Across every industry, sales and service paradigms are shifting. Salespeople feel increased pressure to shrink sales costs and win new business, even when — due to travel, training, and administrative work — they only spend 45% of their time actually selling [1]. Meanwhile, in the customer service realm, retaining customers and their profit potential has become the top priority. As a result, companies are rethinking strategies and making contact centers a major revenue stream for building customer loyalty through cross-selling and upselling.
Technology-based sales and service solutions have become vital to success in this quickly evolving landscape. On the sales side, the solution’s primary mission must be to help salespeople spend less time on tasks that aren’t directly related to selling and more on growing profitable customer relationships. On the customer service side, the solution needs to open new channels for customer interactions that let service providers fully understand and quickly respond to customer needs. Of course, for both sales and service, any solution must produce enough ROI fast enough to be worth the IT investment.
Easy-to-use, connected, secure, cost-effective… these are all fitting descriptors of our sales and service solutions. Designed to integrate directly with your existing applications, our tools and technologies work together at every level of your organization to provide powerful real-time benefits, including 360º customer views, unified communications, business intelligence, management reporting capabilities, and more. And unlike competing offerings, our solutions fully capitalize on your staff’s existing know-how by offering a familiar interface and work environment that integrate smoothly with the business processes they already use.
Thanks to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Integrated Contact Center, Office SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and other Microsoft communications technologies, our customer service solutions allow teams to securely access and share information anytime, anywhere. These solutions open every available channel in any industry between you and your customers, providing them self-service via interactive voice response, the web, mobile devices, kiosks, and television – as well as assisted live service from contact centers via phone, chat, email, and fax.
Enterprise customers and industry analysts alike give our solutions high marks. In fact, Forrester and Gartner recently rated Microsoft as a leader in customer service software. This recognition was based on several factors: customer profitability measurements, multiple channels and queues, skills-based routing, presence management, automated call distribution, offer management, social network monitoring, knowledge management, customer loyalty, and CTI integration to multiple platforms – all key ingredients to the success of any customer service organization.
The Microsoft sales solutions focus on providing a connected, collaborative environment customized for your industry that links people enterprise-wide with each other and the data they need for deep, real-time customer and business insights to help optimize the sales cycle. This anytime, anywhere accessibility provides efficiencies that allow salespeople to focus more of their time on selling and managers to focus on current sales numbers as well as any pipeline prospects needing direct involvement at the executive level. And our sales solutions are designed to maximize use of existing IT investments with minimal complexity and cost, offering reliability, high performance, and plenty of flexibility to fit the current and future needs of your business.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Microsoft Sales and Service Solution Benefits
Customer Service
- Leverages new opportunities through communities via social networking spaces
- Increases agent efficiency with a unified desktop, including 360º customer views
- Minimizes costly mistakes by applying consistent practices
- Reduces training, maintenance, and upgrade costs with familiar Microsoft solutions
- Improves decision-making with seamless, cross-company data flows
Sales Force Productivity
- Increases revenue potential with a complete, contextual, 360º view of customers
- Maximizes selling time, shortens sales cycles, and boosts close rates through automated, streamlined sales processes
- Accelerates sales cycles via anytime, anywhere access to data and communications with distributed sales team members
- Improves sales performance and decision-making through powerful insight and forecasting that enable real-time adjustments in sales strategy
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
[1] Gartner Group, User Survey Analysis: Business Intelligence, Worldwide 2007.