Author: Fati-Sa

In Fact, although the development of the world and technology, there are more customers around the world prefer, phone support when reaching out to customer service, the idea behind talking on the phone with a real human to get support or the service they need, contribute to building more confidence.

For growing companies or the biggest one, it is a real challenge to manage phone support, for many reasons, consume more time, hard to measure support channel, least cost-effective, but we could agree that is a great way to help a customer because it provides direct support.

Some companies, planning and think to offer customers extensive phone support meets their needs, they will need an effective call center software that supports their service team.

Without interaction with the new technology of software, the support team struggles to resolve the different issues,  answer queries, while customers waiting, on the other hand, Supervisors won’t be able to manage the chaos because they won’t have any insight into call volume or trends.

Call Center Software What Is?

Call center software it is a system that permits the company to manages customer communication service, automates and standardizes the process of receiving and responding inbound calls, and outbound calls, assist to manage in general the communications coming from the multiple channels, such as email, live chat, SMS text, even social media account, or different departments.

Empower Your Call Center Agents

By using the call center software, the company provides powerful customer service, because it allows customers to communicate with call center support teams across multiple channels like live chat, email, social media, and text messages.

The best call center software, connecting and routes calls to the right agents or departments, provides employees with additional context, assists in running execute an Omni-channel strategy.

Note

Omni-channel is a cross-channel content strategy that organizations use to improve their user experience and drive better relationships with their audience across points of contact.

So whether the company start-up recently, has ten employees or more than this for the largest businesses, reach the right tools to build your call center is critical, it could be confusing to select and choose a specific one with many options in the software market, in the end, this depends on your needs.

In this article, we look over some common features of call center software, and the best 5 call center software options available in 2021.

Functions And Features In Consideration

choosing the best call center software it depends on your team’s need, after planning and understanding what is the benefits you looking for, and what drawbacks to avoid, draw up a list of desired functions and features you looking for.

Call Routing

Call Routing,  its means to connect the customer with the right person or department, to receive the service, it is very important to understand how it works this process,  Whether your software offers automated call routing, or if customers need to select a department after listening to a set of options, some software systems are complicated to update quickly and easily.

So for this take your time in the trial period to setting up and changing your workflow, to make sure you’re not stuck with one configuration.

Omnichannel

It’s important to consider how well your new call center software will integrate with your other channels.

Provide and supporting customers through  integration and interaction between different channels, like (email, social media or live chat).

It’s important to have a unified customer service experience, this would reduce customer friction, and increase the efficiency of supporting team after inbound calls should be logged on your help desk, other persons on your team could see the context of previous customer interactions trough unified database, this feature permits to create a consistent customer experience.

Outbound Calls

Sometimes the agents might need to make outbound calls to customers to present a set of proactive customer support options, promotional products or services, targeting more prospects.

Look for software that includes an automated dialer and easy to use call logging features so your CRM stays up to date.

Reporting

An efficient and important tool, help manager in scheduling and plan for the future to develop the performance of service provided through the database, like incoming call volume, call trends, and agent efficiency, these data assist to manage common issues that customers are calling for.

Give managers a vast vision of how your team handling the workflow traffic, gaps in your support coverage, build the strategic plans and report depends on data collected.

CRM Integration For Customer Context

If you looking to provide efficient support customer service, in this situation, it would be helpful to choose a system that could integrate with CRM for customer context, why?

The supporting team could provide effectively helps, through a database that is stored about each customer, and all his previous summary interactions, which prevents customers from having to repeat themselves, this would increase the satisfaction with the services provided.

Pricing

Finally, it could be confusing and increase the expenses of the company,  depending on how your chosen software assigns your phone numbers, so make sure before any commitment about the pricing for each minute on the phone, to avoid any extra charge more than expected.

Make sure to confirm what’s included in the package and how much each call and minute will cost.

The Top 5 Call Center Software

now after you determine and evaluate your needs during you looking for call center software, here we listed the options available take a look.

Ringcentral Contact Center

Coming on the top of the list, it’s a great software system to provide more solutions for both sales and customer service team.

This software offers one of the most innovative of the cloud-based phone platforms, that support both desktop and mobile users.

RingCentral contact center, designed around a number of core features such as :

CRM integrations, omnichannel routing, as well as the inevitable reporting dashboard and analytics, moreover, RingCentral has powerful call delegation and answering rules, that would make calls routed to the right person or department.

The software provides three different plans depending on the company size or their needs, basic, advanced, ultimate, the function and the features of each plan are variable as the price as well.

Check their website for more details.

Freshcaller

Freshcaller is call center software provided by Freshworks, designed to be easy to use, and could manage everything from a single control panel, as well as run from the cloud-based solution, which does not require hardware, this makes it a great solution for small business.

The software provides some essential free functions such as forwarding calls, control, recording, and routing.

The basic level is free for unlimited agents, basic call queues, custom ringtones, and other sets of tempting features,  with the only cost being call charges.

As other software has various paid packages, that meet the diverse needs of the market, more expensive options offering more advanced features of course.

Five9

One of the huge software in the market used by the biggest companies regardless of his business activities.

Five9 is an all-in-one contact center solution, that allows managing both customer support and sales,  through a single dashboard, moreover, the software provides Intelligence Cloud-based solution that empowers your customer service agents and gives them more flexibility to work from anywhere.

This software provides sets of major benefits that meet the various business activities, such as, integrate with sets of CRM platform software, Omnichannel support, call routing, analytics, predictive dialing.

The Five9, offer a wide range of solution that customizes depend on the needs, size, and activities of each business, pricing is customized according to need.

Zendesk Talk

What makes this software one of the most extensive customer service platforms?

Given the major feature building a cloud contact center around customer relations management CRM, and not just integrate with it, that would make it the best for customer service.

The support team could access the full customer history, provide the service immediately, and maximize the workflow.

With more additional features as, call recording, and automatic ticket creation, analytics that allow being tracked and monitored, and evaluate the team’s performance.

As well as other software suppliers there are various plans that diverse between free plan with limited essential functions and a more professional one with more hight features.

CrazyCall

If you think to increase the efficiency of the sales team, CrazyCall is a great solution, by the features offered, such as call monitoring, call transfers, and a callback widget, all of these features would give your team fruitful results.

As the previous software listed, the CrazyCall provide different plans to start from 11$ per month per user, to more professional that cost $45/month/user.

You could benefit from a trial period for 14 days.

Conclusion

According to the recent survey showed, a high percentage of the interaction between customers and companies, 48% of consumers prefer to communicate directly with the company, while 75% of people appreciate more human interaction for customer support, as well as their preferred channel are varied In different proportions.

This truth about the importance to have high-quality customer service should be intake when the business startup planning.

 

Best CRM Software for Small Businesses in 2021

It is a fact that relationships management is the most important part of running a business. This is irrespective of whether you take into account shoppers or different organizations.

It is critical to keep up to date on developing discussions with existing clients while likewise adequately overseeing new leads.

Your customer satisfaction depends on your ability to offer attentive, personalized engagement with your clients, even your improvement demands you continue looking out for new customers too.

That is why Customer relationship management (CRM) software comes to help make this crucial process possible.

A good CRM software should allow companies to manage customer interaction and customer data. It should have the ability to automate marketing, sales, and customer support.

Moreover, it should help you access business information, and manage partner, vendor, and employee relationships.

However, because CRMs can perform so many different functions, finding the right one can be overwhelming.

To help you find the right CRM software, we researched and analyzed dozens of options. Here is a list of our 2021 best picks for CRM software and an explanation of how we chose them.

Salesforce

This software has recently become the standard in CRMs. Although the company now offers over a dozen different products, its many-featured and highly customizable sales CRM remains the basis of its offerings.

You can use Salesforce to take leads through a personalized customer journey and use the intelligent marketing platform to drive more sales through emails, SMS messaging, social media, and digital advertising.

While small businesses can take advantage of the lower-priced tiers, the plans and features of the Salesforce system are suited for larger businesses.

Pricing:

Plans for small businesses start at $25/month per user billed annually.

Freshsales

Freshsales CRM software is easy to use straightforward even if you’ve never operated anything more complicated than emailing. You’ll also find in-app video tutorials, articles, and a support person just a few clicks away.

It has an excellent dashboard that gives you immediate access to contact management, reports, emails, phone calls, and more. And, if the intuitive, web-based interface wasn’t enough, there are also mobile apps so you can make sales wherever you go.

Pricing:

Pricing starts at $12/month per user (billed annually).

Zoho CRM

This CRM software supports small businesses, coordinates contacts, markets their brand, runs sales, provides customer support and a lot more. You’ll get a helpful set of marketing and sales features with SaaS apps and online productivity tools.

SalesSignals

SalesSignals, is the basis for understanding how and when contacts, leads, and customers are linked with your company. It provides real-time notifications for email opens, website visits, campaign activity, social mentions, and other actions. For example, if you’re managing an email campaign with your contacts, you’ll be notified when that person opens or clicks a link in the email.

Pricing:

Zoho has a free plan for up to 3 users, but the really good features are in the paid plans. Those start at $12/month per user (billed annually).

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is simple to use and suggests a wide range of CRM tools to running the customer journey. It even offers forever free plans with limited features for their CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.

With this software, you would be able to see your entire sales dropdown right on your dashboard. If you want more data, you can view all contacts and sales operations, detailed reports, and performance on a user or team basis.

Pricing:

The core CRM software is free, but for more powerful features you can upgrade to a paid plan for Marketing, Sales, or Service hubs (starting at $50/month). You can also upgrade to the Growth Suite starting at $113/month for a single user.

Keap

Keap is one of the best CRM software systems to be applied in a small business in order to achieve their goal towards real growth.

For 18 years, Keap has helped small businesses be more systematic so they can deliver a great solution and close more business deals. Keap’s award-winning CRM solution serves more than 200,000 users around the world.

Keap’s platform manages your customer information and daily work in one place, freeing you up from repetitive tasks so you have more time to focus on growing your business and delivering great service.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $79 per month & includes everything you need to grow your business.

What are the key points to look for the best CRM software?

As we are living in a competitive online world, there are tens of CRM software platforms, according to your business information and your objective to grow to develop your performance, you could determine some essential points to select the right CRM.

However, there are some general points to look for, here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Ease of Use

The first point you should look for in a CRM software is how easy and clear it is to use. You will be using your CRM software every single day so as to simplify the work. Therefore, if it isn’t easy to use it won’t help you reach your goals.

The latest survey shows that 67% of businesses think that ease of use is the most important point of their CRM software.

2. Customization

Every single business has specific characteristics, we looking for the CRM that has customizing features, for sales and projects, to make the software serve different teams.

3. Reporting

It is also clear and evident that a powerful CRM allows the elaboration of various data sets and uses them for reporting.

4. 4. Automation and integrations

Realizing that your CRM is not just a contact listing, it needs to combine branding and sales as well as the lead new generation to your brand.

Your CRM should store name, email address, phone number, and maybe even social links that could be used for online marketing strategy.

What to expect for 2021?

As CRMs have improved, they have become more advanced to integrate and automate an extensive range of business processes. Social media links and email combination, for example, they have been characterized as the Customer Relationship Management evolution.

The effect is social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are not just about exploring and advertising your brand but also establishing confidence, credibility, and personality.

In 2021, looking for more automation and integration features to simplify CRM usage has known great popularity. It helps in productivity enhancement, and expands the field of business operations process that CRM tools effected.

Note, looking for a suitable customer relationship management software for your business? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you about your needs?

Q: What are some examples of CRM Software?

A: Customer relationship management (CRM) software refers to any tech solution service that helps businesses run and connect with the current and potential customer. Some examples of leaders in the CRM software industry include Salesforce, Bitrix24, Freshsales.

Q: What are the differences between ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) software?

A: CRM structure is developed to record and store every segment of information regarding customer interactions. This detailed data is standardized and easily shareable throughout the organization.

Like CRM, ERP software is prepared to streamline business processes. While a CRM focuses on the sales section of the company, an ERP system is inserted and applied across different departments.

 Q: What makes a CRM software “open source”?

A: To determine software as open-source, it typically means that some or all of the source code is accessible to users for reviews and commenting or suggestion or modification.

Developers and programmers that want the capability to highly customize their experience CRM software often pick out for open-source solutions.

Firstly, some organizations until today think about CRM software as just a system that collects and stores data about customers and handles their relationship with them.

Beyond that, through the effective functionals provided by the CRM software the company can increase productivity, that drives to increase revenues, and expand more the base of customer foundation as well.

The CRM software ensures better customer satisfaction over a speedy customized customer service, and eventually more sales and customer loyalty.

Whereas other businesses, count on the customer relationship management CRM software, to streamline and control, the traffic of the workflow day to day, which would increase the team’s productivity and efficiency.

Estimation statistic from the Nucleus research showed that the average return on investment from CRM is nearly $9.00 for every dollar spent.

So if you are still thinking that CRM software is just a data mining tool you must change your opinion after complete reading this blog.

How CRM Software Increases The Productivity

The best CRM software must match with your need and strategy to grow the performance and revenue, through some options they offer open source to customize the plan of the work

Thus when we talk about the sales and customer support.

The CRM can streamline the process, control the workflow activities and interactions, deliver the proper customers information to the sales, marketing departments, as customer service as well, through some essential tools functions such as:

1- Integration With Email And Phone

Keeping the customer data updated all the time, by using the CRM platform that maintains and store email addresses and phone number in the system automatically.

Operating the different communications channels within CRM, keep the process controlled, where information can easily be shared to the right agent or department, this allows employees to focus on actual customer care rather than on logging calls and entering data.

2- Integrated Client Profile

The integration with customer’s data allows everyone that interacts with the customer to access all the information seamlessly, which includes the previous communications.

Within the detailed customer profile, that allows an easy and vast view about communications, document, and promotions associated with a specific customer on one convenient screen.

As the team can work on desktop or individually on mobile from multiple locations through the network, the need to deliver a coordinating customer data and communications become vital with the integrated client profile feature.

3- Mass communications

The CRM software offers the mass communications tool that is vital, to deliver and provide the customer with information needed simply and effectively.

This communication tool uses a customized email or SMS to whole or segmented customer lists, in less time than the traditional methods.

What makes the CRM an intelligence choice, have the ability to keep continuous communication with the customer, analyze and review the effectiveness contact operation, With mass communications through CRM, all contacts are automatically logged and organized within the customer profile for convenient access in the future.

4- Management Mission System

Internal communication would be more effective when employees use a unified single point to delegate missions and participate in projects and hold contact between diverse departments as well.

The management mission system is a vital point for any CRM platform, allow to set various tasks, share pertinent files, and prioritize them, all these features give the organization an overview of the progress of the project.

The fact of using a unified point doesn’t mean that should work just on office location, there more options through the cloud-based solution offered for member works on remote or other various locations.

5- Integrated Information-Based

The essential function of integrated information-base is to offer employees a quick and easy access for the pieces of information, they need to deliver a proper and consistent message to customers that meet their requirements.

When a customer contacts the service support to ask for any information about product or service promotion, it important that precise answer is communicated regardless of who provides the service.

This the purpose of information-base, offered by CRM software, the customer support, or any other department can count on the information-base can quickly access answers to frequently asked questions and account details in order to assist customers with the answers that they need, that push them to be more productive away of chaos.

6- Reminders & Calendars

Commitment with appointments not less important of any other factor, and deliver to a customer the message of incompetence.

The fact for creating more trusty with an employee about the customer  deadline or any other timeline, improve employee efficiency and leave the effect of organization and professionalism and this drive more loyalty.

The reminders and calendars are an essential tool on CRM software, allow employees to count on one unified platform for day-to-day tasks and other functions organization.

Corporate calendars may be integrated with personal calendars to prevent double booking and to streamline the scheduling process.

7- Mobile Access

As the mobile device becomes a part of our daily life, to the business world become most important, access to the CRM form a mobile device increasingly matter, as mobility and traveling become part of work in some situations.

Due to the new technology many CRM software offers a mobile app, to make access possible from anywhere, to search customer information, manage reports, access to files templates it simple now.

Include the data update about customers or employees before the meeting is vital to a mission that can be completed by accessing the CRM on distance.

Cloud-Based Infrastructure Solution

Another technology solution increasingly matters where businesses can’t afford any more the high cost of the desk infrastructure, especially the startup businesses.

Cloud-based CRM software corporate for effective growth which translate on decrease expenses of the office technology infrastructure, software, and hardware, with fewer employees on another side.

With the progress, the cloud-based CRM software witness improved reliability and more data security, compared to their software-based counterparts.

5 Ways To Expand Your Customer Base

It’s all about realizing who your customers and prospective customers are and promote the relationship you have with them.

In other words, customer relationship management is the art of maintaining and running a good relation with your clients, understand your customer expectations, and offer more than they can expect.

Due to the new technology of CRM software process will be more streamline and defined ;

1- Reach The Right Customer

One of the marketing surveys showed that 79% of all marketing leads are never  complete the process of purchase.
Source, PARDOT

By using the CRM software you will achieve the most benefits as possible through the marketing tools, email, social, marketing automation

The sales and marketing department now can have an obvious overview of customers and new leads, they can create and target engaging communications to turn prospects into customers and reach key decision-makers faster.

2- Build A Sustainable Relationship For The Long Term

The statement has shown that 46% of the sales leaders are interested in deep customer relationships as the key for sustaining success.
Source, Salesforce*State Of Sale*

If you have a profound realizing about your customer’s interactions, and overview on his history from the beginning with your company, you will have the chance to build a strong relationship founded on trust mutual success, the technology of CRM software helps you to achieve this goal in obvious steps ;

A- Explore Their Needs And Challenges, use the CRM system to record notes what matters to your customers, their preferences, challenges, and needs at the end of each interaction, thus you can use this information at the next exchange, pick up exactly where you left off with a quick review.

B- Engage In The Plan, after realizing and understanding your customer’s business objectives you can recommend the proper promotion for products or services that meets their goals, on accurate time, by using CRM software you will know more detail, such as what they have purchased and how they are using your products or services, so you can provide the most relevant content and information for the next plan.

C- Expand Your 1-To-1 Relationships, more clients prefer the customize the personal experience, and as your business starts growing, it becomes more challengeable to know the details of each interaction and customer, CRM system manages this operation effectively by hosting emails templates, set up task reminders, and enable phone calls to help you connect with customers faster and easier.

3- Decrease The Cost Of Sales

The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5%–20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%–70%.

Attracting the new leads is essential to keep growing but it would be a little bit challengeable or expensive, you can offset the expenses  acquisition costs through sales to your existing customer base, get a deep and vast overview of your upsell-cross sell opportunities, the CRM can help you to improve the sales performance in some points,

– Improving Sales Efficiency, give more attention and priority to the appropriate leads and opportunities that are highly estimated to convert and close depending on customer interaction.

-Boosting Sales Effectiveness, realize which customers are active, to determine the right time to reach them for an optimal exchange and response.

-Increasing Upsell And Cross-Sell Opportunities: have a vast overview of all opportunities that are on the tack, and deals previously on progress  so far.

-Discover Referral Opportunity, instead of keeping paying to attract more new leads, or wasting time cold calling, catch untapped opportunities in your existing market segmentation customers.

4- Provide Better Customer Service

Whenever the service offered to the customer is on the top customized and accurately, you will win the customers loyalty.

The CRM offers a unified database to facilitate the work for each one of customer team support, can access quickly and easily to a customer’s complete history, everyone can quickly provide personalized messages and solutions, with the right resources.

Smoother interactions build trust and encourage repeat business.

5- Improve Customer Retention

As a conclusion for the previous steps that drive you to grow your hallmark and business, the obvious visibility across all relationships and interactions with your customer can help your teams proactively address at-risk accounts and present satisfied customers with new opportunities at just the right moment.

Invest your time and money into the proper CRM software that accurate and meet your plans, and strong customer relationships will pay dividends for years to come.