Buying habits are always changing, which makes understanding customer behavior a challenge, even for the most seasoned sales teams. For companies, the solution is never easy. Everyone is talking about how AI and data-driven approaches will enhance sales efficiency, but what does that mean in practice?
Developing an enhanced 360-degree view of your customers requires more than just keeping data in Salesforce. One approach is integrating your Salesforce org with a content management system (CMS) that gives your entire team a holistic view of each customer. By establishing a single source of truth, your sales reps can better understand who has been communicating with the customer, plus information on all transactions, communications, purchases, and more.
No one wants to receive an email from your sales rep on Thursday that doesn’t take into account a message from your customer success team sent on Monday. That’s why you should take a three-pronged approach:
- Capture information intelligently
- Manage content in context
- Deliver engaging communications
It might sound simple in theory, but this approach can be hard to implement without the right tools in place. Here’s a look at the steps you can take to ensure you’re keeping a 360-degree view of your customer, so you can improve the employee experience, make your customers happy, and increase your business’s bottom line.
1. Get Salesforce Integrated With All Relevant Customer Data
Everyone knows individuals and teams work in their own ecosystems – including SAP, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and of course Salesforce. If you want to break down information silos, you need to start by syncing your Salesforce data with a content management platform (CMS), such as OpenText.
A CMS gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. By centralizing your documents, you’re taking the first step in ensuring sales reps have access to all essential customer information in one view. This includes Salesforce, as well as information and files shared across multiple apps and systems, including ERPs, CRMs, and ECM.
2. Create a Single Source of Truth
Integrating your customer data is only step one. Next, you’ll need to make sure that everyone across your company – from call service workers to sales reps – has access to the same data. To make matters more complicated, some workers will be accessing information on smartphones (think of when your sales reps are on the go) while others will view it on their desktops.
By failing to create that single source of truth, you run the risk of long sales cycles, poor customer service, missed upsell opportunities, and countless hours of wasted time – and we all know that time is money.
3. Find the Information You Need Faster With AI
The AI boom is here and is taking us further away from the world of automation. Thanks to AI, simple searches are quickly evolving into prompt engineering, which means mastering the art of asking the right question is key. One-directional information learning is quickly turning into an unlimited world of “ask me anything”.
Despite these advancements in AI, so many sales teams continue living in spreadsheets and updating data manually. Worse, some are still glued to paper-based selling processes, which keeps processes slow. By investing in AI-power tools to enhance the sales process, you save your employees time and improve their experience. This leads to more time to focus on delivering a strong customer experience and increased margins.
Build a tech stack that allows you to track customer interactions and address their needs faster, without adding extra noise. Keep an eye out for AI-driven features such as:
- Conversational content search: Activate interactive, chat-based search and use natural language questions to effortlessly find relevant document information and reduce repetitive work.
- Smarter content insights: Empower your team to act, not process. Your tech stack should distill content and workspaces into easily digestible summaries, enhancing both accessibility and usability. This shift to AI-powered content services helps to remove costs, reduce resources, and eliminate risks.
4. Gain an Information Advantage With an Enhanced 360-Degree View
With so much information in Salesforce and other systems, finding the right customer data and documents quickly has become more important than ever.
If you can’t search across all of your systems at once, you won’t be able to access information or generate insights easily. Whether it’s data on a transaction or specific behavior, your team should be able to find the information they need, when and where they need it most.
By building a tech stack that allows you to analyze multiple data sources at once, you will be able to search and summarize multiple documents to provide answers faster and better recommend products and services. You can also achieve a quicker time to value that requires fewer resources, gaining favor with customers and being one step ahead of the competition.
And remember: getting your internal team aligned and organized is just one piece of the puzzle. You’ll also want to make it as easy as possible for customers to complete onboarding, as well as submit and upload documents like order forms and identity proofs.
5. Keep Your Customer Information Secure
Privacy and information governance is a growing concern for customers and consumers across the board. In the world of tech sales, it takes months (or even years) to gain trust, and one small mishap to lose it.
Now more than ever, your tools need to handle customer data in ways that meet all privacy and security requirements. This means tools that meet local data privacy laws, as well as standards set by regulations such as GDPR. In highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare, securing customer data is even more crucial.
But your customer data can lead to a treasure trove of insights, so to be able to utilize these you need to ensure you’re always handling documents and data securely and ethically.
Summary
Getting lost in customer data leaves everyone frustrated, especially your sales reps. Integrating your systems and creating one view of your customer data won’t happen overnight, either. Without the right tools in place, elevating the human potential of your teams and getting an enhanced 360-degree view of your customers will be practically impossible.
Use OpenText Solutions for Salesforce with AI-powered technology to capture all structured and unstructured customer data intelligently, manage your customer information in context, connect the dots from multiple sources quickly, and deliver engaging communications built around reliable insights.
By taking these five steps, you will be well on your way to mastering the modern way of work and boosting your sales reps’ success.
Check out our seven solutions on the AppExchange for more info.