Communications Management specialist Oak Telecom is confident its latest product will provide the answer and give resellers a golden opportunity to bring powerful Customer Relationship Management to small business customers.
Called connectX the new software solution has been released on the back of Oak research into the top objectives SME’s need to improve service levels.
The research revealed that organisations wanted to overcome that annoying situation where a customer calls in, establishes a relationship with an employee, and then cannot reconnect with that person when calling back. They also wanted to know the status of the customer to ensure service levels are at their best if the customer is high level or is unhappy.
Oak’s connectX solution solves all these problems and a lot more by whenever possible reconnecting a caller with the last person they spoke to, transferring the customer information with the call and enabling staff to make notes, play back the call and review their conversation. This ensures the customer has received all the information he or she needs and enables the employee and management to monitor and manage service levels.
Oak joint CEO Phil Reynolds said: “SME’s have been effectively priced out of CRM applications by vendors keen to re-coup their development costs by only selling at the top end of the market. Sadly, the comms sector has also given CRM a bad name through overcomplicating products and applications to the point where the actual benefits to the user were highly questionable.
To me, CRM is being rapidly aware who your customers are and dealing with them professionally. An instant snapshot of activity is also very important to managers keen to understand how top customers are being handled, particularly in busy periods.”
With Pareto’s Law in mind - 80 percent of business coming from 20 per cent of customers - connectX also works intelligently to ensure that users can receive an instant report on when they last contacted all their leading customers rated by turnover, potential or strategic importance.
“A supervisor can review this contact report at any time and send an SMS to the account manager about a customer that has not been contacted within a prescribed time. Personally, I would call the agent as well and let them know!” said Reynolds.
connectX can import customer data from all major contact information applications such as Outlook, Sage Act, Sage 50 & Microsoft CRM (Dynamics) and can also work directly from those applications.
Crucially, at a time when SME’s cannot fail to lose business through miscommunication, calls are integrated automatically with Oak’s recordX call recording application enabling potential disputes to be resolved quickly and efficiently.
When CRM needs to be visible across the company, Oak’s displayX can be added which transmits information to desktops or a large wall mounted screen. Highly configurable, the system works in real time to show latest orders, values of orders and even customer credit positions.
“This can even show the sales potential of all the customers that agents are talking to at any given time. Of course, the display can also show any five star customers that waiting to be answered!” added Reynolds.
To implement all the features of connectX a customer will need: a PBX with a CTI interface; Oak’s Comms SuiteX (CSX), which provides the CTI application server; desktop clients; recordX for call recording; reportX for call logging and management reports; and displayX for the wallboard application. All CRM features can be provided even if the user only has customer information on a spreadsheet.