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Nicola Brookes - ContactCenterWorld.com Blog

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From Salesforce adoption to collaboration: 6 tips for sales team success

In today’s super-competitive retail environment, companies that help their sales teams manage customer relationships effectively tend to find more success than those that don’t. For this reason, more and more businesses are turning to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to provide the support that sales teams need to deliver better results.

However, despite the benefits, some sales reps still view these systems as tools that benefit management much more than themselves. With that thought in mind, here are six CRM-based tips from NewVoiceMedia to help get your sales team more invested in your business and increase customer retention and revenue as a consequence.

1.     Salesforce is the world’s number one CRM system

If CRM system implementation fails, more often than not, it’s because of insufficient user adoption among sales reps. To this end, Salesforce has become the world’s number one CRM system because it focuses on delivering an intuitive user experience, and is packed full of features that make a sales rep’s job easier.

For instance, Salesforce ensures sales reps are able to access a complete and accurate become the world’s number one CRM system because it focuses on delivering an intuitive user experience, data set on their leads, which can be used with confidence at all times. As such, the system acts as a sales enabling tool, capable of turning every rep into a one-person sales and marketing machine.

Consequently, rather than being perceived solely as a tool for managers to track progress and compile reports, Salesforce helps those ‘on the ground floor’ to convert leads better, which, in turn, keeps them engaged and motivated.

2.     Create a clear CRM vision statement

A CRM vision statement should clearly define to your employees all corporate objectives related to delivering the customer experience you expect.

Ideally, the statement needs to be seen as ‘coming from the top’ via a senior executive, and expressed in a way that will engage staff. A failure to do either of these things will invariably result in the message not earning the respect from your sales team that it needs to succeed.

Conversely, fully motivating your sales staff to engage and buy into your CRM vision will help provide the foundations needed for delivering the customer experience you desire. What’s more, at the same time, it will help you to differentiate your core business values with those you create for customer interaction excellence.

3.     Measure CRM strategy success and KPIs

Every CRM strategy needs clear KPIs that support your vision statement. These are usually divided between sales, service and marketing metrics, and include things like number of prospects, customer satisfaction scores and retention rates.

Whatever KPIs you use, the metrics need to allow you to measure, track and evaluate the success of your CRM strategy. In addition, success metrics that are tied into compensation and rewards for high achievers are also an effective tool for helping to ensure the continued engagement of your sales team.

4.     Review your customer facing processes

If you are thinking about integrating a system such as Salesforce, it is also worth evaluating the approach your business takes to delivering customer satisfaction.

When introducing a new CRM platform, for example, many businesses simply decide to automate existing sales and service processes. If these processes are already flawed, however, the effectiveness of introducing a new CRM system will be reduced significantly.

If you haven’t already done so, then, before deploying CRM technology, think about whether there is anything you can do to streamline your customer-facing processes. Alongside the new system, refining these processes will help develop your customer communication mechanisms and reduce frustration levels within your sales team.

5.     Keep it as simple as possible

If you are rolling out a new CRM system for your business, it is easy to get carried away and include lots of mandatory fields. Unfortunately, this is both the quickest and fastest route to driving down adoption rates among your sales team.

As humans, we are hardwired to resist change. Therefore, if you try and enforce too many changes on your sales team too soon, you will most likely encounter resistance. Instead, keep things simple – especially at first – and roll out the new system and any other changes gradually.

6.     Encourage collaboration

From the outside looking in, the world of sales is often perceived as dog-eat-dog. In reality, though, it is the sales team that cultivates a culture of collaboration that often enjoys more success.

With that thought in mind, Chatter is a component of Salesforce that is worth encouraging your sales team to use. This is because it allows users to form a community for knowledge-sharing, ensuring the right people can find and share the information that they need from anywhere in the world.

 

Publish Date: June 20, 2017 5:59 AM


Inside sales stories from the pros and what you can learn

From paintings on cave walls to online blogging, storytelling has forever been a huge part of human nature – and it’s no different in sales. The best sellers tell compelling stories about the products and services they push that leave their prospects begging to hear more. To celebrate this fact, NewVoiceMedia has compiled a selection of quotes from the best inside sales pros, complete with a summary of what you can learn from them.

1.     Ralph Barsi, Senior Director of Sales Development at Achievers

The quote: “I decided to focus on inspiring each individual rep, instead of the team as a whole. The more I learn about and understand each SDR [sales development rep], the more I can inspire and influence them to perform at their highest level.”

What you can learn: People are intrinsically different; what inspires one person might leave another feeling totally uninterested. In a team, you will have a huge range of personalities, skills and temperaments to contend with. Therefore, if you are an inside sales manager, investing time and effort getting to know each individual rep in your team could be the key to unlocking their full collective potential.

2.     Trish Bertuzzi, President and Chief Strategist of The Bridge Group

The quote: “I think sales leaders need to focus on their building blocks. And when I say focus, I mean actually listen and observe the interactions between your sellers and your potential buyers.”

What you can learn: Technologies have changed the face of sales. They have made accessing prospect data easier, while creating massive leaps forward in productivity and conversion rates. The downside is that some inside sales teams have been encouraged to over-rely on the helping hand provided by these shiny new tools. However, if you use amazing tech as a crutch for the absence of a solid sales process, you are likely to find it difficult to maintain long-term success.

3.     Lauren Bailey, President of Factor 8

The quote: “Many believe in the next 10 years, inside [sales] is going to shift all to electronic. So it’s becoming a lower and lower touch sales process across all industries.”

What you can learn: The recent growth of inside sales has been accelerated by digital technology. Despite the multitude of benefits, a shift to electronic has created fewer face-to-face touch points across the sales process. To counteract this trend and encourage better engagement with decision makers, it will become increasingly important that businesses and inside sellers create more digital touch points within the buying journey.

4.     Mike Brooks, Founder of Mr. Inside Sales

The quote: “You need to surround your prospect, you need to reach out to them any and every way you can… and you have to reach out to them often.”

What you can learn: Regardless of the growing claims that technology has signalled the death knell for human-to-human interaction within the sales journey, when people need help, many still prefer to talk directly to a person. In fact, one of NewVoiceMedia’s recent studies revealed that 68% of people still prefer a live agent to handle their customer service queries. So, while it might be a brave new world for sales in many aspects, we still shouldn’t underestimate the power of the humble telephone.

5.     Chad Burmeister, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at ConnectAndSell

The quote: “Right now gamification, while important and successful, is only really being used within sales to drive motivation and productivity. What I would like to see is gamification across company departments.”

What you can learn: By providing inside sales managers with tools for motivating and engaging reps, gamification software has brought a sense of innovation to driving sales. Here, Burmeister is arguing that other departments can learn from inside sales by instilling the principles of gamification across an entire business. If executed effectively, gamification can therefore help to engage a wider range of employees and make them more productive.

6.     Laurie Page, Managing Partner at The Bridge Group

The quote: “Eighty-five percent of what’s learned without reinforcement is forgotten within a month. You have to review the same thing again and again until behaviour changes, which is right about the time they can’t bear hearing you repeat the same information.”

What you can learn: The high number of new technologies entering the inside sales space means that businesses are now having to invest heavily in training for virtual selling techniques. However, a lack of continuous training, and more importantly reinforcement, can reduce the value in such training significantly. That's why every sales manager needs to reinforce key lessons via continuous training.  

7.     Dave Stein, Author of Beyond the Sales Process

The quote: “To those of us who study sales performance for a living, ineffective sales hiring is indisputably an epidemic. […] We also know that, depending on the industry, somewhere between a fifth and a third of salespeople aren’t suited to the roles that they were hired to perform.”

What you can learn: Employees are the heart and soul of an organisation. Consequently, hiring the right employees in the right roles is one of the most important aspects of any successful business. As such, the majority of forward-thinking sales managers take a hands-on approach to choosing the most suitable reps to build an effective team.

 

Would you like to learn more about adopting a winning approach to inside sales? Then read NewVoiceMedia’s “Ultimate Guide to Inside Sales” to discover additional tips and advice for building a successful sales team.

Publish Date: January 25, 2017 7:37 AM

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Customer service skills: What does it take to make a great contact centre manger?

Contact centres act as the frontline for many businesses. They are the point of contact where customers and companies meet to resolve issues and buy products and services. Operating at their best, contact centres play a fundamental part in creating a positive customer experience. At their worst, they can inflict irreparable damage that the business they represent will find hard to come back from.

It’s the job of the contact centre manager to oversee the balancing act that makes or breaks a call centre’s success. As such, they have to handle extreme amounts of pressure, while keeping agents happy and accountable for goals and deadlines. Despite the difficulties, if you’re a contact manager, there are a select number of habits and practices that will help you follow the path to greatness.  

Listen to feedback from your agents

Agents are the eyes and ears of any contact centre. From a contact manager’s perspective, this makes their feedback invaluable, as they will be the first to notice trends, and their input can be used to stimulate changes that will help improve the overall customer experience.

Allowing agents to air their voice via team meetings will help them feel as though they play a vital role in the success of the contact centre. However, it is always good to back up such sessions by implementing an anonymous ‘suggestions box’. This way, those who are not comfortable offering feedback in public will still have a way of getting their point of view across.

Deliver short, sharp training sessions on an ongoing basis

According to a report by Sales Performance International, without reinforcement, 84% of what is learned through multi-day training programmes is lost within 90 days.

As a result, there is a growing number of sales managers who are seeking to replace marathon training sessions with learning experiences that are short, sharp and focused. Training delivered as needed, where needed, and an ongoing basis is better served to making lessons stick. Plus, it can also save money in the long-term – so it’s a win-win situation.

Once in a while, put yourself in your agents’ shoes

When was the last time you picked up a headset? If it’s been awhile, you might be surprised by the insight you can glean. For one, it will help you gain a better understanding of the challenges your agents face every day. But perhaps of greater value is that managers who are occasionally seen to put themselves in the shoes of their workforce, typically, find it a lot easier to command respect from the agents working for them.

Implement a structured recruiting programme

Estimates for the turnover rate at call centres across the industry varies. However, there are studies that place the rate at somewhere between 25 to 35%. That means for every 100 agents you employ, up to 35 will leave of their own volition by the end of the year.

Implementing a structured recruiting programme can help you attract better talent, which, in theory, will contribute to reducing your staff turnover rate. Start by ensuring that all applicants fully understand the contact centre environment, and use behaviour-based interview questions and competency-based assessment tools to evaluate whether they will be a good fit for your team.

If your agent turnover rate remains high, conduct exit interviews to gain a better understanding of why people leave. This will help you to identify the common trends and grievances that will help you to make improvements that increase job satisfaction levels.

Motivate your staff

Due to the stressful nature of the work, call centre agents are prone to burn out. As a contact centre manager, this means learning how to maintain drive and energy within your team is an essential part of being successful.

One of the main techniques contact managers use for stimulating agents is setting targets and offering incentives. If you work in sales, the biggest motivation will probably always be money. Consequently, if possible, it’s a good idea to reward exceptional performance with cash bonuses.

Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that every person is unique, which means some won’t be solely money motivated. In this case, sharing positive feedback, highlighting successes, developing team bonding sessions and using a combination of other motivational tactics can help reap the desired rewards.

Be approachable

More often than not, contact managers that show they care will have the most success when it comes to getting the best out of their team.

Consider talking to your team about things other than work. This will help you to gain a better understanding of what makes them tick, and it will help your agents see you as an individual and not just their manager. Equally, joining your agents for lunch and mixing up working hours to be seen by a broader range of employees can also go a long way towards creating a positive and inclusive working environment.

Embrace new technologies

In recent years, technological advances have changed the face of the contact centre.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can now help agents access relevant prospect data in real-time, which help provide the support needed to deliver better results. Mobile technology and cloud-based SaaS means agents no longer need to be tied to their desk, and can work from anywhere. Social media platforms, when used effectively and ethically, can provide agents with extra touch points in the customer service mix.

In short, new technologies have – and will continue to – provide a completive edge to contact centre managers with their finger on the pulse, so it pays to keep informed on the latest tools and developments.

As you can see, there are a wide range of skills and techniques that a contact manager can adopt to help breed success. You can download NewVoiceMedia's free guide to find our more.

Publish Date: November 11, 2016 10:34 AM


Attending Connect 2016? Here are 5 tips for making the most of the conference

If you’re in retail or ecommerce, your business’ most important asset is its customers. Taking care of them and understanding what makes them tick is fundamental to your success.

To help you sell more and serve better, NewVoiceMedia is using Connect 2016 to show you how to harness the power of emerging technologies and tap into the mind of your customers.

So, if you’re attending this year’s event, here are five tips that will make sure you leave our exhibition with actionable insights that’ll guide you towards greater customer success.

1.    Careful planning leads to success

Thanks to the conference’s packed schedule, there’s unlikely to be much time for you to stop and think once you arrive at Connect 2016. As a result, you should take the time to review the agenda carefully before arriving, ensuring you don’t miss the speakers and talks that are most relevant to your business.

If you’re using the conference to network, it’s a good idea to remember that you only get one chance to make a first impression. Before setting off, make sure you pack comfortable, professional attire and plenty of business cards. This way, any new connections you make are more likely to remember you once the conference is over. Of course, you can also download our app to have this info at your fingertips! Just search NewVoiceMedia in the App Store.

2.    Effective note-taking requires groundwork

With 25 speakers crammed into one amazing day, there will be a lot to take in at Connect 2016. If you don’t take effective notes, you’ll be in danger of forgetting important and actionable takeaways before you even get home.

If you know your handwriting becomes illegible after hours of taking notes, you might be better served using a laptop or tablet. Conversely, if typing compromises your speed of thought, it’s probably a better idea to go ‘full analogue’ and opt for pen and paper!

Either way, it’s important that you don’t overburden yourself with information to look back over. So, as each talk comes to a close, make a record of the top three insights you want to follow up on. This way, when it comes to acting upon the insights you glean, you’ll be able to focus your post-conference research much more effectively.

We’ll also be providing the key takeaways after the event, so you don’t miss out.

3.    Get involved in the larger conversation

A conference is a great way to meet new people in your field. However, if you’re usually backwards about coming forwards, reaching out to people across social media before the event is a great way to break the ice. Get ahead of the game by using #NVMConnect now to engage with other attendees and guest speakers, and get involved in the larger conversation.

The closing party is a great opportunity to connect with people in a more relaxed setting. But, with the potential to network

with lots of like-minded people, it’s a great idea to create and rehearse an ‘elevator pitch-style’ introduction to you and your business. Not only will this help you to communicate more strongly and confidently, but it will ensure that you keep the conversation focused and on-topic when you only have a few minutes to chat.

4.    Build connections with the guest speakers

The guest speakers at Connect 2016 are some of the biggest decision-makers and thought leaders in the sales and service industries. When it comes to providing wisdom that could help give your business an added edge, each and every one of them is a veritable fountain of useful information.

If you get the opportunity, don’t be afraid to say hello, ask questions and grab business cards. Some of our guest speakers will be staying around for the after party, where you might even be able to ask your question face-to-face. If not, you can always follow up after the event by engaging with them via the appropriate social media channels or email.

5.    Share the knowledge

If you’ve followed the advice outlined in this post, you should come back armed with a lot of fresh information and exciting insights to put into practice. The best thing you can do after returning to the working environment is to share this knowledge with your employees, colleagues or bosses.

You could put together a short presentation covering the most interesting things you learned for the next company meeting; feedback the key insights you collected to your team; introduce your boss to the most interesting connections you made. In short, the further your new skills and knowledge spread, the better prepared your business will be for connecting with customers in more meaningful ways.

Publish Date: June 29, 2016 1:06 PM


5 reasons not to miss Connect 2016 if you’re striving for sales & service excellence

On June 30, some of the biggest decision-makers and thought leaders in the sales and service industries will be assembling under one roof. It’s AT&T Park in San Francisco – home to the city’s baseball champions – and the event is Connect 2016, hosted by NewVoiceMedia and supported by Salesforce and AA-ISP.

The continual emergence of new technologies is enabling customers to engage with brands and businesses in an ever increasing number of ways. Using this as a starting point, the motivation behind Connect 2016 is to show you how to combine human initiative with the power of these technologies to change the way you think about sales and service for the better.  

So, with that thought in mind, here are five reasons why you should book a ticket for this event – before it’s too late.

1.      One day, 25 expert speakers

We’ve invested a lot of time and effort to ensure our agenda is packed full of expert analysis and actionable insights. A huge range of sales and service experts will be sharing knowledge from a wide selection of on-trend topics. This means in the time it usually takes to complete one working day, you can learn about customer engagement tactics, modern customer relationship management (CRM) strategies, omni-channel service and much, much more.

2.      Learn from sales leaders

The effectiveness – or, indeed, the ineffectiveness – of your sales management can make the difference between your business posting record profits and merely treading water. That’s why we’ve invited a selection of sales leaders from industry experts such as Gainsight and Xactly to take to the Connect Stage. This way you’ll be treated to insights on building rock-solid sales pipelines and developing a ‘bulletproof’ mindset for future success.

3.      Absorb actionable insights from service leaders

For most customers, only the best and the worst service lives long in their memory, while everything else in between becomes instantly hazy. Under these circumstances, customer service has become the main differentiator for businesses in crowded markets. To arm you with the tools for success, we’ve invited top service leaders to share actionable insights that will allow you to learn how your next generation of customers will think, talk and interact with your business.

4.      Unparalleled networking opportunities

Shared knowledge is power. Therefore, we’ve gone to great lengths to create the ideal atmosphere for you to share your experiences with fellow attendees. Once the event’s jam-packed program comes to a close, you’ll have the opportunity to network during the closing party, where a selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided. With some of the brightest minds in the sales and service industry in attendance, it’s hard to think of a better way for you to broaden your knowledge and form new connections.

5.      ‘Try-before-you-buy’ product demonstrations  

Weaved into Connect 2016’s program of talks, interviews and debates is a selection of demonstrations that showcase some of the tools our guest speakers use to help make their lives that little bit easier. By attending the event, you will get the perfect opportunity to enjoy a taste of some market-leading products in the sales and service space, while getting a feel of whether they can work for you. 

Publish Date: June 17, 2016 10:28 AM


The £11 billion customer service scared away [INFOGRAPHIC]

New research from NewVoiceMedia offers a compelling view of the consequences of poor customer service in the UK. The results reveal that an estimated £11 billion is lost by UK businesses each year following a bad customer experience.

With revenue being transferred between companies at such an alarming rate, the study highlights the considerable impact that customers have on a business’s success. Customer experience is the key differentiator, and by doing it well, organisations can drive the customer acquisition, retention and efficiency that make leading companies successful.

Check out this infographic to discover the impact of poor customer service.

Publish Date: May 24, 2016 6:50 AM


Why your customer experience needs to be millennial-friendly

By Tim Pickard, NewVoiceMedia

The millennial generation is growing up – that is, they have jobs, pay bills and consume goods and services. And with 80 million millennial customers in the US predicted to be spending $200 billion annually by 2017, and $10 trillion over their lifetimes as consumers, they are a powerful buying force.

What’s interesting is that with every new generation, comes a new set of customer service expectations. The millennial generation grew up in a very different world to Generation X and the Baby Boomers.

Their world has always been defined by technology and for as long as they can remember the internet has been a part of their lives. This is also the generation that was first to adopt the smartphone, and the group of people most likely to be glued to the device all day long.

The potential power of the millennial generation

This tech-savvy generation may be more demanding, but they also offer businesses huge opportunities. They are what Brian Solis calls Generation C or the “connected generation”.

An example of this is when student, Mollie Sterling, shared a picture of a classroom at the Missouri School of Journalism – it showed rows and rows of students sat with Apple laptops.

The picture went viral and in 2008, Apple even used it in a press conference. This unintentional advert for Apple came about because Generation C effectively acts as a human network, which relays information and experiences in real time.

On the flip side, millennials have the ability to share things which are detrimental to a brand as well. A particularly famous example is when Ryan Block tried to cancel his Comcast service and the agent pretty much refused to let him.

Ryan then posted eight minutes of the agent’s excessive sales pitch on Soundcloud, which has been listened to 5.8 million times.

Millennials are not only soon to be the generation with the biggest wallet, but the biggest influence.

Get millennial customer service right and your message could spread like wildfire. Get it wrong and one unhappy experience could be shared with millions.

Here’s what millennials expect businesses to offer:

What do millennials want from customer service?

The ability to solve a problem themselves

What makes millennials unique is that they have very different ideas when it comes to where “humans” fit into customer service. 

If an app or a quick google search can solve their problem, this is considered much better than having to contact a “real” person.

This doesn’t mean that they don’t want any kind of human customer service. It just means that if it’s the kind of problem they could solve themselves; they want you to have the right self-service options in place to enable them to do so.

The ability to choose how and when they get in contact

Millennials are accustomed to using multiple channels in everyday life. Gone are the days when the telephone was the only channel associated with customer service communications.

Shoppers expect to be able to contact you across multiple channels and for you to be able to track this as one conversation.

Social media is also a must – 36.4% of millennials cite social service as their preferred channel – with many more using it as part of a multi-channel experience.

Plus, the always-on smartphone enabled culture has meant that they also expect to be able to choose when to get in touch – with 9-5 opening hours just not cutting it.

A speedy and convenient service

The smartphone has in many ways sped up our internal clocks. Because mobile devices can instantly connect you to anyone and any information you need, it’s increased how quickly we expect a brand to reply or deliver a service.

This is particularly true for millennials, who either weren’t born before the “always-connected” culture began, or were too young to notice.

 They expect your technology to work flawlessly

There was a time when people were just impressed that a technology worked some of the time, because it was amazing enough that it existed.

Whereas, the millennial generation are used to digital devices that can do just about anything.

As a result, they are very unforgiving of businesses with clunky customer service technology, which doesn’t deliver. If you have a customer service app, they expect it to be easy to use and if they get in touch with a contact centre, they don’t expect technological problems.

Personalised customer experience

According to an Orange Silicon Valley Report, 89% of customers say that having to repeat information is their top frustration about customer service.

This is because millennials expect your team to remember who they are, when they last got in touch and why they last got in touch.

They expect each interaction to be personalised to them, so having to repeat information to a new agent is the ultimate sign of a failed personalised service.

Millennials expect on-demand, multi-channel, reliable and personalised customer service, which is speedy enough for them to feel like a brand values their time.

They may seem like a generation with high expectations, but get customer service right for millennials and the rewards are huge.

NewVoiceMedia's ContactWorld for Service can help deliver the service millennials expect, giving agents the data they need to personalise interactions, multi-channel functionality, and efficient call-routing for a speedy service.

Publish Date: November 30, 2015 9:06 AM

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Twitter vs LinkedIn: What's The Best Social Network for Sales People?

Matt Tuson, NewVoiceMedia

Ask any sales person to name their go-to social network and you’ll get the reply ‘LinkedIn’. But according to Forbes, more salespeople used Twitter in their 2014 sales processes.

This fact is likely to come as a surprise to sales managers – not only does LinkedIn have more users, with 364 million compared to Twitter’s 302 million, but it is far more focussed, and perceived as the network for businesses and professionals.

So, what’s behind this unexpected result?

1. Twitter is where the relationship begins

In most cases, professionals are far more protective over their LinkedIn exchanges than their Twitter exchanges – making Twitter a valuable opportunity to initiate a relationship with prospects who might not respond on LinkedIn.

The network is also fast-paced, collaborative and relatively informal, making it easier for a prospector to share an idea or engage with a potential client. This can then lead to the relationship moving over to LinkedIn, which represents a more serious commitment.

Vanessa Di Mauro, CEO and Chief Digital Officer of Leader Networks describes Twitter as, “…the bar after work – where you keep your tie on but loosen it a bit”, while LinkedIn is, “…the conference room in the corporate office.

2. Twitter allows you to learn more personal things about your prospects

This might sound a little creepy – but it doesn’t mean learning their home address or the names of their children. While, there’s no denying that LinkedIn is an incredibly useful tool for sourcing business-related information and gaining an accurate picture of an organization, it lacks an insight into a prospects’ likes, dislikes and interests.

Twitter, on the other hand, gives you access to a greater variety of personal information, such as who a prospect follows on the network (competitors, business professionals, politicians, news outlets etc.), who follows them, what they tweet about, what they retweet, what lists they’re a member of etc.

All of this information helps you to build up a more accurate picture of who you’re trying to engage with – which makes it easier to initiate a relationship.

3. Twitter allows you to monitor what people are talking about

In terms of monitoring conversations, Twitter is far superior to LinkedIn. Twitter’s hashtag is a powerful tool for salespeople, making it easy to find out what prospects are talking about.

Plus, LinkedIn only allows you to follow someone’s profile and what their talking about if you’re connected to them – and this relies on them accepting your request. Twitter doesn’t have this option, so you can follow and interact with whoever you like.

John Barrows, owner of Sales From The Streets recommends setting up a separate Twitter account to follow your top 25 prospects. He said: “This way you can have all your prospecting information on one feed without having to sift through everything else to find something worth using as a reason to reach out to someone.”

4. Twitter allows you to determine the pulse of an industry

Twitter is the go-to network for marketers, PR professionals and journalists – and there’s a reason for this. It’s the fastest way to find out what’s happening in an industry, including; who the thought-leaders are, who frequently contributes to discussions and who’s making a lot of unsubstantiated noise. This information can then be used to aid your research process on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is still a vital network for sales teams

Despite Twitter’s value as a platform for initiating relationships and engaging with prospects, LinkedIn is still a vital network for sales teams for a number of reasons:

1. LinkedIn allows you to expand your business connections

The clue is in the name – LinkedIn allows you to create ‘links’ with relevant people. And as a network with professionals in every industry, who are all looking to make business connections, it offers huge opportunities to prospectors.

The advanced search function also allows you to filter by title, company, company location, company size and seniority level – making it a great way to find relevant leads.

2. LinkedIn helps you to target decision makers

When you’re targeting a prospect, it can be difficult to know who the real decision-makers are. This can result in you contacting someone who doesn’t have the authority you need – which is a waste of your time and theirs.

However, LinkedIn can provide all the information you require. People often post a lot about their organization, such as who reports to who in their department and who is in their team. With a little detective work, you should be able to work out who you need to influence. 

3. LinkedIn can get you past the gatekeeper

More often than not, an important decision-maker will be well-guarded, with a ‘gatekeeper’ preventing your sales calls and emails from getting through.

LinkedIn offers a way around this – InMail. Available on paid accounts, InMail allows you to email any LinkedIn user without an introduction. And with LinkedIn claiming that an InMail is 30 times more likely to get a response than a cold call or email, it could be a powerful tool for prospectors.

4. LinkedIn means you never have to make a truly ‘cold’ call

No one likes making or receiving cold calls. But with LinkedIn, the availability of information including job title, responsibilities, experience and connections you have in common, means that no call has to be truly ‘cold’ – providing you with plenty of options for starting a conversation. 

And you don’t need to worry about telling prospects that you researched them on LinkedIn – most people will be flattered that you took the time to find out more about them.

 

Despite research indicating that Twitter is the #1 sales social network, there’s no doubt that LinkedIn is still a vital tool for sales teams. While Twitter is a useful platform for initiating relationships and engaging with prospects, LinkedIn is essential for more in-depth research and maintaining relationships.

Which network do you think is best for sales? Share your thoughts below.

Matt Tuson, NewVoiceMedia

Publish Date: October 12, 2015 9:33 AM

 1

What's the Future of Customer Service? Experts from Salesforce, NewVoiceMedia and ClickSoftware Share Their Thoughts

As customer service becomes a key differentiator, what does the future hold for this industry? We’ve gathered together the expert opinions of Sarah Patterson, VP Service Cloud Product Marketing at Salesforce, Tim Pickard, SVP Marketing, NewVoiceMedia and Stephen Timms, President of the Americas, ClickSoftware, who all shared their views on a Forester Research webinar.

According to Forrester Research, the last hundred years can be characterized by four different trends or innovations. First, there was the “age of manufacturing”, followed by the “age of distribution,” but then in 1990, the digital world began to take shape, beginning the “age of information.”

However, from 2010, we entered the “age of the customer.” This is an era beyond the technology itself, instead focusing on the impact on the lives of consumers. The result of social media is a more connected world, where everyday consumers have greater power and businesses are playing catch-up.

So, how well are businesses doing in the “age of the customer”?

Every year, Forester Research surveys consumers to find out how businesses are performing when it comes to customer service. And every year, the results are pretty much the same.

Forester Research has completed this research for over seven years, showing that brands are struggling to provide great customer service – even when customer experience becomes increasingly important.

Over half of brands are rated as ok or poor and only around 11% are rated as excellent. So, why is getting it right such a struggle? Well, businesses have to balance customer needs with the costs of running customer service, and as consumers grow in power, they expect more. This change is happening so rapidly that many are struggling to keep up.

Here are the highlights of the Forester Research webinar, with three experts answering three key questions about the future of customer service.

1.     What’s the most exciting trend you’re seeing in customer service?

Sarah Patterson, VP Service Cloud Product Marketing at Salesforce

By 2020, there will be 75bn connected products – and this “internet of things” will be the most disruptive force in the world of customer service.

As these products are more connected to the lives of consumers, they gather better and more accurate data. This means that companies which provide or use connected products will be able to deliver a more personalized and seemingly effortless customer service.

Tim Pickard, SVP Marketing, NewVoiceMedia

The number of ways in which customers want to connect with businesses keeps increasing at a rapid rate. This is a challenge for companies, as they need to be able to follow conversations, not channels.

You’ve only got look at the radical differences between the ways in which young teens use social media and connected devices, compared to young professionals, to see how quickly things are changing.

Stephen Timms, President of the Americas, ClickSoftware

Wearable technology is an exciting trend right now – and looks set to become an extension on the customer service businesses offer.

Wearables provide real-time information and allow both employees and consumers to make better informed decisions. The role of this technology in customer service is expected to grow.

2.     Why is it important to manage customer engagement across a single platform?

Sarah Patterson, VP Service Cloud Product Marketing at Salesforce

It’s difficult to really understand and engage with your customers, if that data is split across multiple platforms.

Sarah used a personal story to illustrate this. She booked a room at a popular hotel chain, but the room was too noisy to take work calls, so she asked to be moved.

A few weeks later, she was looking to book a room with the same hotel chain in New York, but even though she had the booking page open, she didn’t get round to booking.

The next day she received an email from the hotel chain saying that they’d noticed she was interested in booking a room in New York. They continued to acknowledge that she’d had a bad experience on her previous stay – so if she booked this room, they’d upgrade her room and also make sure it was in a quiet area.

This goes to show how important it is that every department can see a complete view of the customers, so that they can embrace opportunities like this.

Tim Pickard, SVP Marketing, NewVoiceMedia

It’s essential that marketing, sales and service are aligned and not separated into distinct siloes. If each department is too independent, they’ll put their own team goals before that of the business.

Common scenarios when “silo mentality” takes hold is if marketing launches a campaign without telling sales, or if sales overpromises to customers in order to meet their targets, or if customer service focuses too much on call handling times and not enough on customer experience.

A single platform allows these departments to align, but also gives customer service agents the information they need to handle a call in the most appropriate way.

Stephen Timms, President of the Americas, ClickSoftware

As customer expectations continue to increase, businesses need a single platform to manage communications, otherwise their service simply won’t live up to what’s expected.

Consumers don’t want to have to repeat their problem every time they get in touch – they expect this data to be stored, so that when they pick up the phone, the agent can start dealing with their problem straight away. And not only that, the agent can provide a personalized service based on their history with that brand.

3.     What’s the number one recommendation for customer service decision-makers?

 Sarah Patterson, VP Service Cloud Product Marketing at Salesforce

Mobile should be the primary focus. Consumers don’t necessarily want to call a contact centre – for some problems it makes more sense to try a self-service approach.

Businesses need to ensure their mobile site has the information customers need to solve basic issues themselves. Plus, at the moment, nine out of ten apps don’t provide embedded customer service in the app.

Businesses shouldn’t force customers to get in touch via a different channel, but ensure the support is there, within the functionality of the app.

Tim Pickard, SVP Marketing, NewVoiceMedia

Businesses need to take the “outside in” view of their customer experience and try to see their business through the eyes of their customers.

Customers don’t see multiple channels, they see one brand. So, in order to deliver a great experience, you need to be able to track communications across channels. If businesses can’t do this, not only are they failing their customers, but they’re making it impossible to measure their performance.

For instance, if you can’t measure how many times a customer contacted your team across multiple channels, you can’t see how many contacts it took to solve a problem. As a result, a customer could tweet you, email and phone you about the same problem, but your contact centre team may measure the phone call as their first point of contact, and record that customer problem as being solved in only one point of contact.

Ensuring you have a single view of customer communications means that not only can you provide a more personalized experience, but you can be sure you’re measuring your performance from your customers’ perspective.

Stephen Timms, President of the Americas, ClickSoftware

Businesses need to decide what their value proposition is and deliver a service to reflect that. In many ways, you need to decide whether you’re focus is on price or experience and provide the level of customer service necessary.

For instance, Walmart is hugely successful, but known for its focus on price and not its customer service.

What do think the future holds for customer service? Share your thoughts below.

Publish Date: September 21, 2015 7:39 AM

 1

Why your sales team should be like the New York Yankees

By Matt Tuson, NewVoiceMedia

While the sales office may seem a long way from the baseball pitch, there are a lot of similarities when it comes to the factors leading to success.

There have been plenty of articles arguing that sports stars would make great sales people – and I’m sure most of your sales team would like to think they’d make great sports stars too.

Both sports and sales have one outcome in mind: winning. It’s about competing to get the result you want as a team. And this is something the New York Yankees regularly achieve.

Here’s why your sales team should be like the New York Yankees.

They work as a team

Where many sales teams go wrong is that they compete too much internally, and not enough with their actual competitors.

Of course, a bit of competition is healthy and is a great way to motivate your team – but ultimately, sales people need to collaborate and share information, so an overly competitive environment is counter-productive.

It’s hard to imagine the New York Yankees winning a game if each player had their own agenda and that’s what you’ve got to remember in sales.

However, embrace a healthy rivalry – so long as it inspires positive behavior and motivates your team – similar to the longstanding rivalry between Yankees and Boston Red Sox, arguably one of the greatest rivalries of all time.

They bounce back

The effort a sales person has to put in in order to make a sale can be huge, so if it all falls through, it can be quite a blow. From relationship building efforts to extensive research, it can feel like you’ve wasted your time. 

These are the kind of setbacks sports people face all the time. Every player in major league baseball today has suffered countless defeats in the past.

You need to motivate your team to bounce back. Use every sale that’s fallen through and try to find ways to improve.

They are motivated

You don’t get into the New York Yankees unless you’re motivated – the same should apply to your sales team.

Part of this is about hiring motivated people, but another part is being able to motivate your team with targets, goals and competitions.

Only 30.6% of US sales people in 2014 were engaged in their job. This is sure to have a huge impact on the success of a business.

Harvard Business Review has also found that there’s a correlation between setting ambitious targets and the success of a sales organization. 75% of high-performing sales organizations raised their 2014 annual quotas more than 10% over 2013 quotas.

Whereas, only 25% of average sales organizations raised quotas this high and just 17% of under-performing sales organizations.

They hire right – but are quick to fire under-performers

The primary way the New York Yankees improve is through acquiring new talent. However, this is not the only way to build a team – when Gene Michael took over the Yankees in 1993, he spent more nurturing talent rather than buying it – and saw great success.

In sales, it’s important to employ both tactics. There are times when you need to hire star performers, but it’s also important to develop the team you have.

What is interesting with the New York Yankees (and virtually all top sports teams) is that underperforming players and managers don’t last long.

The same is true of top sales teams. The better a sales organization is, the quicker they are to fire a poor performer. According to the Harvard Business Review, 78% of high-performing sales organizations would fire a poor performer within a year, compared with 63% of average and 52% of under-performing sales organizations.

They don’t stop adapting

You can’t stick to the same tactics forever. Just because a certain strategy won you the game five years ago, doesn’t mean it will today.

For instance, the Yankees have embraced modern tactics like the defensive shift, plus other changes in strategy in order to stay competitive.

The same applies to sales teams – you need to ensure you can adapt to industry trends and embrace new tactics and technology that can help you make sales.

They are managed by the crowds

While your sales team are not likely to have ‘fans’ and crowds cheering them on, they still have an audience to impress – and that’s your potential customers.

Ensure your team have this goal in mind. Creating lasting relationships with happy customers is key to success.

If you want your team to be the sales equivalent of the New York Yankees, you need to invest in the right technology to support them. NewVoiceMedia's gamification solution, Motivate incentivises your sales team to emulate best practice sales behavior and promotes healthy competition – all with the goal of engaging and motivating your team.

How do you motivate your sales team? And which baseball team would you want your sales team to be? Share your thoughts below.

Publish Date: September 2, 2015 1:01 PM


Gamification: Does it Work for Sales Teams?

By Matt Tuson, NewVoiceMedia

Gamification works on the simple principle that if you turn work into a game, where there’s a winner or a prize, your employees will work harder. Essentially gamification aims to change the attitude towards work – from working because you have to, to working because you want to.

What’s surprising is the number of sales people who don’t feel engaged at work. In 2014, only 30.6% of US sales people said they were “engaged” in their job. And this is where the idea of gamification comes in.

The psychology of gamification

If you take the well-known analogy of the carrot and the stick, gamification often employs both tactics. The ‘carrot’ part is the points and rewards you can get and the ‘stick’ is often the fear of being at the bottom of the leader board.

From a psychological perspective, dopamine is the brain’s version of a carrot. It’s a chemical signal that gets passed from one neuron to the next when you experience pleasure – such as achieving a goal.

If you split your day-to-day sales activity into individual goals, each with points, every time you achieve a goal, dopamine is released in the brain.

Gamification is also a way to tap into the intrinsic motivation of competition. Studies have shown that competition positively motivates some people – namely, those with a competitive spirit.

And as sales people are a competitive bunch, gamification for sales teams is the ideal solution.

What can sales managers gain from gamification?

Sales managers were employing gamification techniques long before the word ‘gamification’ had entered the language of business.

The sales contest is one of the oldest tricks in the book – it’s just now, this kind of contest can be measured with more metrics, and in real-time with tools like NewVoiceMedia’s Motivate. Here’s what sales managers could gain:

1.    Increased user-adoption for your CRM

As a sales manager, it’s hard to predict revenue without up-to-date knowledge of what’s happening right now and what’s in the pipeline.

While your CRM should be able to give you the data you need, this relies on your team inputting all of their data correctly.

Beyond competitions to boost sales, gamification can be used to ensure that your team use your CRM properly. If you work under “if it’s not on the CRM, it doesn’t exist”, your team won’t be able to gain points or rewards from activities they don’t record, thereby encouraging a good and standardized CRM practise.

2.    Boost productivity

Introducing friendly competition can encourage sales people to push that little bit further each day. Whether that’s making an extra call or doing a bit more prospect research, it could be the motivation your team need to keep pushing themselves.

And as sales people are by nature competitive, this ‘game element’ to their working day keeps them engaged.

3.    Encourage collaboration

With the rise of home-working, sales teams can feel disjointed, making it hard to foster a team atmosphere.

While you may think gamification only encourages individual ambition, it can also promote team spirit. By dividing your company into teams (some businesses even use popular sports teams as the names), it becomes a team game, where everyone has to work together, sharing ideas and best practices in order to win.

Gamification may seem like the latest buzzword, but could actually be the solution to the age-old problem of employee boredom.

Beyond engaging employees, it can create a better working environment, where employees collaborate more and each sales rep follows the same CRM practices. All of this, not only makes the job of a manager easier, but the company as a whole more efficient.

Have you tried gamification techniques at your company? Share your experiences below.

Publish Date: August 28, 2015 5:07 AM


Why Your Customer Experience Needs to be Millennial-Friendly

By Tim Pickard, NewVoiceMedia

The millennial generation is growing up – that is, they have jobs, pay bills and consume goods and services. And with 80 million millennial customes in the US predicted to be spending $200 billion annually by 2017, and $10 trillion over their lifetimes as consumers, they are a powerful buying force.

What’s interesting is that with every new generation, comes a new set of customer service expectations. The millennial generation grew up in a very different world to Generation X and the Baby Boomers.

Their world has always been defined by technology and for as long as they can remember the internet has been a part of their lives. This is also the generation that was first to adopt the smartphone, and the group of people most likely to be glued to the device all day long.

The potential power of the millennial generation

This tech-savvy generation may be more demanding, but they also offer businesses huge opportunities. They are what  Brian Solis calls Generation C or the “connected generation”.

An example of this is when student, Mollie Sterling, shared a picture of a classroom at the Missouri School of Journalism – it showed rows and rows of students sat with Apple laptops.

The picture went viral and in 2008, Apple even used it in a press conference. This unintentional advert for Apple came about because Generation C effectively acts as a human network, which relays information and experiences in real time.

On the flip side, millennials have the ability to share things which are detrimental to a brand as well. A particularly famous example is when Ryan Block tried to cancel his Comcast service and the agent pretty much refused to let him.

Ryan then posted eight minutes of the agent’s excessive sales pitch on Soundcloud, which has been listened to 5.8 million times.

Millennials are not only soon to be the generation with the biggest wallet, but the biggest influence.

Get millennial customer service right and your message could spread like wildfire. Get it wrong and one unhappy experience could be shared with millions.

Here’s what millennials expect businesses to offer:

What do millennials want from customer service?

The ability to solve a problem themselves

What makes millennials unique is that they have very different ideas when it comes to where “humans” fit into customer service. 

If an app or a quick google search can solve their problem, this is considered much better than having to contact a “real” person.

This doesn’t mean that they don’t want any kind of human customer service. It just means that if it’s the kind of problem they could solve themselves; they want you to have the right self-service options in place to enable them to do so.

The ability to choose how and when they get in contact

Millennials are accustomed to using multiple channels in everyday life. Gone are the days when the telephone was the only channel associated with customer service communications.

Shoppers expect to be able to contact you across multiple channels and for you to be able to track this as one conversation.

Social media is also a must – 36.4% of millennials cite social service as their preferred channel – with many more using it as part of a multi-channel experience.

Plus, the always-on smartphone enabled culture has meant that they also expect to be able to choose when to get in touch – with 9-5 opening hours just not cutting it.

A speedy and convenient service

The smartphone has in many ways sped up our internal clocks. Because mobile devices can instantly connect you to anyone and any information you need, it’s increased how quickly we expect a brand to reply or deliver a service.

This is particularly true for millennials, who either weren’t born before the “always-connected” culture began, or were too young to notice.

 They expect your technology to work flawlessly

There was a time when people were just impressed that a technology worked some of the time, because it was amazing enough that it existed.

Whereas, the millennial generation are used to digital devices that can do just about anything.

As a result, they are very unforgiving of businesses with clunky customer service technology, which doesn’t deliver. If you have a customer service app, they expect it to be easy to use and if they get in touch with a contact center, they don’t expect technological problems.

Personalized customer experience

According to an Orange Silicon Valley Report, 89% of customers say that having to repeat information is their #1 frustration about customer service.

This is because millennials expect your team to remember who they are, when they last got in touch and why they last got in touch.

They expect each interaction to be personalized to them, so having to repeat information to a new agent is the ultimate sign of a failed personalized service.

Millennials expect on-demand, multi-channel, reliable and personalized customer service, which is speedy enough for them to feel like a brand values their time.

They may seem like a generation with high expectations, but get customer service right for millennials and the rewards are huge.

NewVoiceMedia's ContactWorld for Service can help deliver the service millennials expect, giving your agents the data they need to personalize interactions, multi-channel functionality, and efficient call-routing for a speedy service.

 

What are you doing to meet millennial customer service expectations? Share your thoughts and experiences below. 

Publish Date: July 27, 2015 3:53 PM


Top six call centre challenges facing the technology sector

By Ashley Unitt, NewVoiceMedia

The technology sector is fast-paced, with many businesses expanding rapidly. Add to that, the complex nature of many technology companies’ product or service and providing customer support in this sector can be a challenge.

Here are six of the most common issues which prevent technology businesses from delivering an outstanding service – and how we’ve helped our customers overcome them.

  1. Routing customers through to the right agent

Complicated products and services lead to complicated customer problems. As a result, contact centres in the technology sector need to be able to route callers through to the right agent for each problem.

Our ContactWorld solution for Salesforce helped Topcon Positioning Systems, use Salesforce data to route calls. This not only meant the right agent answered every call, but when they did begin a conversation, the agent had the most up-to-date customer information to hand.

  1. Building relationships

Whatever industry you’re in, building relationships with your customers is vital. Our ContactWorld solution has helped mobile communications company, Truphone, deliver outstanding service because of its seamless integration with Salesforce.

The team have instant access to all the information they need when a call comes through, which makes their job easier – and the team as a whole, more efficient.

And seeing as some of the world’s most demanding consumers make up Truphone’s customer base (time-pressured executives working in global markets); a fast, efficient and reliable service is essential. Plus, using NewVoiceMedia’s post-call surveys, Truphone can monitor performance and ensure they consistently deliver outstanding service.

  1. Providing consistent support to customers across the globe

If you’re expanding internationally, it’s important that you can provide the same quality of experience in Europe as you can in Asia.

Our cloud solution helped enterprise mobility management company, MobileIron, do just this, ensuring customer data was available to agents across the world and allowing call quality to be monitored globally.

If you’re serving customers across the world, your callers will be speaking in many different languages, which can cause delays when trying to match a customer to the right agent. Our caller line identification is integrated with Salesforce, which helped to tackle this, reducing call lengths by 20%. 

  1. Call centre management

It’s difficult to manage a customer service department without an accurate picture of what’s going on.

Our solution helped business software company, Qlik, to manage its call centre more effectively, with key operational metrics available in real-time. Plus, the company can now monitor the percentage of calls per customer, so that if there are issues, it can resolve them more quickly.

  1. Designing a scalable contact centre

The technology sector is well-known for overnight success stories – where companies grow from a project in someone’s garage to a global business.

It’s therefore important that any technology business has a scalable customer support team. ContactWorld allows you to do this scale up quickly and easily – adding a new agent to the system is as simple as a few clicks.

An example of where we’ve helped to create a scalable customer service team for a customer is PhotoBox. Its business is extremely seasonal – with 50% of sales occurring in eight weeks of the year. ContactWorld allows the company to easily add and remove users depending on what they need.

  1. Managing different call volumes

If your industry doesn’t have clearly defined peaks and troughs (e.g. the increase retail businesses see at Christmas), it can be difficult to plan your how many agents you need.

ContactWorld records all this data to help you build a picture of peak times of the day, month and year, so that you can plan your contact centre and the number of agents needed at any one time.

This is something we successfully helped outsourced customer service solutions provider, Prism, to achieve. 

With the right technology, you can deliver outstanding customer service – no matter how complex your product or how quickly you expand.

What challenges are you facing at your contact centre? And how do you plan to overcome them?

Publish Date: July 22, 2015 5:43 AM


The real cost of poor prospecting to UK businesses (INFOGRAPHIC)

New research from NewVoiceMedia provides a compelling insight into a prospect’s view of B2B sales practices, revealing that just 10% are completely satisfied with sales approaches they’ve received.

And with findings uncovering that more than half of sales calls are poorly researched, the study exposes the huge disparity between a prospect’s requirements and the behaviours and techniques used by sales reps throughout the UK.

Check out this infographic to discover the real impact of poor prospecting.

 

The real cost of poor prospecting to UK businesses (INFOGRAPHIC) - An Infographic from Blog | NewVoiceMedia

Embedded from Blog | NewVoiceMedia

Publish Date: March 31, 2015 11:21 AM


Investment in cloud technology: Why the cloud is such a hot prospect

Cloud computing is fast becoming one of the most attractive industries to invest in. It has transformed the landscape of IT and as a result, it’s not surprising that the growth in cloud computing is outstripping the overall expansion of IT. It’s even continued to grow during the global recession.

The Growth of the Cloud: Key statistics

Cloud computing has raised the standards when it comes to IT infrastructure and access to software. Businesses that are yet to move to cloud are in a rush to embrace the technology, with 69% of CIOs surveyed planning to move to the cloud by the end 2014.

According to 451 Research, revenues in the public cloud market are set to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 36%, reaching at least $19.5 billion by the end of 2016. Plus, the study also showed that 69% of enterprises with separate budgets for cloud computing are planning to increase spending on cloud services in 2014.

And it’s not simply that businesses are planning to spend more. The scale at which the spending is increasing is remarkable – predicted to triple from 2011 to 2017. According to research firm, IHS, the $72 billion spent in 2011 will reach a figure of $235.1 billion just six years later.

Amidst global growth in cloud technology the US comes out top, accounting for 59% of all spending on cloud services from 2013 to 2016. Western Europe is currently a little way behind in second place, accounting for 24% of spending in that period.

But within the cloud technology industry, there are a variety of sectors and growth between these markets varies. At the moment, it’s SaaS solutions which are responsible for the bulk of the market revenue. If you look back at 2013, market revenue during this year reached $58 billion and SaaS solutions accounted for $36 billion of that total.

Quite simply, if cloud technology continues to grow at this rate, it won’t be long until cloud services become the norm in every office across the world.

How the Growth in Cloud Technology Affects the Contact Centre Market

If you look at the contact centre market in the US, you can see how cloud adoption began slowly and then spiralled. In 2008, the rate of adoption was only 2.2% but by the end of 2012, this had more than doubled to 5.9%.

However, what’s most interesting is what happens next. DMG predicts that by 2015 at least 18.1% of contact centres will be in the cloud.

There are several reasons to explain this sudden boost in cloud adoption. One of the main barriers preventing widespread adoption of cloud technology previously was security concerns, which most vendors have now overcome.

Also there’s the fact that the sector has seen huge investment, which has made cloud services increasingly efficient and cost-effective, widening the gap between what’s possible via the cloud and on-premise.

The gulf between the level of service offered by cloud solutions and traditional on-premise software is becoming so big, that many contact centres don’t see it as an option. Joining the cloud is fast becoming what people would expect.

Why Cloud Technology is No.1 Choice for US Venture Capital Investors

The figures speak for themselves and it’s not surprising that such incredible market growth has reached the ears of investors.

In the ninth annual Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey, US venture capital investors said that cloud technology was a market that they felt most confident in, compared with other leading sectors like mobile, enterprise software and healthcare IT.

At NewVoiceMedia, we’re seeing the result of this confidence in the cloud technology market. Last week, we secured Series E funding of $50 million from top technology investor, TCV and joined by existing shareholders BVP, Highland Capital Partners Europe, Eden Ventures, Notion Capital and salesforce.com. This has taken the total investment in NewVoiceMedia within the last 18 months, to $105 million.

Prior to this investment, we’ve seen huge growth, leading to doubling of staff over the last year to meet the demand for our technology. In the last financial year, our license revenue grew at over 100%, outpacing the market fivefold.

While the whole industry is a success story, NewVoiceMedia has been picked out of the rapidly expanding market for our proven business model and innovative technology.

“TCV’s strategy is to invest in leading growth technology companies with a proven business model. We were impressed with NewVoiceMedia’s experienced leadership team, clear vision, relentless focus on excellent customer service, extremely rapid expansion and innovative multi-tenant cloud contact centre platform. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to help NewVoiceMedia continue its impressive growth”, said John Rosenberg, TCV.

The global cloud technology market has experienced huge growth over the last decade and is forecasted to expand further with huge investment. We are poised to extend our global reach, with the right staff and technology to keep on growing.

What do you think the future has in store for cloud technology? Share your thoughts below.

Publish Date: July 28, 2014 11:50 AM

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