It wasn’t long ago that the idea of contact centres being a ‘cost centre’ was a universally accepted truth.
Fast forward to today: customer experience is top of the agenda for any business wanting to remain competitive, and contact centres are significant and proactive drivers of profit.
This remarkable transformation has undeniably been driven by advances in technology.
Namely, cloud-based contact centre software.
Read on to find out how cloud-based contact centre solutions are helping businesses to increase sales.
Defining sales enablement
Before we get into what makes contact centre software such a powerful sales enablement tool, let’s take a step back and clarify what we mean by the term ‘sales enablement’.
Gartner defines sales enablement as “the activities, systems, processes, and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with clients and prospects.”
In short, it means giving your sales team what they need to close more deals.
What that entails can be anything and everything from product information, to brand collateral, to detailed information on customers themselves.
Contact centre solutions = sales enablement tools
Contact centre software supports and enhances sales enablement in several ways:
- Facilitating a more personalised, value-added service
- Supporting a seamless experience across multiple channels
- Increasing agent productivity and efficiency
Now let’s look at how contact centre software provides these avenues of support.
Personalisation and the single customer view
In sales enablement, personalisation is rapidly changing from an option to a necessity.
This report from LinkedIn, for example, found that 64% of B2B decision-makers would not engage a salesperson if their communication was not personalised.
A detailed understanding of your customers’ needs, challenges and motivations is paramount to delivering the personalised service they expect, and maximising sales ROI.
The most efficient way to achieve this understanding is to establish what’s known as a Single Customer View or SCV (not sure what that means? Here’s a quick explanation).
Contact centre software lets you achieve an SCV by consolidating historic data of a customer’s interactions with you across all applications and channels, before putting it at the fingertips of your sales or contact centre team.
With this detailed customer data visible from their computer screen, employees can tailor the service they deliver to your customers based on their previous interactions.
The best contact centre solutions will also offer CRM integration, which allows you to draw from additional customer data, and gain an even deeper understanding of their needs.
Omnichannel capabilities create smooth, seamless experiences
As well as a personalised experience, today’s customers want to feel in control.
They want the sensation of being in the driver’s seat, steering the course of their customer journey across their preferred channels of contact.
Customers not only expect this omnichannel experience, they will also pay more for it.
According to the Unified Commerce Index from Adyen, consumers who shop across multiple channels spend 30 percent more per purchase.
Contact centre software gives you the capabilities to deliver an omnichannel experience, not only giving you a full view of inbound and outbound activities as they happen across your channels, but also allowing you to monitor, manage and respond to that activity in real time.
The best contact centre solutions will also enable you to responsively redirect inbound activity, and redistribute your workload to different agents on the fly.
This ensures no single employee gets oversubscribed, and keeps your customer experience swift, smooth and seamless, even when sudden demand floods in across multiple channels.
Smart dialler tools increase productivity and efficiency
Contact centre software doesn’t just support sales enablement for inbound customer queries – it can level up your outbound activity too.
The old practice of manual dialling is incredibly time consuming: hanging up between calls, finding and dialling the next number, logging unanswered calls and leaving a voicemail.
Each little action adds up to huge numbers of unproductive hours when iterated across thousands of prospects and customers.
Contact centre solutions can put an end to this with smart dialling features, such as auto-dial or predictive dialling.
Auto diallers alone have been shown to produce 200-300% more productivity per hour among contact centre agents when compared to manual dialling by hand.
Most importantly though, these dialling tools also help sales teams convert more leads in less time.
If one contact doesn’t pick up, another number is automatically dialled, so your team spends more time speaking with responsive prospects than chasing dead ends.
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BONUS: Reporting and recording for continuous improvement
Contact centre software can also produce greater sales success by supporting teams in continuous refinement of their sales tactics and training processes.
Contact centre solutions offer detailed reporting on customer activity as well as automated call recording.
By using both of these features consistently and analysing your results, sales and contact centre teams can systematically improve each component of their sales cycle – identifying the weak links in the chain and focusing their efforts on strengthening them
These features also mean that you never fall behind the curve of customer demand. Instead, they help keep you on the pulse of your customers’ evolving expectations, so you can continue to shape your service around them.
Why contact centre software is the best of all sales enablement tools: key takeaways
- Contact centre software acts as a powerful sales enablement tool by providing sales and contact centre teams the resources to close more deals
- Providing rich customer data in a single customer view, contact centres can provide a more tailored, personalised service to each customer
- Omnichannel capabilities support a smooth, seamless experience that customers feel in control of, and that they will pay more for
- Smart dialling tools will dramatically improve outbound productivity and efficiency, helping to convert more leads in less time
- Detailed reporting and call recording also enables teams to continuously refine sales processes and training, and to shape their service around evolving customer demands.
