The Value Of Voice In CRM

By Steven De Korne, Vice President of Marketing, Vertical Communications

For years, companies serious about customer service — and the impact it has on the bottom line — have invested in customer relationship management (CRM) tools for gathering business intelligence. When it comes to giving sales teams the ability to quantify customer communications and allowing them to track which customers require follow up and which issues need to be addressed, these systems have proven themselves to be indispensable. CRM data provides end users with a framework for identifying, harvesting, and managing critical information, and extracting the insights needed to improve relationships across the customer base.

That said, there has always been one vital ingredient missing in the formula for creating a well-rounded, comprehensive summary of sales activity and customer knowledge. That is the analysis of voice communications, so vital to any business. Modern unified communications (UC) technology — which incorporates voice — captures a number of detailed analytics, particularly in a contact center environment, such as the number of dropped calls, the number of customers forced to wait on hold, the duration of that wait, the quantity of calls handled by an agent, and how quickly an issue was addressed. Such vital metrics add deeper dimension to CRM, shedding light not only on the quality of calls, but also on the individual performance of employees.

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