Incomplete data, inefficient processes, duplicate data entries are all familiar challenges for those who operate in the customer engagement sector, even for those using a tool such as Salesforce CRM that is purpose built to handle customer services.
Resolving contact center management issues does more than improve your customer engagement and agent efficiency in today’s environment, it’s likely a business imperative.
A Harvard Business Review survey found that while 31% of respondents said they currently have a single, 360-degree view of customer data, half of those said they lack the organizational structure to make use of those insights. That’s a business problem that must be resolved to compete in this new customer-centric era.
As Brian Solis, Vice President of Salesforce said when discussing the competitive advantage derived from a strong customer experience, “We need to build a new model for customer engagement, and for business itself: one that actually places the customer, and the data that represents them, at the center of everything. It reimagines how we work, how technology connects the dots, to enhance how we understand and serve customers.”
Many in the healthcare market are building on this customer-centric focus to transform business workflows in innovative ways.
Optimize Existing Systems with Contact Center Management and Salesforce Optimization
One healthcare provider faced considerable growth and expanding omnichannel options. The organization had scaled from 10 customer service agents to over 100 in just a few years to accommodate the growing number of customers across many channels.
The answer to manage the growth was to do more with its Salesforce CRM platform (Salesforce optimization), and Five9 Telephony Platform with its Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
In this case, the healthcare organization teamed with DecisivEdge to leverage all three in a more holistic framework.
For instance, they leveraged the IVR and other contact channels to identify likely opportunities for self-service and automation of inquiry. Then they introduced an analytics-focused infrastructure to derive insights from contact activities across channels.
With effective contact center management and CRM integration, they were able to analyze business processes and workflows to remove bottlenecks and redundancy, optimizing operations and providing scalability.
This transformation resulted in several million dollars of savings over a three year period.
Improved User Interface with Salesforce Optimization
In another case, a behavioral health recovery center struggled to streamline patient admissions. The pre-admission process took too much time resulting in lost opportunities to help patients. The success of any recovery center support model is built on speed and accuracy—a task complicated when call center agents have to move between multiple systems.
The team introduced an interactive call flow customer experience user interface for advisors that makes data entry more intuitive and follows the direction of the call processing.
For instance, they improved workflows and interface between Salesforce to Avatar, the electronic health record (EHR) system, as a first step. The team analyzed and eliminated various known interface errors between the EHR and Salesforce environment using Boomi cloud-based enterprise integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS).
The result of these changes were immediately noticeable by the call center agents. The quality of the calls increased because agents spent less time searching and scrolling, and more time focusing on the patient.
Just as importantly, the redesigned system now supports marketing and business development. It includes a dashboard to support business development activities within the Salesforce Reporting feature and help the marketing team understand the types of patients that are entering the system in order to build facility standing and invest monies appropriately.
Optimize Salesforce for Opportunities – Contact Center Management
Like any comprehensive platform, most of us do not use our software applications to the fullest extent—that scenario is compounded when solutions such as Salesforce CRM are deployed. Yet, few companies rarely use an optimized Salesforce platform to even 50% of its capabilities.
These systems are designed to manage, track, and store massive amounts of data, and are therefore inherently more complex with features and functionalities that require considerable expertise to deploy effectively. Integration with legacy systems, enterprise resource planning solutions (ERPs) or other applications such as integrated voice response (IVR) solutions and contact center management further complicates the effort.
A Salesforce optimization plan or roadmap is a proven way to help organizations do more with a powerful solution that is already in use by an organization. An optimization plan can help enter the quality of data needed to automate customer-facing processes efficiently.
Further, it encourages companies to use more Salesforce functionality, and allows companies to provide more proactive service to their customers through increased touchpoints. From there, customer adoption and retention will follow
Optimizing your Salesforce CRM and contact center management is likely not something that can be done internally in an efficient, timely and cost effective manner—it often takes external expertise.
Investment in Contact Center Management and Salesforce Optimization
Investing more into your Salesforce CRM platform also provides unique opportunities to take advantage of advances such as intelligent routing and messaging, Natural Language Processing, artificial intelligence (AI) and other solutions.
In its AI-Infused Contact Centers Optimize Customer Experience report, Forrester Consulting conducted an online survey with over 300 contact center technology decision makers at global companies that ranged from financial services and manufacturing to healthcare and education.
The study found that 64% percent of respondents said their firms are planning to increase their investments in AI for their contact centers over the next year to better evaluate data. In the study, 87% of respondents believe that harnessing this data for insights would enable their companies to deliver timely and contextually relevant customer experiences, identify new revenue streams, or dynamically respond to market changes.
Consider Salesforce’s recent introduction of Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI CRM technology, which delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale.
An effective AI implementation requires specialized expertise.
According to Forrester, 89% of respondents experience challenges with implementing AI in the contact center management for reasons that range from lack of internal resources to insufficient expertise. The report analysts noted: “To overcome AI implementation challenges, companies must seek more training, expertise, and support when implementing AI. The right partner can do most of the heavy lifting.
However, Forrester also found that “the perceived benefits far outweigh the risks posed by these challenges, and firms should look beyond chatbots to get the most out of AI for their contact centers.”
DecisivEdge can help you automate and optimize your Salesforce experience for a modern, highly effective customer experience. We integrate disparate systems—regardless of platform, implement intelligent routing and messaging, and leverage AI and Natural Language Processing into your workflows.
We help our respective clients explore opportunities to fully optimize best-in-class technology solutions, in conjunction with analytics and data-driven operational strategies, and then work hands-on with implementation to provide real-life end-to-end solutions.