While most companies are focusing more attention on customer experience, savvy businesses are also examining their sales funnels with an eye to enhancing those experiences as well. COVID-19 and remote work have put new pressure on customer service organizations and inside sales teams. On the sales side, data from McKinsey show how virtual sales interactions are now twice as important for companies as before the pandemic. This underscores the need to deliver great sales customer experience.
Of course, “Zoom” calls are ubiquitous these days for both sales and customer support. But inside sales leaders are also implementing other digital technology to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teams at multiple stages in the customer journey and are seeing outstanding performance improvements.
Triage Sales Botlenecks
Many begin by creating a CX strategy for their sales process that identifies bottlenecks and roadblocks where they lose disproportionate numbers of customers. They explore how digital sales customer experience can mitigate these issues and the technologies that are best suited to solving their problems. Here are some of the most popular and efficacious tactics being implemented for improving customer experience in 2021.
Visual Selling for Sales Customer Experience
In selling, when the prospect can see a product and representative, it can dramatically improve conversion rates and speed to close. The following technologies make it easy to share images and videos by leveraging the prospect’s cellphone:
- Co-Browsing Technology: This tech enables the rep and the prospect to view web or app content together, making it easier to understand benefits and features. This can be a significant boon to prospect and existing customer satisfaction. It can even contribute to higher loyalty and customer lifetime value by encouraging more extensive use of the purchased solution.
- Content-Sharing: Content sharing enables the agent to send links to visual tools that help customers get past their objections. Because an estimated seven people are better able to absorb visible versus verbal information, content sharing can be a fantastic addition to a customer experience strategy — one that helps you consistently deliver a great customer experience.
Both of these technologies enable richer customer interactions. Most companies find that implementation is more straightforward when identifying a single vendor for multiple digital marketing and selling technologies. The best approaches enable numerous forms of content and interaction so you can create ideal workflows and adapt to market changes.
Recently, new technologies called “no-code” CX automation platforms have been developed. These platforms enable anyone to build a wide variety of digital CX experience types without knowing code. “No-code” CX automation toolsets take the pressure off your dev and IT teams because no code is necessary to build and deploy experiences in multiple customer channels.
Streamlined and Compliant Signing and Onboarding
No one wants a sales process that requires more rounds of interaction than necessary. Most of us know that a multi-step process for signatures and implementation lowers customer acquisition and provides a suboptimal overall customer experience. There are several excellent capabilities available to drive efficiency:
- DIY Onboarding Workflows: Once your seller has closed a sale, you want them to move to the next customer. By designing simple forms, data collection tools, and training modules, you empower customers to onboard themselves. Additionally, many companies find that by integrating their workflows and processes with data from their CRM, they can simplify and enrich processes with a more pleasing personalized experience.
- Secure Payments: Secure payments tools hash data, so agents never see sensitive information like credit card numbers. This can mean an improved customer experience because added security can get more people “over the line.”
- eSign: Some companies have replaced their e-sign point solution with offerings that are part of integrated caller engagement platforms, simplifying operations and improving security. It’s all about timeliness and a better experience. When the user can sign when their interest is highest, your sales and digital marketing conversion rates increase. Less customer effort is sure to help drive higher transaction counts.
Providers that deliver multiple solutions in this arena are rapidly growing in popularity. It stands to reason that if companies can get the benefits of various technologies in a single solution, they can streamline the path to making every prospect a happy customer.
Eliminate Process Abandonment
Brands lose many potential customers because prospects become distracted or frustrated. In 2021, prospects have very high expectations for every customer engagement. Here are some tools companies now leverage to boost completion rates through overall better customer experience.
- Micro-Apps: Companies create small applications that address workflow bottlenecks. For example, a micro-app enables prospects to retrieve, review, and e-sign legal disclosure agreements efficiently. The best tasks to automate data collection that quickly surfaces customers’ needs. Micro-apps also help improve the employee experience because highly repetitive tasks are eliminated from workflows.
- Data Entry and Pre-Qualification Through Visual IVR: This means offering callers the option to see their choices instead of wading through audio trees. Many companies use these as a way of eliminating prospects that are too small to serve. For many consumers, audio IVR is nearly always a bad experience. By giving people ways to access alternatives, you can enhance the efficiency of both your sales and customer success team.
- Self-Serve Sales Process: Many sales teams and marketers have tried to divert individuals who prefer self-service by building apps that guide users to transact without help. Especially for Millennial or GenZ prospects, digitized sales processes are often preferred over phone calls. For these prospects, digital automation is synonymous with a good sales customer experience.
Each of these solutions helps you reimagine your interactions with prospects and new customers in ways that can dramatically boost agent productivity. Changing consumer preferences create enormous opportunities to increase the efficiency of your prospect flow. This is an excellent example of how improving customer flows for your organization helps you better meet customer expectations and deliver a positive customer experience.
Implementing Sales Customer Experience
A platform-based approach, in which a single vendor provides multiple forms of digital engagement, is generally preferable to cobbling multiple point solutions.
The FICX No-Code CX Automation Platform and solutions help inside sales and contact center leaders address the many opportunities they have to improve and optimize CX. Our revolutionary platform empowers the full range of customer collaboration capabilities to be developed without the assistance of dev teams or coders. Using our platform, leading companies experience better acquisition rates, higher customer retention, and enhanced customer loyalty.
Further, our built-in analytics produce actionable insight to inform customer experience improvement on an ongoing basis. In this way, customer data drives enhanced customer experience management.
For more information about FiCX, visit our website or request a demo.
