
With the evolution of business process outsourcing, companies are striving to attain competitive edge by improving their customer support services. Initially, enterprises primarily focused on hiring a third party service provider to gain cost advantage. With time, this focus has shifted towards attaining strategic advantages by leveraging various service delivery models followed by the outsourcing industry.
This brings us to the question what exactly is a customer relationship management (CRM), and how can BPOs help companies in strengthening their customer relations. CRM is mainly a process by which an outbound call center is able to manage interactions with its current and potential users. It is a customized approach that makes use of technology to synchronize marketing, sales, technical and customer support. It is also used by BPO companies to manage clients and business contacts for effectively handling sales leads. CRM solutions, by integrating with the traditional call center services like helpdesk outsourcing, facilitate more effective up-selling, cross-selling, and customer retention.
Let's take a glance at how CRM has helped enterprises in personalizing their services
CRM tool incorporates three important features, including analytical CRM, operational CRM, and collaborative CRM. While analytical tool investigates the user data for a wide range of functions, operational approach offers a comprehensive front line support to sales, marketing and other related services. A collaborative relation management tool is used by a service provider to directly interact with the consumers.
By integrating these three features of CRM software, call centers can effortlessly manage and retrieve customer database for their future reference. The other benefits include:
1. Improves Efficiency: The customer relationship management software helps third party service providers improve their productivity by quickly reviewing customer orders, effectively reading required disclosures, and consistently tracking order fulfillment requests. In fact, a study by Sales Force Automation states that the software can improve a company's cross sell and up sell orders increased by 12% in the initial six months, while it can increase the productivity of a customer support agent by nearly 15% in 60 days.
2. Increases Customer Retention Rate: It is important for a service vendor to help its client in improving the consumer retention rate. By using CRM software, the vendor is able to efficiently manage the increasing volume of customer interactions by formulating and designing the telesales strategy. This not only streamlines their operations, but also ensures that a customer call is never missed.
3. Cost Savings: By using CRM application, a contact center is able to optimize its work hours by allocating its resources in a better way. This facilitates a BPO unit to manage its services in the peak hour and accordingly, save overhead costs related to consultants.
In this way, customer relationship management software can help contact centers in building business excellence.