The world went digital years ago, and the impact isn’t just in our personal lives. Any modern business that wants to succeed needs to have a strong online presence. Not only that, but they need to incorporate digital solutions into their day to day operations. Discarding old, legacy systems in favor of more technologically advanced software solutions is called digital transformation, and it’s becoming increasingly important for all businesses.
Digitizing your business gives your employees the best tools to increase their efficiency, allows you to make business decisions based on data-driven insights, enables smoother cooperation across your departments, and helps you improve your relationships with your customers. Here are just a few ways digital solutions are improving businesses.
Customer Relationship Management
CRM software is a technology that manages your company’s interactions with customers and potential customers. One of the best ways you can improve CRM is by adopting advanced call center software solutions. Your call center is the first point of contact many customers have with your business, and being able to offer them the best customer experience possible here will go a long way toward keeping them as returning customers.
Customers are often frustrated before they even reach out to your contact center, so you’ll need convenient IVR (interactive voice response) or artificial intelligence solutions for call routing to quickly connect each caller with the right agent. If you have true omnichannel call center software, customers will be able to contact your agents via their preferred method whether that’s a voice call, text, SMS, web chat, or even through your mobile app. Not only that, but they’ll be able to seamlessly switch between communication channels when needed, all while staying in contact with the same agent, ensuring convenient and personalized customer service.
Contact center software also boosts agent productivity thanks to a unified agent desktop that provides relevant information on all ongoing conversations and incoming calls, so they can react as quickly as possible. Supervisors can even monitor call quality with easy call recording to ensure customer support standards.
Marketing Information Systems
An MIS makes it easy for companies to conduct and analyze market research collected from big data resources like industry reports, government databases, and even internal company data. While you may still want to conduct primary market research using manual means like surveys, focus groups, and observations, using an MIS makes secondary research much easier than dedicating a team of manual researchers to it.
With the ability to collect and organize data in near real-time, as well as create summarized reports based on the data, your analytics team will be that much faster using the data to predict customer behaviors and create new marketing strategies.
Application Integration
It’s great to have digital applications that help your departments do their jobs better and faster, but you aren’t using your software solutions to the best of your ability unless you have full integrations. Application integration software lets your different applications work together by sharing data rather than being siloed (run separately) from each other.
When enterprise software solutions are separated this way, your employees have to draw connections between software programs themselves, which is a lengthy process that can be prone to errors. With the right application integration technology, you can integrate all systems you use, including integrating on-premises solutions with cloud or web-based programs.
A great example of integration could be connecting your MIS to your call center software. The marketing research you collect combined with the customer data and sales leads that you have from your CRM platform can help you increase conversions with your current customer base as well as reach out to new potential customers. The easiest way to ensure a successful digital transformation is to ensure all the pieces of your puzzle are working together.