Having the appropriate sales software to meet a call center or other company’s customer relationship management, or “CRM” needs is essential to keeping the lines of communication open among in-house colleagues as well as between customer/sales agent and clients.

With Salesforce.com’s (News - Alert) sales software – “Sales Cloud” – agents receive a complete view of the customer across all departments. From customer information to contact numbers to previous deals and conversations with past and current sales reps, information is shared across all departments. 

Having a system that works this way allows for in-house sales reps to have background information on a customer, such as a pre-existing issue, so when contacting a customer, sales agents don’t have to go in blindly and cause a less than ample interaction with an outside person.

Knowing that there are outstanding service issues or that a specific customer was just contacted by another department makes a world of difference when picking up the phone to speak with that customer. With the Sales Cloud, customers can use many of sales software’s tools to keep the lines of communication open both in-house and with customers.

With the marketing and leads feature, the gap is closed between marketing and sales departments, bringing both previous marketing campaigns and experiences with customers into a single application where sales people can access and review in order to have all previous contact information on hand.

Salesforce.com’s genius feature allows agents to connect with other sales, marketing and company colleagues to discuss and receive feedback about previous experiences with specific customers. This way, a sales agent can improve on past customer interactions, learn and access the individual needs of specific customers as a way to create a new, intuitive experience for the customer, which will improve the relationship between all parties.

“This is one of our key selling points,” Salesforce.com officials said. “[Agents are] getting a complete view of the customer across all departments.”