This is a guest blog post by Pierce Buckley from babelforce, a global integration platform for communications. Pierce is a CX and Contact Center Expert with babelforce. babelforce has developed babelConnect, an extension with which you can make calls from your Zoho CRM account.

Here’s a conundrum for the modern contact center – how can you provide a personal experience to customers while also processing them quickly and efficiently?

It’s been a major obstacle in telesales since the beginning. Not that long ago, an outbound campaign meant a ring binder full of names and a touch tone phone. It was laborious, slow, and decidedly impersonal. But with a modern CRM system, agents can go into each call with pretty decent information on their side. (And the phone is probably an app.)

Don’t talk – communicate

There’s no doubt about it – a well-deployed CRM system is a game changer for sales teams because it puts relationship building back in the mix. When reps can make a call with the complete interaction history at their fingertips, breaking the ice is 100% easier.

At the level of individual contacts, that might be the full story. But what about the macro-level call processing, the nuts and bolts of keeping your campaign running? Can that benefit from a technological intervention in the same way?

It’s not a rhetorical question folks – the answer is yes.

With babelConnect for Zoho CRM, the favourite word is “automation,” which is not one typically associated with the human touch. But that’s actually the point; if you take human labor out of repetitive chores, you’re freeing time up for other tasks. Ask a room full of salespeople, “Who likes making connections and building relationships?” and you’ll see a lot of hands go up. But ask the same people, “Who likes populating call lists?” and you’re not likely to get the same enthusiasm.

How to find the balance

So what does this have to with CRM? Well let’s go back to our first question – how can you balance personal service with efficient processing?

The ingredients for a successful sales campaign are reliable customer data and good agent utilization. Consider those mundane processing tasks that agents hate doing. There are two-and-a-half scenarios where you handle those tasks manually:

1. When they need human oversight

2. When that’s the quickest way

2.5. When it’s really fun

It’s safe to say that scheduling tasks do not usually fulfill any of these criteria.

The common chores that support sales activity might include recycling unanswered contacts or scheduling follow-up calls to high-value customers. There’s rarely a good reason for these kinds of tasks to involve humans, yet many businesses commit valuable resources to them. As a result, scheduling takes longer, is less precise, and bores staff to tears.

Getting the most from leads

Some of the highest value leads a business can attract arrive through their website. Requests for information are like gold and demand quick attention. According to HBR, businesses that respond to enquiries within one hour are seven times more likely to qualify leads.

So let’s imagine the absolute best scenario that could follow: Customer data travels from your website, straight to your Zoho CRM. A profile is created, and the babelConnect app places the call on the outbound schedule on priority.

And the first time a human is involved? Well, it’s the first time a human is needed – in actually handling the call. The value of babelConnect is that it maps into the incredibly strong relationship-building utility that Zoho CRM already offers. While Zoho holds the customer information needed to nurture leads, babelConnect can identify, schedule, and dial leads that actually need nurturing.

So here’s some homework for you: calculate the difference in the number of sales conversations per month when the average talk time per sales agent goes up from 40 to 50 minutes per hour. Typically, the difference equates to 25%. Now think about the impact of that on your bottom line! In addition, if you factor into your calculations the reduced cost of preparing and updating lists manually, you’ll see that it can mean a huge transformation in your team’s performance.

Come and talk to us, and find out how babelConnect for Zoho CRM is going to make that happen.

You can also check out the integration itself and install it from the Zoho Marketplace.