Tag: Communication

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Getting a Better Sense of Customer Relationship Management

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I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how important it is to have a handle on your clients’ needs. After all, how else are you supposed to offer them the level of service that they need to remain satisfied enough to stay subscribed to what you offer? This endeavor is exactly why a customer relationship management (or CRM) system is so crucial.

What is Customer Relationship Management?
Customer relationship management is effectively how a company can gauge and improve their interactions with their clients, gradually coaxing them toward repeated business transactions. By compiling data from the many points of contact that a prospect or repeat customer has with a business, that business can build a profile that will help inform their next steps.

With data able to be drawn from website and social media activity, live chat and telephone conversations, and a customer’s purchase history, CRM software can heavily assist you by constructing a database of customer information. Some can even automate certain processes, assisting a company’s marketing and sales forces in more effectively communicating with customers from a more informed standpoint, or allowing labor to be saved by leading an incoming caller through a precomposed voice menu to direct them to whom they need to reach.

A CRM can also be used to optimize internal tasks, like the managerial responsibilities of Human Resources, processing analytics, and automating certain workflows. Some CRM solutions have even begun to incorporate artificial intelligence to better predict a customer’s trajectory.

Customer relationship management systems can be hosted on-premise or delivered over the Internet as a cloud-based solution.

Putting a CRM to Use
A CRM can be leveraged in any number of ways for your business to embrace. Social media engagement can be monitored to identify which platform is most used by an audience, monitoring keywords and brand mentions. Otherwise, it can be used to assist in addressing feedback over social media.

Speaking of feedback, a CRM system can also be of use in a business’ contact center, collecting data from service calls to inform a company’s sales and marketing efforts, as we mentioned above. This is especially useful in a business-to-business application, as it can help to optimize a business’ journey through the sales and marketing funnel.

If a CRM system sounds like something that your company should implement, reach out to COMPANYNAME by calling PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Know Your Tech: A/B Testing

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A key component to effectively attracting your audience is to better understand their preferences. Even the most seemingly insignificant change, like changing the color of the buttons on your website, can have a major impact on how effective your materials are. Fortunately, through a process called A/B testing, observing the impact of these changes is somewhat straightforward.

A/B Testing, Defined
Running an A/B test is the process of comparing a single variable to deem which option, Option A or Option B, is the more effective of the two. The key to an effective A/B test is to only change one thing between the two test subjects – otherwise, you have no way of knowing exactly what it was that was the influential change.

A/B tests can be used to make a wide variety of choices, from something as simple as an adjustment to a call-to-action to a different layout to a particular page. In this case, Option A should be the way things currently are to serve as a control for the experiment, while Option B displays your proposed change. Each option is then presented to an equally-sized segment of your audience to deem which of the two is the more effective.

Setting Up an A/B Test
A/B testing can be used to make a vast number of decisions, as long as they are approached one at a time. As we said before, if multiple variables are involved in a single test, that test isn’t going to deliver reliable enough results to make any well-supported decisions. It is also worth mentioning that A/B testing tends to work better when comparing options for relatively minor changes, like calls-to-action or images included in an email or on a landing page, rather than big ones.

The first step will be to decide which variable you intend to test, followed by your determination of a metric to base your observations against. Does this change boost engagement? Increase the time spent on page? Improve your click-through rate?

Once this has been accomplished, you’re ready to state what your control option will be, and what your change will be after that. Your control group should be whatever you currently have in place, so you can accurately judge if a change would be an improvement or not. Then you need to settle on a sample size, or the number of recipients that will be a part of this test.

Not all changes will be accurately measured with a sample size alone. Some changes would be better left running until a statistically significant data sample has been collected. Speaking of statistical significance, you will also need to decide how significant your results have to be before a change is deemed to be worthwhile.

Running An A/B Test
There are two real keys to running a successful A/B test: first, you have to give it enough time to collect the data you’ll need to come to a conclusion, and second, both options need to be tested at the same time to prevent other variables from affecting your data. Of course, if the variable that your A/B test is evaluating is timing, this doesn’t apply so much.

In short, A/B testing is a relatively simple way to make sure that you’re having as large an impact on your audience as possible. Can you think of any times that you’ve done something similar to test out a proposed change? Tell us about it in the comments!

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tip of the Week: Creating Canned Responses in Gmail

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If you’re like most business users, you rely on email quite a bit to stay apprised of what is going on, as do most of the people you are likely in communication with. As such, you most likely understand that, while most emails require some kind of response or confirmation of receipt, not all of these messages require a heartfelt message. This is where Gmail’s Canned Responses come in handy.

This week’s tip will go over how to set up your own canned responses to streamline your repetitive, but necessary, communications.

How to Set Up Canned Responses
First, you’ll need to log in to the browser version of Gmail. Once there, click on the Gear icon in the top right under your profile image and select Settings from the menu. From there, you’ll see a horizontal menu that will display Advanced, click into it. You will see the option to enable Canned Responses. Click the radio button to select enable, and then save your changes. You can now create canned responses to use in your correspondence.

Creating and Using Your Canned Responses
To create a canned response to use, open the message composer and write out what you want your message to say. Once you are satisfied with your return message, access the message window options by clicking the button in the bottom-right corner. That menu should now have a Canned responses option, with a sub-menu that allows you to save a New canned response. You will be prompted to give your new response a name, and then it will be saved for future use in that sub-menu.

What kind of messages would you anticipate using canned responses for? Tell us what you think in the comments!

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Casserly Consulting Blog

9 Ingredients to Creating a Winning UCC Strategy

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If there is one thing that supports everything a successful business does, it has to be communication. Any company relies on its communications to ensure that its clients are satisfied with their services, and as communications have improved, it has only become easier for a unified communication and collaboration, or UCC, strategy to take form.

With these strategies, businesses have been able to expand upon their capabilities to enter and embrace the digital age. What follows are ten elements that a UCC would commonly feature in a business setting.

Collaborative Software
It is essentially guaranteed that you have some experience with collaborative software in this day and age, even if you haven’t personally used it to its full potential. With Microsoft Office and the G Suite available almost anywhere, the idea of collaborative software is not a new one. However, there are many more solutions out there that allow for many people to pool their skills and talents into a particular project in real time, regardless of how far away they are from each other. Many of these solutions also enable video conferencing and instant messaging, which will be discussed in greater depth later.

Podcasts
Imagine giving a presentation where the audience could pause you and wait until a more opportune time to listen to the rest of what you had to say. This is exactly what a podcast delivers–an on-demand lecture on a topic that an audience can listen to at their own convenience. Podcasts are also a more personal method of communication, as many listen through the intimate channel that is the headphone. If you are considering delivering your own podcast, you should be sure that you have these five needs planned out beforehand:

  1. Topic
  2. Length
  3. Frequency
  4. Format
  5. Distribution

Instant Messaging
When it comes to rapid communication, you don’t get much faster than ‘instant.’ Businesses have picked up on this and now leverage instant messaging as a communications method. With utility as a communication device between individuals as well as among groups of people, instant messaging lives up to its name with the capability for near-instantaneous response times as individuals communicate with each other. In addition, companies that have used instant messaging in the workplace have seen increased efficiency and collaboration, as well as a reduction in email.

Video Conferencing
While it is certainly not a new technology, the practicality of video conferencing has increased significantly over the past few years. Better technology and improved Internet speeds mean that communications can happen in real time from almost anywhere in the world. Not to mention that, according to the IDG Enterprise Video Conferencing Trends in 2016, 96 percent of those surveyed agreed that video conferencing improves productivity and can reduce travel costs by 30 percent.

Discussion Forums
Sometimes a user would rather crowdsource their answers from their fellow users than bother the original source. Providing these users with an outlet to share their issues with each other allows them to identify their most pressing concerns, and also tells you what needs to be resolved or addressed first. You and your team can also step in and provide a solution to these issues, establishing yourselves as thought leaders.

Another benefit of discussion forums is that you are able to collect demographic information from your visitors here as well, enabling you to create a more complete idea of who your visitors are, and which groups seek information on which topics.

Email
While email may have once been seen solely as a means of sending and receiving messages with an individual or group, it is now relied upon as the primary record for over three-quarters of business correspondence. Archived emails help businesses keep track of their transactions, and incomplete email records have been the downfall of some companies in legal matters.

Clearly, email needs to be a component of your UCC. However, you will want to ensure that your selected email solution is properly secured, has searchable archives, is mobile-friendly, and integrates with your other solutions as much as is possible.

Enterprise Social Networking
While social media may have a less-than-shining reputation as a distraction in a workplace setting, Enterprise Social Networking works to the opposite effect. A company can leverage social media to help develop external business opportunities and to promote internal collaboration and communication. Furthermore, employees can be encouraged to act as brand ambassadors, using social media to share company culture posts and boost audience engagement–a strategy that more and more businesses are adopting.

With a UCC, a business has a variety of collaborative and communicative solutions to choose from, and many line-of-business applications incorporate enterprise social media platforms.

ChatBots
ChatBots can serve as a very helpful communication tool for the modern business and its website. Often structured in a way that is similar to an instant message, a ChatBot combines AI and human intelligence to improve the customer’s experience through a few common features.

  1. Engagement – One of a business website’s key roles is to engage with its visitors so they will interact with the website. A ChatBot is an always-present opportunity to engage, with the benefit of providing your site visitor with information and assistance.
  2. Personalization – As one of your visitors uses your ChatBot, they will likely give you a pretty good idea of why they are visiting. This allows you to customize your sales approach for their company, as well as to track and evaluate user behavior to deem which types of content are the most impactful to your strategy.
  3. User Experience – Most businesses have an unofficial list of the questions that everyone asks. ChatBots can make that list official, with set responses that are activated by certain keywords in your visitor’s inquiry.

Project Management Software
In order for a business to be successful, it needs to be successfully managed. This is why 77 percent of businesses leverage project management software, as it encourages collaboration among team members, improved organization, and an overall boost to performance. This variety of software is also used by 66 percent of organizations to communicate with their clients.

UCC has grown significantly in popularity as the technology that supports it has developed. For more information on Unified Communication and Collaboration solutions and their place in your business, call us at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Cost Savings Are Just The Start of VoIP’s Benefits

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Business owners and managers are always looking to save a buck. Since the cost of doing business continues to climb, looking to the cloud for their business-critical applications is one way to spread computing costs out over time. The cloud offers several solutions to help the modern business keep their costs down, and nowhere can these costs be mitigated more than with a business’ communications.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), specifically hosted VoIP, can help you reduce your communications costs in many ways, including:

Hardware Costs
A hosted VoIP solution makes it possible to get a powerful business phone system without having to go through the headaches and expense associated with installing new phone lines. Anyone who has ever run telephone wire from a distribution hub through the walls of a building knows that, in certain cases, it’s an arduous job. By hooking directly into your company’s broadband network, you can easily add and remove VoIP users on demand.

Additionally, deploying a hosted VoIP system removes the need for PBX hardware altogether. As the major expense in any traditional business telephone system, a PBX system can have huge costs, even thousands of dollars, per user. Even for a smaller PBX roll out, you are looking at a substantial capital investment that is transformed immediately into an operational expense once you choose to introduce a hosted VoIP solution.

Fee Structures
The largest expense for any telephone system is the minutes the phone is being used. Every traditional phone bill will feature costs for long distance calling, which the way it is set up most of the time, are calls that can often be local. Getting rid of this recurring expense is one of the most effective ways hosted VoIP is able to present any business with cost savings.

Broadband Internet is relatively inexpensive, basically mandatory, and available through multiple regional carriers, allowing your organization to buy the resources you need, again, as operational expense, not capital outlays. Moreover, the VoIP service rates are very competitive with the rates that you’d pay if utilizing a traditional phone system, without the need for constant management and maintenance of the system as a whole. A VoIP subscription is typically paid per user, which also provides efficient scalability and organizational flexibility in regards to your telephone system.

Mobility
Another way VoIP helps the modern business stretch its dollar is by adding a mobile aspect to their phone system. Many VoIP systems have mobile applications available through the Android or Apple App Stores. This provides organizations the mobile flexibility they need from their business phone system without paying a pretty penny for individual phones and service plans. Since these applications can be run over Wi-Fi, or through the organization’s virtual private network (VPN), it can save plenty of financial resources normally spent on the deployment of a typical mobile strategy.

VoIP provides all of the most important options that traditional phone systems provide, while adding mobility, and removing the enormous upfront capital costs, long distance fees, and operational maintenance that traditional business telephone systems bring. If your business is looking to cut costs, considering a VoIP system is a good place to start. For more information about VoIP or for to learn more on how to leverage other enterprise communications systems for your business, call the IT professionals at COMPANYNAME today at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

3 Reasons VoIP Is An Improvement Over Traditional Telephony

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Do you still rely on a traditional telephone system to keep in touch with clients and internal departments? This can be a severe issue for your operational budget. While your employees might be accustomed to having the physical phone on their desks, virtual phones are becoming a major contender to replace them for all different types of businesses.

Voice Over Internet Protocol, also known as VoIP, has a surprising amount of benefits over its traditional contemporary. Here are some of the best features of VoIP that make it a dynamic and flexible choice for your organization.

Flexibility
Have you ever had to step away from your desk while you’re on the phone? With the static lines tied to the corded phones of old, this was an impossibility. Even if it is a cordless phone, chances are that it’s limited to a certain range, even within your office. VoIP can completely change the way you look at a telephone solution.

VoIP has options that lets your employees take their duties on the road, allowing them to communicate with any connected device. You can use VoIP applications on a laptop, smartphone, or even a desktop. All you need is the right software installed. Your employees can take their conversations on the road, be it for a business trip, a walk down the street, or burning the midnight oil at the home office to meet an important deadline.

Functionality
Knowing what your phone system can do is incredibly important. Sometimes your phone system will come with various other services like your Internet or television packaged together. When this happens, service providers tend to nickel-and-dime you for everything they can get for simple conferencing solutions. Depending on what your services come attached to, you may need additional features that aren’t already included.

VoIP allows your organization to spend fewer resources on services that you may not want or need, and free up more funds to spend on what you absolutely need. For example, you can get all of the services that you want and need with VoIP, including call forwarding and conference calling, but without going all-in on a service that forces you to pay for television or other services. This helps your business be more productive and lucrative without dropping more than necessary on unused services.

Cost
Your traditional telephone system will wind up costing you more in the long run thanks to its plethora of services and features that don’t do anything for your bottom line. Since these companies require various services to be purchased in a bundle, they cause more trouble than they are worth–particularly in regard to long-distance charges. It might seem like you’re getting a great, varied service, but you’re just spending money on things that you don’t need.

Unlike traditional telephone systems, VoIP lets your organization benefit from significant cost savings. Since you’re only using your business’ Internet connection, you’ll spend less on implementation fees and running wires around your office. All you need to think about is your bandwidth, but that’s easy enough to figure out compared to all of the headaches that come from a traditional telephone service. We can help you work out a plan where you get all of the services that you want, all budgeted into a monthly payment that works for your specific needs.

Does your business need a new communications solution? COMPANYNAME can help. Your organization can take full advantage of VoIP to augment communications and change the way you do business. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.