Customer service is the key difference between a highly professional company and just a good company. Intelligent companies are empowering their customer service to deliver an exceptional customers service. Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions are playing a pivotal role in this empowerment.

 

More and more companies are deploying CRM solutions to effectively manage their valuable customers. The aim of a CRM solution is to meet customer expectations and needs in order to achieve maximum customer lifetime value and return to the company.

 

CRM solution is used to collect, store and manage information about current and prospective customers. In a business unit, CRM organizes all customer data in a way that allows various departments to collaborate on customer care, allowing exceptional service and intelligent decision-making.

 

Using CRM, companies are able to improve the productivity and efficiency of sales, marketing, customer service and of other departments. Today, companies are also thinking of sharing and leveraging information from their CRM systems with other information channels to take these benefits one step further.

 

The integration of CRM systems with phone applications is seen as a way by which companies can improve customer experience as well as optimize their investment in CRM.

 

To build customer loyalty, maximize efficiency and productivity of service and sales functions, companies are also automating interaction between interactive voice response (IVR) applications and CRM

 

The integration of IVR applications with customer service functions generates a positive caller experience. At the start of a call, in an automated way, the information from CRM system can be used to provide the caller with personalized information.

 

IVR systems can be set to read data such as whether the caller is an important customer, or he recently made a purchase; and more in real-time. This allows the support to respond according to the relevant information and more efficiently. Along with good will, the company also increases its pool of satisfied customers.

 

Flexibility is critical to successfully extending self-service CRM functionality to the telephone. The application must be able to respond to changing customer/business needs in real time. Hosted IVR applications are making the change and adjustment of phone options an effortless process. Through a simple Web browser, a Web-based toolkit enables real-time adjustments.

 

Live telephone conversations are still a popular way for customers to access enterprise information. Phone-enabling CRM systems shorten the call transaction which increases overall customer experience. Also, these systems provide an environment for decreasing costly live agent time.

 

Phone-enabled CRM applications offer voice-oriented incident management, order status, repair tracking, refund status, password reset and customer survey capabilities. The applications provide instant and intuitive access to a broad selection of support options and help customers resolve more common and/or lower priority items on their own.

 

There are technologies that allow call center solutions to integrate with CRM systems. When a call comes in, the solutions are able to access company’s database to retrieve related details, such as customer records, purchase history, or billing information, to facilitate the call. This allows agents to interact with customers in a more personalized way.