can’t imagine life without your smartphone. You can just say “Hey Siri, call Mom” and instantly the number is dialed for you. Be honest, do you know Mom’s phone number? It’s practically impossible to remember all of your contacts’ information, and because your phone manages details like a personal assistant, you don’t have to.

Building and maintaining great customer relationships is at the core of any good business model. But staying on top of who your customers are and what their relationship with your business is at any given moment is difficult. And that’s true across the board—whether you’re a small business with a hundred customers or a large one with hundreds of thousands.

Over the past 30 years, the term customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved with the times—what was once seen as a tool designed to provide visibility into a company’s sales pipeline has morphed into something much more powerful. At its heart, CRM is about managing current and potential customer relationships by collecting and analyzing data.

With the coronavirus outbreak, customer experience teams across the globe are having to rapidly adapt amid ticket spikes, customer cancellations, market volatility, and increased uncertainty. Each week, the world is changing, and business simply isn’t business as usual. Most teams responding to customers are transitioning to a work from home environment, putting additional strain on their ability to respond to customers effectively. For many of us, that means learning and adjusting as we go.

Every second your customer spends waiting on hold with support is a second they’re closer to switching to your competitor. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020, long wait times top the list of what makes for a bad customer service experience. However, there is a solution to those delays in service, one that customers increasingly expect: automated customer service.

When most people think of live chat, they think of customer support. But it’s also a sales rep’s secret weapon. That’s because chat provides a direct line between a rep and their prospective customers. Sales teams can use chat to generate leads, improve sales conversion rates, and identify upsell opportunities.

With all the uncertainty around COVID-19, we’re contingency planning, and we know you’re probably doing the same. We’ve compiled a list of our product features and ideas to help your team continue to work effectively. Best of all, most of these utilize tools that are already included in your subscription.

With so many new customer communication channels opening for business, the classic contact center can seem kind of old school. Nobody wants to phone a business anymore, right? Wrong. In fact, 66% of customers still typically resolve their issues with a company via telephone, according to our latest Customer Experience Trends Report. While many support issues can be resolved via messaging, email, or self-service, sometimes it’s just easier and more efficient to pick up the phone.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software can be a great resource for you and your team. If you take a deep look into your customer data, you can get better forecasting capabilities. In other words, you can more effectively serve your customers and understand your prospects. Yet this adage is only true if: Around 65 percent of CRM projects fail due to low user adoption. Why?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a powerful tool for any sales team; it saves them time and provides invaluable data insights for nurturing prospects until they become customers. But, surprisingly, it’s more common for sales reps to use Excel and email to store and manage prospect data than it is to use a CRM system. And for the teams that do use a CRM, few take full advantage of the tool.

Here’s something support leaders in the trenches know all too well: customer interactions are on the rise, which goes hand-in-hand with consumers’ expectations that the service they’ll receive will be stellar. That’s challenging enough for any business, but for companies in growth mode, those trends can lead to serious strain on support operations.

Have you ever heard someone say the price of growth is change? An old boss of mine used to say this regularly, and there’s a lot of truth to it. As your organization grows, it’s guaranteed to cause a lot of change. One place where this growth-fueled change often manifests itself is in how you support your customers. The last thing you want is to see your customer count skyrocket while your customer experience and customer satisfaction suffer.

Want a great way to tank your customer satisfaction? Ignore your customer service team. Customer expectations have never been higher, and they want answers faster, on the channel of their choice. Your team is made up of people with varying degrees of knowledge and experience—someone who’s new could unknowingly say the wrong thing and end up making an irate customer even more upset.

If you’ve ever watched The Office, you might remember the episode when Dwight and Jim discover that their customers have been giving them terrible reviews. They’re in total and utter denial — “The reason that I got bad customer reviews is because I didn’t! There is a massive conspiracy going on here!” Dwight protests.

When Birchbox, a personalized beauty subscription service, was founded in 2010, they had just a few people answering customer emails. Eight years later, they had a team of 54 support agents managing a monthly volume of nearly 38,000 tickets across multiple channels. With the efficiencies gained from implementing a robust customer support software, they actually reduced their cost per contact and achieved their fastest resolution time ever, despite the company’s rapid growth.

Despite our cultural obsession with achieving inbox zero, email remains one of the top ways customers reach out to businesses. In fact, 49 percent said email was their preferred customer service channel, second only to phone, according to Zendesk research. Email, if a little perfunctory, has the advantage of being a readily accessible and widely understood medium.

When most people refer to a CRM (customer relationship management) they’re referring to software or a tool that enables them to manage and improve their relationships with prospects and customers. But customer relationship management varies, depending on what department you’re talking to. A support team might use a CRM to manage customer tickets, while marketing teams may use the tool to analyze how consumers respond to online campaigns.

Businesses tend to primarily associate customer acquisition with marketing and sales. They often leave customer service out of the equation because they forget that customer acquisition includes the ability to convert prospects that are already in contact with your business. Prospects often subscribe to email newsletters, follow your business on social media, or read your blog, demonstrating a level of interest and familiarity that hasn’t turned into monthly recurring revenue—yet.

Customer expectations are higher than ever—so much so that ​IDC predicts​ that companies will spend $641 billion on customer experience technologies by 2022 to meet them. Customers want easy, fast, and personalized experiences across touchpoints, and they’re comparing your business to companies that consistently deliver on their needs. When companies prioritize their relationships with their customers, they reap the benefits of renewed loyalty and competitive advantage.

The buying process has changed. Access to digital communication channels and endless information online has empowered consumers to take control of their buying journey. On the flip side, legacy sales software hasn’t kept up with the modern buying process—sales processes have only become more complicated. In an effort to fill the gap, companies have layered on more and more point solutions, forcing sales reps to navigate multiple tools.