Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Cold calling: the two scariest words to any sales rep in the industry. For even the most charismatic of souls, this downright medieval practice can conjure nightmares of rejection, exhaustion, and failure. But is that the whole truth? Almost every business still uses cold calling tactics, so there must be some value in reaching out to chilly leads. It might be hard to believe in this era of open information and emotion-based sales, but cold calling still has an important place in the business world.

Customers want answers, and they want them fast. About 60 percent of consumers say quick problem-solving is a mark of great customer service. But how do you deliver speedy service without sacrificing quality? By creating a knowledge base. Knowledge bases provide on-demand support by answering common questions and explaining how to use products or services successfully. With this resource, customers can solve problems independently.

In a perfect world, every customer would be 100% happy with every purchase. Shipments would arrive ahead of schedule, products or services would exceed expectations, and we could forever banish the terms “return” or “refund” from our daily lexicon. While there’s no magic formula to guarantee customer happiness, new research shows how important of a role support agents play.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical measures of performance for sales teams. They can evaluate the efficiency of a sales funnel, assess the effectiveness of outreach methods, and even identify the number of emails reps send out in a given week. But no KPI receives more attention than the sales win rate. Win rates reveal important details, including which sales tactics work best, which areas need improvement, and which products or services generate the most sales.

Most businesses strategize sales through the eyes of the customer. What do customers want? How do we make customers happy? What are the best upsell strategies? These are all worthwhile questions—and the customer is certainly important—but no company can help their customers if they have internal issues in serious need of fixing. That’s where sales and operations planning (S&OP) comes in.

While leaders navigate a constantly changing reality, they must keep thinking about how to drive their business forward. As many companies hold on deploying new initiatives until the outlook is more clear, they are eyeing where current investments can be made: such as in customer experience. Why CX? Where human interactions are concerned, it’s quality, not quantity that ultimately matters most—now more than ever before.

When it comes to sales, it’s easy to believe that no opportunity is a wasted opportunity. If you throw a product at enough people, someone is bound to buy it, right? Technically…yes. But say you spent money and effort to contact 100 random people about your product. Seventy-five of them aren’t in your target audience, 10 of the remaining 25 can’t afford your product, and 14 are happy with their current product from a competitor.

Today’s businesses are looking to provide customers with improved experiences while decreasing service costs—and they’re quickly learning that chatbots and conversational AI can facilitate these goals. By 2024, experts say the global chatbot market will reach $9.4 million. What customer service leaders may not understand, however, is which of the two technologies could have the most impact on their buyers and their bottom line.

Every salesperson is eager to hit their monthly quota—the more sales, the better. But the road to that finish line is reliant on a set of key players: sales leads. Before sales reps can meet their targets, they need a clear understanding of what a sales lead is and how a lead is different from a prospect. They must also be armed with proven lead generation strategies to get people on the path to becoming a customer. We’ve got you covered.

For support agents, organizing and triaging customer requests from various channels is already a challenge. The fact that 73 percent of consumers plan to continue using new support channels only makes ticket management more complex. The best way to beat the odds and consistently provide your customers with quick and effective responses? Ticketing systems. Ticketing systems document and track customer issues and interactions, making it easier for customer service teams to manage their support cases.