The expansion includes products in select Industry Cloud base licenses. Salesforce says the new offering with enable businesses to complete more tasks with fewer resources, boost efficiency and deliver better customer experiences at scale.

With companies facing uncertain economic times with inflation, supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, any new efficiency helps, says Salesforce. Industry-specific automation can replace tedious, manual tasks.

At least 86% of senior IT leaders say the experience an organization provides its employees and customers is as important as its products and services. Meanwhile, four out of five senior IT leaders agree that improved customer-facing and employee technologies are critical for their organization to compete.

A study from Salesforce’s MuleSoft and Vanson Bourn showed that 91% of organizations say they they need automation technology, but only 23% have fully implemented automation across business functions.

Salesforce Flow for Industries

Users of Salesforce’s Flow for Industries can create intelligent process automation unique to their specific industry. According to Salesforce, these new tools help customers with the following:

• Create better customer and employee experiences: OmniStudio enables organizations to build branded, dynamic customer interactions and employee workflows fast. Flow easily connects them with enterprise data and applications, without code.

• Easily manage rules and actions: Business Rules Engine allows organizations to simplify and automate processes such as pricing discounts, care management or financial planning with declarative setup, management and evaluation of rules. Using a no-code interface, organizations are empowered to build, test and execute rules before they are integrated.

• Save time and resources: Document Generation gives organizations the ability to automatically generate and share documents using a no-code template designer, while Intelligent Form Reader uses optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically read and extract document data, unifying the end-to-end management process, and freeing up time for higher-value work.
• Simplify data management: Data Processing Engine helps organizations create definitions to transform data across multiple sources then surface that to customers within a workflow.

The Flow for Industries suite of automation products is generally available now. These tools are free to base license holders.

Learn more about the new Flow for Industries on Salesforce here.

The post Saleforce Expands Automation Product Suite appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Microsoft bills the new offering as a way to keep hybrid and remote salespeople productive while navigating between CRMs, videoconferences, chats, email and documents to connect with customers and close deals.

Calling Viva Sales a “smart CRM companion in a blog, Microsoft says the app helps connect customer and deal insights that are already in Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office apps.

Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft, writes in an announcement blog that Viva Sales enhances the CRM system with data from Microsoft apps to help sellers be more connected with customers and provide a more personalized customer experience.

Althoff says this happens through a simple customer tagging feature, automating the data capture to save the salesperson time and provide their organization with a more complete picture of deal and customer status.

“With AI embedded throughout, Viva Sales is like a sales coach to move deals along with recommendations and reminders,” Althoff writes. “This intelligence layer provides sellers the information they need to help them be more productive.”

According to Microsoft, Viva Sales recommends next steps to progress a customer through the sales funnel and prioritizes work and next steps to help sellers close deals and enhance customer engagement.

Microsoft did not detail exactly which CRMs the tool works with, instead saying Viva Sales can help enrich “any” CRM system, in addition to the company’s own Dynamics 365 Sales app.

Viva Sales builds on Microsoft Viva, the company’s new employee experience and engagement tool that was launched last year.

“The future of selling isn’t a new system. It’s bringing the information sellers need at the right time, with the right context, into the tools they know, so their work experience can be streamlined,” Althoff says. “Empowering sellers to spend more time with their customers has been our goal — and we’ve done that by reimagining the selling experience with Viva Sales.”

The post Microsoft To Launch Viva Sales To Enhance CRM, Selling Experience appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Salesforce, Revenue Cloud brings together CPQ and billing, partner relationship management and business-to-business commerce capabilities to help organizations take control of their revenue growth across every channel.

Revenue Cloud is part of the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, making it easy for companies to “connect their sales, partner, operations and finance to create a single source of truth for revenue and customer transactions from purchase to renewal to revenue recognition.”

According to Salesforce, Revenue Cloud can help businesses:

Read Next: Salesforce Report: Strong Digital Operations Are Helping Businesses Survive Pandemic and Beyond

• Transform the buying experience: Give customers the ability to seamlessly jump across different sales channels with direct sales, partners and digital storefronts. Now, a customer can fill their online cart with a specific configuration of products or services on their own and then reach out to a sales rep to ask a question or request a discount. Their rep will already have a complete understanding of the customer’s existing product history and online interactions at their fingertips for a smooth transaction. Our new CPQ-B2B Commerce connector allows businesses to customize digital storefronts for complex B2B selling and add customizable, configurable pricing to digital carts for a self-service experience.
• Accelerate new revenue streams:Revenue operations teams can quickly spin up new monetization strategies, such as launching a subscription product or implementing consumption pricing. New technology from our recent acquisition of Vlocity provides industry-specific solutions for unique workflows related to revenue, like managing ad inventory or content syndications for media companies. With new Multi-Cloud Billing, companies can create revenue streams from other clouds on a single platform. For example, field service reps can upsell products or create revenue from onsite services with billing and payments handled on one single, unified system. And with Revenue Cloud Quick Starts, businesses can launch a subscription offering from start to finish in eight weeks instead of months.
• Improve revenue efficiency: Automation removes the burden from teams who are tasked with manual approvals, data reconciliation and transcriptions of orders from one system to another. Automatically validating sales orders and consolidating invoices prevents issues such as underbilling for services or incorrectly tracking changes to a contract, which can lead to lost revenue in the sales cycle. Instead of manually downloading outdated order forms, the new Customer Asset Lifecycle Management tool shows a simple, visual dashboard of everything a customer has purchased, keeping track of all contract amendments over time and open balances to provide a deeper understanding of the customer relationship. Real-time tracking against valuable KPIs like customer lifetime value, net revenue retention and monthly recurring revenue help teams align and make strategic decisions on where to cut costs or what kinds of customers to target. Integrations to ERP systems make revenue data actionable by adjusting go-to-market strategies or providing discounting guidance.

The new solution comes as many business’ revenue cycles were thrown into limbo when the COVID-19 pandemic hit earlier this year. Deals stalled and sales channels were disrupted as customer needs changed. Meanwhile, other companies couldn’t meet demand for their products.

According to a Salesforce study, 80% of business buyers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its product or service, and 74% have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction.

The post Salesforce Release Revenue Cloud To Speed Up Buying Process appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The increasing adoption of SaaS CRM by SMEs will be one of the major drivers in the global market, predicts their report.

The integration of analytics into SaaS CRM will have a positive impact on the market and contribute to its growth significantly over the forecast period, says Technavio.

The integration of analytics into SaaS CRM will be one of the critical trends in the global market.

Customer data from e-mails, social media, and other platforms can be captured and analyzed using SaaS CRM. Moreover, SaaS CRM incorporated with analytics helps to build strategic marketing decisions by providing critical insights about consumer behavior patterns, says the company.

The use of analytics in SaaS CRM helps enterprises in gaining a complete business overview, which can accelerate business agility and innovation.

“Therefore, the integration of analytics into SaaS CRM is one of the key SaaS customer relationship management market trends, which will drive its growth in the coming years.”

More from the research:

This market research report segments the global SaaS CRM market by end-user (retail, BFSI, manufacturing, telecom and IT, healthcare, and others) and geographical regions (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).

The North American region led the market share in 2018, followed by Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA respectively. During the forecast period, the North American region is expected to maintain its dominance over the global market. This is due to the use of public cloud services by enterprises, increasing need for analysis of customers’ information, and the presence of large cloud service providers in the region.

Read Next: What is Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)?

The post The Market for Global SaaS Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is Growing appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The Tech Decision

Brex’s previous basic voice service plan wasn’t scalable and Parelius didn’t think upgrading would give them the return on investment they needed. Parelius stated that its original solution was, “…not a good product to begin with.”

Support associates didn’t have the right tools to support Brex’s customers and they weren’t able to answer calls efficiently to meet customer service level agreements.

Since Brex’s voice service didn’t have the tools to monitor queues or provide actionable data, Parelius began searching for a better customer support platform that offered these features and wasn’t tied to a specific CRM.

Parelius learned about UJET during his search for a new CRM tool. Parelius evaluated eight contact center companies.

Compared to all of the other providers, UJET offered the best combination of cost and ease of implementation.

Brex needed a platform that offered more than its previous customer solution. UJET imports relevant customer data for agents before they answer calls or chats.

Receiving customer information gives agents context before speaking to customers about the issue.

Setting up proper call routing would ensure that Brex customers could be transferred to the right agent quickly without having to be transferred multiple times and creating frustration.

As the support supervisor, Parelius was also looking for a platform with robust real-time reporting.

This would help Parelius manage associates to optimize support during high volume periods and see how quickly associates were resolving issues.

The Customer Support Platform Solution

Brex implemented UJET voice for its associates, enabling them to support its financial customers more efficiently. UJET’s ability to provide accurate wait times and information from customer profiles helps Brex’s support team adhere to its customer service level agreements.

Associates are able to take inbound calls more quickly because of UJET notifications and benefit from incoming calls going to the right associate the first time due to call routing.

Brex offers 16 support hours daily during the business week and 14 hours daily on the weekend. It recognizes that financial emergencies can happen at all hours of the day and plans to offer 24-hour customer support soon, all supported by UJET.

“The level of support I get from the implementation team at UJET is not in the same universe as what I’ve gotten elsewhere,” says Paralius. “It’s like having a partner who will talk you through your use cases and help you not only implement it, but also optimize it.”

The Impact

Brex is exceeding its goal to answer inbound calls in under 30 seconds.

To date, the longest customer wait time has been 24 seconds, with an average of only 12 seconds. Brex is now answering 95% of inbound calls within its 30 seconds goal and is trending toward 95% in early 2019.

Read Next: Are You Responding Too Slowly to Customers’ Frustrations With Their Digital Experience?

Brex is striving to build a framework to allow the company to scale, while not wavering from the level of service and care it currently provides with 25 Associates. This includes opening a new office and setting up rules to intelligently route calls between offices.

Brex is able to dynamically scale its customer support operations to keep pace with its rapid growth with the customer support platform.

The company also plans to offer customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES) surveys and 24-hour customer support. Brex is also working on releasing an official app in which it will include the UJET SDK to offer an effortless customer support experience on mobile.

The post Brex Customer Support Platform Keeps Them Scalable appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The partnership will natively connect Tenfold’s real-time cloud integration layer and intelligent integrated desktop agent with the Avaya IX Contact Center and Avaya IX Workplace unified communications platforms.

“Every enterprise is looking for ways to differentiate, by delivering a uniquely amazing customer experience, while at the same time making their internal teams and processes more intelligent and efficient-hitting both the top and bottom-line,” says Frank Ciccone, senior vice president of sales, Avaya. “Partnering with Tenfold provides Avaya clients with innovative AI-driven cloud technology that arms their teams with relevant real-time customer data and insights to more thoroughly and efficiently serve their customers.”

Integrating the Tenfold integrated desktop agent into Avaya’s outboung and inbound voice solutions extends the value of clients’ existing Avaya and CRM investments, while enabling AI-driven outcomes. As part of the partnership Tenfold will join A.I.Connect, Avaya’s initiative that brings together vendors and developers taking an active part in building AI-driven solutions. This program hopes to accelerate the adoption of AI solutions in contact center and unified communications technology solutions.

“Customer expectations have changed, putting demands on sales and service teams to deliver personalized and contextual experiences at scale in real-time. Our joint clients will benefit from this strategic partnership, creating seamless integrated experiences for their customers and employees across all interactions and channels,” says Jeff Cotten, CEO, Tenfold. “Voice powers more than 60 percent of customer interactions, but typically, voice interaction data lives across siloed systems, limiting companies’ ability to operationalize AI. This partnership will unlock that data, connecting it into a company’s CRM empowering joint customers to drive predictive customer engagement.”

The post Avaya and Tenfold Partner to Integrate AI into Leading CRMs appeared first on My TechDecisions.

“As our customers have adopted Office 365, team sizes have grown and their needs have become more complex. We built Nimble 5.0 to integrate with the business apps and tools they use everyday: Office 365, Teams, Edge, Power BI, Dynamics 365, and applications built using Azure,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara.

New in Nimble 5.0 smart CRM:

• A single system of record for relationships across the organization —  two-way contact sync with hundreds of business apps enables teams to engage intelligently by accessing a shared 360-degree view of contacts enriched with company and personal insights, social signals, communication histories
• Redesigned contact record with inline editing and granular activity tracking — updated UI scales to browser screen size for a more intuitive perspective on the people who matter most
• All-new Activities Listing Tab and Custom Activities Type — teams able to organize, prioritize, and track activities (including calls, tasks, and events)
• Email tracking everywhere you work
• Contact privacy with user group controls
• New Database field types (text, date, numeric, float)
• Detailed activity reporting, activity automation, and greater customization — integrations with Azure common data services and Microsoft Power BI helps Nimble 5.0 deliver detailed dashboards of CRM reports and visualization

“Too many CRM solutions focus on collecting and counting arbitrary data deemed important by some pinhead manager who never sold a day in their life,” said Rich Bohn, President of Sell More Now.

Read Next: The SMB Guide to CRM in 2019

“What makes Nimble CRM unique is that it’s squarely focused on relationship-building, empowering the whole company, not just sales people, to communicate effectively with all the requisite context and social insights they need to engage at their fingertips.”

The post Nimble 5.0 Smart CRM Updates: Office, Azure, and More appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Your patrons have shared their data all last year through clicks, subscriptions, customer service requests, sales inquiries and more — and now expect your business to be able to turn those interactions and touch points into a more targeted, holistic experience.

Small- to mid-sized businesses that cater to the right customers — and to enhancing the customer experience — can expect to see big gains. With CRM revenues at 39.5 billion dollars and growing, leaders are investing in this software to improve customer interactions that lead to sales.

From improved customer experiences to increased productivity, CRMs are on the rise for a reason and have become powerful and customizable enough to adapt to the needs of SMBs across industries. With that said, let’s take a closer look at what small businesses need to know when looking for a CRM — or evaluating their existing solution — in 2019.

CRMs Are Big With Small Businesses

Popular for a reason: The CRM landscape is evolving, with SMB-focused solutions increasingly providing greater value to small businesses than enterprise level competitors are able to offer; the social CRM sphere alone is estimated to reach $10 billion in 2019. With real-time insights into customer information, the ever-evolving CRM model will drive relevant content to better fulfill customer expectations.

Easy does it: The right CRM can work magic, serving as a single platform that can span across the entire breadth of an organization — sharing information and providing value for customer service, sales, product development, management, operations and more. The sales-cycle will no longer be filled with fragmented or piecemeal information conducted offline on notepads and whiteboards. 

Time to Act With Analytics

Playing nice with predictive analytics: Businesses need to craft effective ads, select which customers to cross-sell to and address their customer churn. Since you have access to intelligent information, the question becomes — how will you aggregate and leverage all this data? Today’s best SMB-focused CRMs capture metrics more effectively than ever before. You’ll receive digestible and actionable information in one space.

Getting real with artificial intelligence: CRM and AI are quite a dynamic duo. When combined, they can bolster the revenue of your business with a predicted $394 US billion dollars gained by 2021, according to Statista. When paired with a good SMB CRM, AI technology can act as a virtual detective that collects clues to build customer personas, improve your ability to personalize interactions and put the right information in front of your team (and your customers) to help create meaningful interactions.

Machines that dance to your algorithms: Once an external function of CRM, machine learning is now integrated into advanced CRM solutions for SMBs. And as the demand for customer intelligence increases, you can take the next best step to make a sale based on your history in the sales cycle. These systems recommend communications based on your customer preferences. The best SMB CRMs are designed to make sales and marketing recommendations that help you close deals faster and cater to your customers’ specific needs.

Experience is the New Journey

Mapping your customer’s path: If you want to improve the customer experience, listen to your patrons. Trust that your target market is willing to pay more for a quality 1:1 experience. Old data models relied on placing people into broad groups, casting customers as two-dimensional characters based on gender or profession. The best SMB CRMs go well beyond raw data to construct a realistic snapshot of each customer based on new intel they themselves provide: clicks, online accounts and conversations. From awareness to post-purchase, analyzing the ups and downs of your strategy will show when to apply the gas (or brakes) with a customer and focus on retention.

Grow through retention: As a small business, you want to move seamlessly from conversion to retention. Make sure your CRM taps into behavioral insights and personally re-engages lost customers. CRM automation can free up your time, allowing you to focus on building core customer relationships without having to manually track down interactions. Tech-driven CRM systems will communicate across channels to rapidly seek information in order to understand each unique situation.

Automate your marketing process: Natively integrated marketing automation technology in an SMB CRM solution can help a business improve sales in a hurry. Once you’re able to see which pieces of marketing content lead to customer engagement, how the customer engages, how long and what their next steps are — you’ll wonder how you managed before automating. Marketing automation technology designed specifically for SMBs has gone a long way toward leveling the playing field between small and enterprise level competitors across a variety of industries and market verticals.

Nurture the conversion: Nurtured leads convert faster, and more reliably, than when a business relies on the customer to do all the work. Understanding when and how to act on a lead is critical. Since good rapport is all about good timing, the right CRM will work in tandem with your sales team to proactively guide customers toward the products and services best suited to their needs.

Reach For Cloud-Based Solutions

Mobile is flexible: Increasingly affordable, elastic and with you everywhere you go — the sky’s the limit when your CRM lives on your mobile device. 68 percent of CRM solutions will be cloud-based in 2019 and the best cloud-based SMB CRM solutions will have a dedicated (and strategically designed) mobile component. Plan to adopt a CRM system you can rely on while in the field visiting customers with an app that gives you access to specific information instantly at your fingertips.

Go for layers with a subscription model: For SMBs, it’s often preferable to pay a small flat monthly fee instead of a more substantial upfront cost. The subscription billing model allows small businesses to effectively control, plan and manage their budgets — while also ensuring their technology is updated and they have access to customer support as the company grows and needs change.

The Bottom Line

In 2019, an effective CRM can provide your SMB with an opportunity to proactively anticipate customer needs and guide the customer experience while streamlining and unifying disparate areas of the business. A CRM won’t solve all your problems, but the right CRM can lead to marked improvements throughout the business while positively contributing to bottom line growth in a variety of ways. Get out there and find the right solution for your business’s growth in 2019!

The post The SMB Guide to CRM in 2019 appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The Tech Decision

For Kansas State University, developing a one-of-a-kind family welcome center, complete with interactive technology platform was vital for engaging with visitors while remaining authentic to the university’s story.

After a recent renovation and implementing Campus Management’s CampusNexus CRM, Kansas State was able to create an interactive technology platform in the newly dedicated Berney Family Welcome Center.

The Solution

The result was a bright new space, with a massive, intelligent wall that integrates campus visit details (maintained in CampusNexus CRM) and presents this information back to students. Students interacting with the wall’s touchscreen can forge a digital path that reflects their unique interests and questions.

The video wall engagement is then extended to their mobile devices, which they can refer to for a schedule, map, or details about academic interests.

CampusNexus CRM includes an admissions process based on higher education best practices. This allows institutions to identify the best prospects and create personalized, and targeted messages to boost the reach and impact of an admissions strategy. The solution aggregates data from multiple systems and departments, providing a powerful retention tool and early-warning system for identifying and assisting at-risk students. Whether alumni are donating to an institution, providing a career path for recent graduates, supporting recruitment efforts, or returning to school for additional training, CampusNexus CRM helps constituents stay connected to an institution.

The Impact

While analytics data on usage is still being compiled, the video wall has been well received by parents and students. Visitors have stated the experience is unlike any other they have had at other universities. The unique service is currently focused on prospective students, but the institution is considering adding a current student and career services/employer layer to it as well.

The post Kansas State Video Wall and CRM Integration appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Integrators can now use the combined features of Salesforce and D-Tools System Integrator (SI) in a seamless workflow from initial lead tracking and opportunity management, through project proposal, design, installation and on-going service management, according to the company.

D-Tools and Ennube Solutions say they have partnered to develop a Salesforce integration to ensure that client, product and project information is efficiently, seamlessly and accurately managed from the initial lead capturing and client opportunity through purchase, design, installation and on-going service.

Through this integrated workflow, D-Tools SI connected with Salesforce is said to help streamline operations, standardize processes and improve operating efficiencies.

This is said to allow project managers to better manage budgets, sales teams to improve opportunity wins and financial teams to more accurately track revenue and expenses — all using integrated applications.

You can learn more about the integration here, and get additional information on the D-Tools SI platform by signing up for a free personal tour.

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