Why voice conversations are a vital piece of your digital strategy

Written by Charles Heunemann, Managing Director VP Asia Pacific at Natterbox Limited

It’s hard to believe that less than 50 per cent of CRM sales updates actually make their way into the CRM, but that’s what a recent article on SalesforceBen revealed about how automatic logging of activity into Salesforce can improve data quality.

This number not only sheds light into a lack of communications and marketing strategy, but also reinforces a double negative that impedes sales productivity and robs management of data critical to decision making.

Over the years much has been written about this particular hurdle to user adoption, which is really what this issue is, a major culprit for CRM project failures. In fact, according to CIO.com CRM project failure rates can be as high as 33 per cent with data quality listed as the second largest contributor to user dissatisfaction.

Automating the capture of company data appears to be the answer to this issue as relying on manual data input is inherently inefficient. Like the SalesforceBen article much of the focus is on the capture of digital or text information such as email/calendar, web-to-lead forms or chat. However, all of these factors fail to recognise one critical element of business communications, voice.

While text based communications are transactional in nature when it comes to building trust and growing relationships successful businesses all have one thing in common, they all talk to their customers.  Sixty per cent of business communications are still conducted over the phone however for many organisations there remains a stark disconnect between their CRM, legacy phone and contact centre systems.

Integrating phone and contact centre systems with Salesforce has innumerable benefits for businesses. Automating the capture of call data as an activity task history record is a productivity boon for staff, some of whom according to the aforementioned article have to log more 500 activities per week.

A phone system and contact centre that is 100 per cent embedded and managed within Salesforce takes away most of the complexity associated with figuring out how to integrate voice with CRM. It also provides a simple and effective pathway for elevating voice into your digital strategy including access to the latest in Voice Analytics powered by artificial intelligence which can assist in refining business operations and ultimately their success.

Automating the capture of voice information does more than just help management make better decisions, it also leads to a virtuous cycle which enables call data to be leveraged to improve the customer experience via personalisation of the customer journey and increasing speed of engagement which leads to greater levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.