Pre-Sales in a Product company

Pre-Sales is a very widely appreciated team in the IT/ITES Services sector for all the back end help/knowledge they build for winning large scale bids. The Business Analysts talk to the customer and capture the requirements. Both teams function in tandem and contribute significantly to win big deals. In Contrast, when you look at a product company ( We are talking of B2B ) the BA/Pre-Sales is clubbed into the same team and not necessarily separate functions. Especially in early stage firms, when the product is new and you are building a process to sell, Pre-Sales stands to be the most important function to stabilize Product Management, Product Delivery, Training & Product Support with a role in all these functions and much more.

Now coming to the most important role of Pre-Sales - To Support Sales, Here is a quick check on what your Pre-Sales need to know or the skill set they need to have:

• Can you show and explain any and every feature in your product?
• Can you explain to the customer in simple terminology how your product works?
• Can you differentiate between must have requirements and good to have requirements of the customer?
• Can you explain customer requirements to your product team ( if they are already not available) in the language they understand?
• Can you listen to the customer requirement and then show how it can be fulfilled using your product?
• Can you improvise on what the customer wants and show them how to do it in a better fashion using your product?
• Can you help your sales team win a deal with your strong industry knowledge & product experience?
• Do you know what goes in the back end to enable a customer?
• Do you understand the architecture of your product and its limitations it has?
• Can you estimate how much time is needed to deploy the product based on the requirements?
• Last but the most important part, are you in line with the company vision on the product roadmap?

 

If most of your answers are Yes, then you have a very strong pre-sales person else the other way. Quite often, your team will be a mix of people who can cater to only part of these questions - that is when you have to segregate the team into Business Analysts and Pre-Sales ( proposal building,solution document etc).

Most often than not Pre-Sales needs to also get involved in Delivery so that you deliver exactly what is discussed at the time of sale, Also Training which is done mostly by Pre-Sales for a considerable time, Product Management -  so that the road map of your organization is not peddled with the requirements of customers, but at the same time you create a balance where customer / market requirement is given priority and is delivered in the product version releases. Product Support -  If pre-sales is involved in the above 3 functions of delivery,training and management - the number of queries to support will be considerably less and also customers will be more reasonable since they understand the product and also know its limitations.

But till your product becomes a hit, you will need a strong pre-sales who can manage customers, train them, support them ( even if you have a support team, still the personal touch matters a lot in India) and also manage your internal product releases in sync with the market requirements.

Also, with a strong Pre-Sales in place, your delivery & customer support will face a lot less issues / complaints since there is a dedicated person who hand holds the customer from Sale to Go-Live and takes care of any minor changes,configurations etc needed.

As the company grows and you scale up, the following roles can be removed or diluted from Pre-Sales in the order of priority

1. Support - Support definitely needs to be a dedicated team and multi-tasking is definitely not the way to go when you scale. More on this in our next blog.
2. Delivery Management - A separate team is needed to manage the huge deliveries you will get when you scale up
3. Product Management - A dedicated product manager is definitely needed by the time you are ready to scale to manage the large list of product requirements.
4. Training - This can always be under Pre-Sales but if you can afford, definitely a dedicated team to build and maintain product documentation.

In short, your Pre-Sales will be the "Sun" of your Organizational System and all departments supported and backed by it after you scale up. But unlike the Sun, it will never be a role to be in lime light and will always remain the backbone system. Your customers will Love it and so does your Sales team.

Indian Cloud based SAAS products - The correlation between Sales and Support models

Cloud ...Cloud ...Cloud ...This has been the buzz word around in the last 3 years and it is to stay. The industry is adopting Cloud based solutions , products like never before. High growth markets like India where technology adoption has just started, there is a good story to crack the market. Also, businesses are looking at new options on the cloud .The question that arises now and is very important for start-ups who offer services on the cloud - What is your Sales Model? How do you reach your target market? How do you sell?

Most often than not, this is also THE QUESTION which investors will ask you. What is your strategy or at-least the plan for scaling up operations and revenues? Having the luck to speak to some of our industry peers , friends and competitors as well in the start-up community , we have seen a mix. of ideas on the strategy for growth. But what we found from experience is quite different.

Couple of ideologies which you will hear mostly are 

1.  We are a Cloud based company, we will sell online like any e-commerce store and support is via email or phone. No customer visits at all.
2. We sell online/offline but we support online only and no customer site visits for support.
3. We are reluctant to support customers at their site but yeah , we do send if it is a large customer.

Here's the catch. Does your Sales model also put pressure on customer support and the way you operate? The answer is Yes, it does and in a significant way than you can imagine. Based on our experience, we have classified into phases the growth of an organization and how your Sales and Support models change.

Phase1 - Online Sales & Support ( just started off with a SAAS model)

If you are selling online only and the only way you generate revenue is by pulling more users to your website, then yes your support model can be completely online. Even if customers insist for a site visit, you can justify and answer their queries online than visiting their office. More importantly, your product should be simple enough to support online.

Phase2 - Online or Offline Sales and only Online Support:(struggling)

This is the worst model you can look at but is the most fancy one. Basically, as an organization you are shouting out that you want to make sales & generate revenue either online or if required, by visiting a customer using a sales team but you will support customers only online or on phone but will never visit their site.

This is the worst model imaginable from a customer support / customer satisfaction perspective and lot of customers will churn easily to competition. You will want to quickly move to the 3rd phase or model- the most popular one in India. Companies which get stuck in this phase (Phase2) quickly move back to Phase1 or die down.

Phase3 - Online or Offline Sales & Support ( product is established and the need is identified, growth phase):

The Sales and Support teams visit the customer based on the size of customer, critical nature of the issue or depending on the partnership maintained.

Especially for the Indian market, it is the most dependable model for scale in revenue since the market dynamics are still mostly offline.

 

Conclusion:

You could be a poster boy startup and technically the most sophisticated product in the market but to survive in the Indian market and do business, you will need to create a support system which is in line with your sales organization and customer expectations.. Also, since most of the startup's will go from phase1 to phase3 to increase the revenues, their support model too has to change as they grow. You could be a high tech. startup but to grow and survive the Indian market, you will need an offline support systems since your customers need not be as high tech. as you, they just need to be able to afford your product :) .

 

3 Strategies to Optimize Your Call Centre Management Effectiveness

Call Centre management has been transforming from what we had yester years. Now, the game is more about Customer Retention, Customer Acquisition and cost optimization and excelling in your competition. Now comes the question of how can you excel in your Customer Service Management? As it has emerged as a key to the success of every businesses.

Cloudagent has been designed keeping in view about each and every vertical and the processes involved in such verticals such that we can deliver a superior customer experience. Cloudagent recommends 3 strategies to optimize your call center operations.

1)   Adhering to Departmental Key Performance Indicators

 

 

Although fundamental agent-monitoring KPIs such as average handle time (AHT), average speed of answer (ASA) and average talk time (ATT) will continue to be important measures in evaluating contact center performance in the foreseeable future, there is an increasing need to broaden the toolset. Using measurements focused on meeting company goals (such as increased sales) and objectives in the areas of customer satisfaction (“Are my customers happy?”), corporate and brand image (“How are we perceived?”) as well as building customer loyalty become more critical. These goals and objectives must be reviewed and adjusted annually, at minimum, to ensure an ongoing match between corporate mission and objectives and contact center performance. The corporate agility to change measured metrics and management tools to match evolving objectives and changing market conditions will be crucial to the success of the overall customer service effort.

At CloudAgent, “Interactive Analyst” helps you in sticking to your KPI’s. The Interactive Analyst  is contact center analytics tool bundled with CloudAgent. IA enables supervisor and decision makers to get the In-depth knowledge of their contact center . IA lets businesses know SLA performance, Agent Productivity, Overall Contact center productivity and customer satisfaction. You can also schedule the selected report to be delivered as email in your Inbox. The CloudAgent contact center dashboard provides real-time statistics of contact center performance. Supervisor can monitor one or more sites from Anywhere, Anytime over the web. This allows supervisors to easily monitor and manage distributed contact centers across locations. There are over 200 Dashboards that the customers can schedule on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This helps the customers in closely monitoring their KPI’s and achieving them.

 

2) Building an Integrated Call Centre

Optimizing a customer service implementation requires integration and a complete customer

profile development across front-office and back-office operations, multiple departments and all available access channels. In addition, all operational data gathered from support systems must be unified within an actionable insight framework to drive operational KPIs from efficiency to effectiveness. Until this data integration and system coordination is achieved throughout the technologies, processes and data stores within the enterprise, customer service efforts will be sub-optimized. Building a integrated cloud contact center is a complex proposition, Cloudagent provides it all at just one click away. Using Cloudagent is easy and will just take 30 mins to install. Cloudagent can also be used not just for calls but also for emails and SMS. 

3) Process Optimization

 

 

 

Process optimization has been the key challenge for the senior management of companies. Process optimization if handled End-to-End, can attain desired results for any organization. Integrated quality monitoring tool, allows supervisors to judge and rate the agent performance on various process specific parameters. This helps isolate performance shortfalls and take corrective steps to rectify them, and align training to improve performance. This also provides early insights into customer expectations and behavioral trends, that helps decision makers align business strategies to keep up with business competitiveness.

For enquiries please send us a email to marketing@ozonetel.com or call us at 1-800-200-0820

 

 

 

CloudAgent can Increase your Ecommerce Sales. Find out How?

Ecommerce in India is currently overtaken the passion of Information Technology. While Ecommerce companies may allow clients to purchase goods and services online, customers who encounter difficulties may sometimes struggle to receive assistance. There is no substitute to a live operator offering customer support when your clients need it. And with so much talk about identity theft, you need a way for your shoppers to feel secure. Even though most e-commerce transactions are managed online, there is still a need for telephone support. 24/7 customer support is the difference between growing a base of loyal customers and leaving a bad impression of your brand that could hurt your business.

 Online customers expect useful product information, access from any mobile device, intuitive interfaces, full support, a fast checkout process that accepts all payment methods, and a place to rate their experiences. They don’t tolerate screen freezes, transactional snafus or confusing menus. An effective order taking procedure is the backbone of any business that sells directly to customers.

When you advertise a phone number on your website/TV/Radio, your customers will trust in your business more and will be more apt to purchase your products. CloudAgent can help you in converting that trust in increasing your sales.

Elevate your customer experience: Have On-going training for your agents about how to convince their customer to purchase a product. Have them in the loop of the new retention management programs that the company has announced and how does it benefit the customer. Have the Agent talk to the customer from the customer perspective instead of the your company. Redesign your IVR System, Use our platform KooKoo to address usability issues while complying with the complex call routing rules caller.  Once the caller responds by making a missed call, CloudAgent records the input and updates required for your business.

Order Management/Order Processing: Order processing is been the biggest worry for every customer, especially when the consignment doesn't reach him with the time frame. With Cloud Agent you can Integrate your existing sales CRM to CloudAgent. Quickly locate Customers previous information, reduced data entry requirements.

Click to Call Features: This feature of Cloud Agent allows you to run simple inside sales, with end-to-end call tracking and analyses. This feature is very useful to reduce most of your manual work and optimize your agent productivity.

Missed Call Services: This feature can be a very useful feature to customers who are not used to make online purchases. They can give a missed call to the number advertised on the website and talk to the agent and gain credibility of the website. Another method to effectively use the missed call services is to give feedback of the website services once the consignment is delivered to the customer.  Once a consignment is received by the customer, the customer gives a missed call to the given number for feedback and the agent calls back the customer. Once the call is finished, CloudAgent fires SMS to caller requesting for feedback using a MISSED call process.  No cost to the your dashboard. Advantages of Missed call services at CloudAgent are;

1. Immediate feedback about the website process or about service
2. Identify top and bottom customers as perceived by the callers
3. Identify hidden calling patterns and customer grievance patterns
4. Very important feedback loop established immediately after the delivery of service or Call

How KooKoo Can Ease Your Cloud Communication

Cloud communication is fast becoming the order of the day. This is happening for a reason. With computers vulnerable to physical damages and even cyber security issues, a sense of insecurity does tend to haunt us all as we have valuable data stored therein – both personal as well as work-related. Any loss, even a minor one can spell disaster. This is the reason as to why facilities are being shifted on to cloud platforms for users to remain worry-free.

Life has turned easy, isn’t it? However, comfort knows no bounds, which is why software developers tirelessly put in efforts to come up with something innovative or a product which is simply out of the box. A leap in that direction has been taken with further easing up of cloud technologies as well.

This is how Ozonetel’s KooKoo platform has taken shape. Besides being completely safe and cloud-based, it uses your existing web development skills, thus cutting out on the requirement to learn something new. It would be safe to categorise it as an ‘add-on’ which can help you deal with apps your way (even make them anew) and also customize them.

In short, it can be described as a shot in the arm for your webpage dealing with callers, from where you can have commands executed (in terms of flashing texts, collecting input, sending SMS, recording, etc.) on your behalf. You end up paying only as much as you use, minus the irritating heavy hardware, wires, their installation and maintenance. Without having to maintain them, you save capital – major advantage of having switched over to the cloud platform.

Last, but not the least, the Cloud IVR application will never try to infringe upon your privacy in terms of storing your data. It purely does what it is supposed to do – perform telephony functions.

Tracking your Marketing ROI using Cloud Telephony

We at Ozonetel have come out with a new tool that can help you track your marketing ROI. The general customer flow goes something like this:

1. Customer searches on the web
2. Customer clicks on your ad.
3. Customer lands up on your site.
4. Customer browses the site.
5. Some customers call.
6. Some of them buy and some move on.

Now, the web tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics etc allow you to track the flow from start to end and you can make optimizations on how make more people buy. The problem comes with step 5 above.
What happens with the customers who call?
Did they continue on the site after the call?
Did they leave after the call?
What was told in the call?

There can be lot of optimizations done to handle the customers who call and this is where we come in. We have a simple tool which will help you track this communication.

We enable this by sharing a simple javascript code which you put in your landing pages corresponding to different campaigns.

So when customers visit your site and call your call center we track that and update your analytics(Google,Mixpanel etc)

So now your callers can be tracked just like your web visitors as shown below.
                                        

 

Get Caller details and other info right in Google analyics. Get information about realtime callers to your call center etc.
This works best with our call center productCloudagent.

If you want to try this out for your campaigns, just drop us a mail at sales@ozonetel.com or go to http://ozonetel.com/signup.html

Cloudagent Loves Salesforce - Supports Open CTI

Every call center needs a good CRM to provide proper service to its callers. Cloudagent works well with all CRMs and we have ready made integrations with most of the popular CRMs and support desk systems.

We had already covered how to integrate your Salesforce account to provide a contextual IVR on our KooKoo blog, http://blog.kookoo.in/2012/03/integrating-kookoo-with-salesforce-to.html

Now, we support Open CTI from Sales force. With this, Cloud agent call center software can exist as a first class citizen in your Sales force system.

Just login to your Sales force account, choose the call center tab and start receiving calls. You will also automatically get click to call integration.

Contact us for more details or call us at 1-800-200-0820

Cloud Count Center | Call Center support

With start-ups popping up all across India, it may not be a bad idea for you as a company to aspire toexpand beyond your comfort zones to new and previously unvisited areas. It will also be a natural part of any business to rely heavily on customer support services. Technically speaking, it may not be feasible to reach every nook and corner of the world, what is to be done in such a case?In life hard work is needed for success, the same mantra goes for businesses as well.

However, smart work and lazy-but-innovative ideas can also turn out to be game-changers in many situations. This is exactly what everyone is looking out for. You get complacent for a moment and you risk losing out big time. This is exactly the kind of scenario that the reputed Rural Shores faced. With a team of 10 agents engaging in multilingual voice processes, Rural Shores was unable to scale up. Due to growing inbound and outbound multilingual calling support, Rural Shores embarked on Ozonetel platform in August 2013 post which every multilingual non-telecom voice process were moved on to the Ozonetel cloud platform. Soon, multi – lingual voice processes grew up to 250 agents within four months. The cost plummeted by 50% along with a productivity boost. In case you are still wondering how all this will be achieved, all you need to do is simply rely on Ozonetel and grow. With our world class cloud telephony services, we will not disappoint you.