SUMO’s one-on-one scheduling feature, Appointment Wizard, is a fast and easy way for sales teams to book appointments with prospects or customers. Let your sales reps book an appointment, recording the What, Who and When, and send a confirmation without even leaving Salesforce.
The Appointment Wizard can be accessed from within a Salesforce lead record.
Set Up a Menu of Service Types
Customize both the service type and times for the types of appointments your sales reps need to offer. You can define the menu of services as well as the time limits for each service type.
Book From a Pool of Resources
Have an SDR, admin or other employee that schedules appointments for your sales team? The Appointment Wizard will show the appointment setter a list of available reps based on the service required.
View a Sales Rep’s Availability in Real-Time
Once a service and a representative is selected, the Appointment Wizard will show all available days and times for the chosen rep. This information is all in real-time as the rep’s calendar is synced with the Appointment Wizard to provide the most up-to-date availability.
Set Up Appointment Reminders
SUMO allows for up to three different reminder channels, phone, text, and email, that can be set to remind your prospect or customer anywhere from 1 to 3 days prior to their appointment. SUMO has found these type of appointment reminders reduces the probability of no-shows by up to 35%.
Built to Extend the Power of Salesforce
As SUMO is built native on the Salesforce platform, no additional manual admin work by your sales rep to record the booked appointment is required. All details for the appointment are automatically logged within the lead record once the appointment process is completed.
White Label Templates
The confirmation email template your prospect or customer receives can be personalized with a customized confirmation message and your company’s brand identity from your logo to brand color scheme.
Delivering a Positive Experience
Although the appointment is now set, there is still the possibility that the prospect or customer will want to reschedule their appointment. A self-scheduling link embedded in their email confirmation will let prospects and customers reschedule their appointment anytime from a desktop, tablet or mobile phone. The self-scheduling link also reduces the risk of a no-show and the pain of playing phone or email tag with your sales reps.
This self-scheduling link will take the prospect or customer through each step in the scheduling process and the appointment will be immediately be updated for both the prospect/customer and their sales rep.
Once the new time is chosen, the prospect or customer can even update their appointment reminders.
An End-to-End Sales Solution
SUMO’s Appointment Wizard is a customizable feature that is the same whether your organization is using Salesforce Classic or has converted to the Lightning Experience. It reduces the time your sales team spends trying to book one-on-one appointments with prospective and current customers. It also helps manage the appointment even after the booking is complete with our Reminder Engine and self-scheduling capability available 24/7 365 across devices.
Adding online scheduling to your sales team’s technical toolbox helps combat the back-and-forth of communication tag and lowers no-shows while creating a positive experience for a potential future customer.
New to SUMO? Visit our Salesforce AppExchange listing for more information and a full video demo of this SUMO feature.
Call center agents are pressured to be efficient and provide customers with a positive service experience. Agents have a list of tasks that need to be completed both during and after every interaction. They also have to work within a time limit on just about every task. One of these tasks is done after an interaction is completed. It’s referred to as After Call Work. Take a look at this comment from a thread dedicated to After Call Work or ACW from the Reddit group r/talesfromcallcenters.
Don’t use After Call Work for after-call work
“My job allows us 45 seconds of ACW. Meanwhile, if someone is calling in with like 5 different issues they all have to go under 5 different categories with detailed notes. So we have to keep track to keep our call under 6 1/2 minutes while keeping detailed notes (no abbreviations at all) and actually working on the reason why they called in to begin with. It’s very hard for me to type and talk at the same time. I jot notes down so I don’t forget why they are calling but I either start typing what I’m saying or saying what I’m typing! I’m a fast typist and can get my notes done pretty quickly but not in 45 seconds! Especially for multiple reasons for calling in.” jennabellie. Reddit. Reddit, Inc. Web. 2017.
The Work of After Call Work
The work after a call involves a long list of information like call purpose, customer concerns, and call outcome. ACW activities can also include sending follow-up emails and forwarding requests to a supervisor. It is often a long list of information that must be logged before the agent can pick up their next call. It’s an important KPI for call centers no matter if they are inbound, outbound or hybrid of both functions. Some call centers limit a support agent’s ACW time, some push their agents to have a majority of the call notes recorded during their calls. As is apparent from the Reddit comment above, these approaches have still their pitfalls.
Managing the Minutes
Managing ACW tasks can be solved by combining internally created resources and processes with technology tailored to a call center’s needs. These are some of the universally recommended internal strategies and tools for managing ACW:
Make call text management practices a detailed part of your training process. Set up a mentor program by pairing seasoned agents with agents that are new or struggling with managing their after call work activities. Provide reusable repetitive call text that agents can cut and paste into their notes for common call issues. Allow the use of an approved list of call center abbreviations to help with completing notations while on a call. Create a bank of templates for emails responses for common issues. Build a resource library of responses for common live chat questions. Lastly, one of the most useful internal strategies is to practice continuous quality improvement measures. Ask for feedback from your agents on the after call processes and resources currently in place and regularly after implementing any changes. This practice can help in identifying what is working and what isn’t.
Supercharging the Minutes
Working with your team can help curb the challenges agents face in managing their ACW tasks and time limitations. If you have this part of the equation figured out then it’s time to turn your attention to the technologies in place. CTI tools that work with your CRM will, among many other things, will provide more accurate customer records, call data and analytics on agent efficiency.
At the foundation of a good call center technical stack is a good CRM (customer relationship management), like Salesforce. The blocks that build upon this foundation are CTI (computer telephony integration) applications. Important information is centralized in one location, easily obtained from your CRM after every call.
For example:
Call Tracking – Active call or even voicemail recordings can be automatically added to a customer case within your CRM and data entries can be programmed to populate a helpdesk ticket. CTI tools allow the syncing of data from phone calls to CRM and ticketing so call data doesn’t get siloed.
Note-Taking – CTI tools allow agents to directly update a CRM with non-call customer interactions from emails and texts to social media.
The Domino Effect of Good ACW
Although ACW occurs after an agent has interacted with a customer, it is important that is well-executed as it contributes to a customer’s level of satisfaction and overall experience. The information recorded benefits the customer should they need to interact again with your organization.
There are customer cases that can require scheduling follow-up calls, consultations or service appointments. This is an opportunity to extend the quality of customer service that your call center provides. Rather than making it difficult for your customer to schedule a follow-up call or meeting, your agents can make it convenient for the customer by offering self-scheduling:
Scheduled maintenance like software and equipment updates
Email drip updates on renewals
Schedule an appointment from a chat
Incoming calls from customers to schedule initial consultation or service for a physical location
Self-scheduling is a convenience for both call centers and your customers. Customers value the ease of scheduling an appointment and are more apt to keep the appointment. And agents can spend more time on higher priority tasks rather than repeatedly calling or emailing a customer to set or reschedule an appointment.
If you would like to consider appointment scheduling for your call center, SUMO Scheduler includes all the features discussed above. You can even make your own custom reports on any table or field in the database and have a report or collection of reports emailed to you every Monday AM before your management meeting. And as a Salesforce® native application, SUMO can extend the power of your Salesforce CRM and Service Cloud®.
Sending appointment invites from Salesforce to contacts from cases.
Inviting contacts to schedule with you or a co-worker.
Not to mention, the ease of data management as everything is in Salesforce with no need to manage two sets of customer data. Let one of our scheduling experts show you how we can help your agents be more productive, deliver better service faster, and improve your organization’s C-SAT.
Your company has armed the sales team to the teeth with every selling tool in the market. From a CRM platform to a dialer to a library of content pieces from the marketing team. However, there is one piece of software that may be missing. It is a piece of software that fits seamlessly into a B2B selling tool suite: online appointment scheduling.
The B2B sales cycle is a sales process with little variance in most industries. The steps in the process all tend to be the same and it is usually the length of the cycle that can vary the most.
A B2B sales cycle can be outlined in 6 stages:
Prospecting
First Contact
Qualification
Presentation
Evaluation
Closing
Incorporating online appointment scheduling during some of the key stages of the sales cycle not only lightens a sales rep’s daily task load during the process, it can also help facilitate the sale.
Prospecting
Filling up the top of the sales funnel is hard work. Whether your company has a dedicated SDR team or your salespeople do their own hustling to fill their pipeline, prospecting can be time-consuming.
Besides cold calls and emails, your company can support your sales team’s prospecting efforts by implementing self-scheduling across several online channels. Embedding scheduling CTAs on your company’s website, microsites or landing pages that showcase important features, offer interesting content or pricing pages can compel a visitor to click for more information.
First Contact
Sales teams can expend a lot of time and energy researching prospects. Not only is there research to be done, but they may also need to compose the perfect email and phone script. These first touches are most often a soft pitch, an introduction rather than a hard sell. Your team may be sending an email and following up with a phone call or vice versa. If the sales team has done their research, the information that is provided is highly relevant to the prospect’s industry and particular needs. Once the first contact is made, the last thing a sales rep wants is to make it difficult for their prospects to connect with them again.
Adding a self-scheduling link to an email signature or to the marketing collateral included in the email presents a prospect with the opportunity to schedule a short meeting with an SDR or sales rep to learn more about your company, its product or services.
Qualification
A sales cycle may include more than one discovery call. A sales rep’s first meeting with a prospective client may not have been with the decision-maker but rather a gatekeeper. In this case, your sales rep will need to organize another call. A sales rep providing a scheduling link to the new contact removes the hassle of email and phone tag that normally occurs to get such an important call booked.
Evaluation
In this critical stage of the sales process, your sales rep can be partnering with several other internal departments. This stage can be quite lengthy depending on the size of the prospective client organization and the number of departments that may be using your company’s product or service. Your sales rep could be facilitating anything from reviewing redlines in a contract, overseeing a technical scope with your engineering team or perhaps they are asked to do a third demo.
Online scheduling helps a great deal in responding to proposals from prospects as well as returning customers. It also helps avoid those dreaded “no-decision” losses.
An Extra Helping Hand
The role of appointment scheduling throughout the sales process can be a valuable tool. It can not only support a sales team during every stage of the sales process, it can also help guide prospects through the customer journey and help reduce the length of the sales cycle.
Salespeople benefit from not having to chase after a prospect for a meeting date and time, prospects can enjoy the convenience of the scheduling experience. Online appointment scheduling software also connects with your company’s CRM platform, recording a prospect’s contact information, saving your sales reps time on such manual tasks. Improving the “last mile” of selling and customer interaction, online scheduling gives your sales team an edge over those sales teams that do not have it.
Retail companies are having to work harder nowadays for a customer’s attention. The well-tested strategies of luring customers into stores with one-day sales, direct mail pieces, limited time giveaways and special events are not always as effective as they used to be. Brick and mortar retailers that shift their marketing and sales tactics to include digital tools can better connect and interact with customers that are now used to being romanced by companies across both online and offline channels.
Brick-and-mortar retail locations will most likely continue to reduce their footprint but the physical storefront will still continue to exist despite the onslaught of competition from online-only retailers. Making sure your company is delivering convenience and a positiveexperience for your customers is a solid place to start building and retaining your company’s customer base. The art of clienteling combined with a little technological support can play an important part in this customer nurturing process.
More than half (54%) of retailers said the customer experience is their most important area of focus, way ahead of cross-channel marketing (16%), data-driven marketing (14%), mobile (11%), and programmatic buying/optimization (4%). (Adobe)
Clienteling Still Matters
Clienteling, a buzzword for retail salesperson’s art of catering to customers, is still a very valid practice in modern retail. By establishing long-term relationships with their key customers based on their particular tastes, preferences and past purchases, the lifetime value of a customer can increase.
In the good old days, the salesperson had a sort of little black book with this valuable information, allowing them to provide a highly personalized shopping experience. Personalizing the customer experience has now since moved from Rolodexes and paper files to software applications, specifically mobile apps.
Taking the Black Book Digital
In the new omnichannel world of retail, the traditional black book is no longer as powerful as it used to be. Your customers are mobile and can be present in many locations, whether they be global or national or local. Your customer’s relationship with your retail business could include more than one storefront as well as your online channels. This customer mobility creates a challenge for a salesperson that uses a black book. How can the data and insights it provides be available for stores wherever the customer chooses to shop?
75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, OR knows their purchase history. (Accenture)
Acting as a digital black book, clienteling apps can help your sales staff better serve your customers and better serve your business. A good application will take all the important black book insights your business has about a customer and put it all in one place, at the fingertips of your sales staff, so it’s visible across devices and locations. Clienteling apps provide your salespeople with these useful features:
A Catalog – your products with inventory levels, location availability and customer reviews at their fingertips from a tablet or mobile phone.
A Customer Profile – including purchase histories, special dates, the locations and frequency of their visits.
A Personalization Multi-tool – integrations with CRM platforms, social media, and mobile POS software can provide salespeople with several opportunities to serve the customer directly on the sales floor, and send personalized emails or text messages about sales, store or life events.
This centralized data helps a salesperson deliver recommendations and guide the customer experience in-store. This data can also better engage customers on your website in a similar manner. An evaluation of your business’ needs is a good starting point to use as a comparison against an application’s functionality, scalability, and cost before committing to one.
A Natural Partnership for Success
Another perhaps less sexy yet just as effective ways to continue to deliver the convenience and positive experience that modern retail customers now expect is with online appointment scheduling. Something as seemingly simple as automating appointment scheduling can closely tie together with clienteling practices for the convenience and positive experience that the modern retail customer now expects.
An appointment scheduling application used in tandem with your clienteling app can help to pull your online customers into your physical stores, give your salespeople more time to serve your customers and can extend the impact of convenience, personalization and positive customer experience.
At SUMO we have seen a proof of this concept with one of our large retail clients, a jewelry retail chain. The retailer implemented SUMO with a goal to carry the business through daily sales cycles and boost sales for the upcoming holiday season. The retailer implemented SUMO’s self-scheduling buttons on various pages on their website. They also had their salespeople use SUMO in tandem with their regular clienteling application activities. The retail chain was able to combine the convenience of self-scheduling with the positive experience of personalized service to great effect. The retailer was able to track website traffic that walked into their stores. They also saw an uptick in the growth of their client base.
A Retail One-Two Punch
Retail customers, more than ever, are accustomed to being catered to as a valued client whether it’s their first visit to your store or their fortieth. Clienteling applications deliver the experience the modern retail customer expects. An online appointment scheduling platform extends the experience while delivering the convenience the modern retail customer likes. The combination of these two sales tools can go a long way to both growing and sustaining customer loyalty.
94% of consumers name a consistently good customer experience as the main reason they remain loyal to a brand (Blackhawk Network)
The SUMO team likes to collaborate across departments. In the past quarter, our departmental teams here at SUMO, from the product team to the marketing team, found schedules were already packed with appointments when anyone would try to book an internal meeting or even drop in for a quick consultation. The team leaders took a quick view of everyone’s calendars and spotted a trend.
They noticed a lot of recurring meetings were posted. They also realized these were standing meetings that didn’t always happen since they may have been pushed to accommodate a more pressing matter.
The Solution: Hit Delete
Our team leaders reviewed the existing list of recurring meetings and it was decided that every meeting that was not immediately necessary be deleted across the board.
Besides the awesome feeling of having a meeting deleted from your calendar and seeing a big block of time become available to do other things, as a team we also are seeing the ability to tackle important daily tasks or issues quicker since team members were now available to collaborate.
Recurring meetings will never disappear but we are more conscious now about weighing the importance of the meeting and setting a realistic duration limit rather than just allowing it to repeat forever.
On May 25th, the GDPR law goes into effect in Europe.
The full acronym is EU-GDPR which stands for the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. Since the announcement of its acceptance into law, the internet has been flooded with articles, videos, and webinars covering the details and implications of this new internet privacy law.
Setting forth a new legal set of guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information of persons residing within the European Union, those businesses found in violation can suffer significantly. Companies that don’t comply and get caught can be met with hefty fines. Failing to comply can add up to €20m or 4% of your company’s annual turnover, whichever is greater. These fines are the impetus for many multinational companies to meet the requirements by the go-live date.
SUMO’s Path to Compliance
Even US-based companies can have a small measure of a footprint in Europe through their customers. As a US-based company, and in due respect of this EU law, we are working to make sure we achieve compliance.
We understand and appreciate the trust our customers put in us and believe in maintaining the strictest security of their data. As an application built native on the Salesforce platform, SUMO holds an extensive set of security certifications including bank-grade security, and enterprise compliance standards with certifications in SAS 70 Type II and ISO 27001.
Besides putting things in place to meet GDPR compliance, we have been taking other actions including educating our staff and updating our terms of use, privacy and security policies. Our goal in this journey is full transparency.
Resources
The website dedicated to GDPR education and resources provides a defined list of the terms that are used in the new law as well as a statement of the key changes this law brings in relation to the data privacy directive established in 1995.
SUMO respects your privacy. Our updated Privacy Policy can be reviewed here. And our Security Policy can be reviewed here.
If you should have any questions, please reach out to us through our Contact Us page.
The story of how the Hawaiian word ‘Ohana’ came to define the Salesforce® culture is fairly well-known in the Salesforce community. It’s a concept that has since extended well beyond Salesforce employees to include partners, customer, and users. Salesforce Dreamin’ events, regional and strictly community-led, are a prime example of Salesforce Ohana.
As a Silver ISV partner, SUMO is proud to also be a Silver Sponsor at this 3rd annual Salesforce community event to be held in Atlanta, GA. Because there is so much to offer, this event will not be just one day but one and half days. Admins and users will experience an event filled with learning, earning and connecting with their fellow trailblazers.
What to expect
There will be not one but three keynote speakers! The topics will include a travel through the history of Lightning, now on its 8th version, to present and beyond. If you’re interested in marketing, there will be keynote from Pardot discussing the future of marketing and for all you developers out there, a keynote presentation on Salesforce DX will be available to attend as well.
There will also be be over 20 breakout sessions, a chance to earn new badges during the Badge-a-thon and a live demo jam. There will also be an opportunity for mingling with AppExchange partners at the Sponsor Expo. SUMO will be one of the sponsors onsite giving demos and answering questions about how our lightning-ready application can extend the power of Salesforce for you and your organization.
The event starts at 3 pm on March 15th and will last through the day on March 16th. The venue will be the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center. The hotel is located at 3405 Lenox Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30326. You can register for the event here.
If you’re coming from out of town, you can learn more about the event’s venue and even book a room from the block of reserved rooms here.
Every third Thursday of the month, Salesforce gives people the chance to tune into a webinar for a game show-style throwdown between AppExchange apps. This webinar series, hosted by AppExchange and well-known Salesforce MVP(s), has been going for two years now. On February 15th, it will be SUMO’s turn!
On Thursday, February 15th, SUMO Scheduler, along with four other AppExchange partner apps will be featured in the Demo Jam webinar series. The event will be hosted on GoToWebinar at 2 pm EST.
What’s in it for you?
You’ll get a chance to learn about what awesome things the competing AppExchange apps do to help Salesforce users and administrators improve their workloads and goals. These fast-moving presentations are a totally live demonstration of their capabilities since slides and videos are not allowed. And it is up to you who wins!
It’s All About the Numbers
5
AppExchange partners are participating.
3
Minutes for each app to demo their solution.
1
Winner is chosen, by you, the listener.
The Competitors
In this edition of the webinar series, the focus will be on sales applications. SUMO will be in good company, joining both seasoned and newbie Demo Jam participants:
Conga – Increase the return on your Salesforce CRM investment through automation of data, document generation, contract lifecycle management & reporting solutions.
Conversica – The Conversica AI automated sales assistant reaches out to every single one of your leads, as many times and over as long a timespan as is required, and lets your salespeople focus on selling and closing deals instead of chasing down leads.
DocuSign – Electronic signatures are just the beginning. DocuSign makes any workflow or approval simple, secure and fully digital, so you can get on with your business, and your life.
SpringCM – SpringCM’s powerful and configurable workflows help automate your contract and document processes, without introducing customizations to your Salesforce org, all on the most secure cloud-based document management platform available.
SUMO Scheduler – SUMO Scheduler’s 24/7 365 online appointment scheduling solution enables sales, service and support teams to focus on sales and service rather than the time-consuming back and forth struggle of manual scheduling, helping drive more appointments, reduce no-shows and increase C-SAT.
A Sneak Peek
One of the features SUMO will be showing off during our demo is our Appointment Wizard.
The Appointment Wizard makes it easy for employees to schedule appointments from a lead. By clicking the “New Appointment Wizard” button in Lightning, a Salesforce user may navigate through a simple wizard (similar to the customer self-scheduling process). Our new Appointment Wizard integrates with the SUMO Assignment Engine, enabling you to use our automated routing features, such as round-robin, load-balancing and more.
We hope you’ll join us for this special webinar. It should be a great combination of entertainment and educational information. You can register for the webinar here.
Despite customer interaction channels like Twitter and live chat, the emergence of chatbots and evolving AI technology, many consumers still use the phone to communicate with companies.
Customers most certainly do use these digital channels for assistance. They will consult these channels and other resources that are available 24/7, like knowledge bases and forums, but they do so usually for simpler issues. When they use the phone to contact customer service, they are usually doing so because they want to talk to a real person about more complex issues.
The problem is it’s still a channel that struggles to deliver a positive customer experience.
Success is measured in seconds
There are a number of metrics that affect the high negative opinion customers have of calling call centers for assistance. Call center managers understand and track these metrics, but knowing the metrics important for their call center to succeed is often much easier than tracking them. One of these many KPIs (key performance indicators) for a call center is Average Time in Queue.
This KPI is a measure of the time a customer spends waiting in a call queue for a service or support representative to pick up their call. So in a nutshell, it’s all about how long your customers are waiting to talk to someone on your team and your call center’s success in this area is measured in seconds rather than minutes.
In 2017, Arise conducted a Google Consumer Survey of over 1,500 U.S. Consumers regarding the wait time they considered acceptable before hanging up the phone. From a selection of five options, the results tallied as such:
Why turn back the clock
Customers don’t like to wait on the line to talk to an agent no matter how entertaining the call waiting music. As the seconds on the clock tick away, so does your customer’s patience and confidence in your company. Reducing the time a customer waits on hold makes for not only happier customers but more loyal ones as well. And every second you are able to save your customers being on the phone creates a ripple effect that travels all the way down to your bottom line.
Customers are inclined to repeat their business with your company when their experience with your company is a positive one. And loyal customers are better for business than new ones. Loyal customers will stay with a company longer, tend to buy more and are inclined to recommend the company to others.
How to turn back the clock
Stealing back seconds from the clock starts with your call center team. Getting the opportunity to speak to a human being is, after all, the reason your customers are using the phone to contact your company. Here are a few ways to improve your Average Time in Queue statistics.
Training
You’ve already made the significant investment in hiring real people with the right set of hard and soft skills for helping your customers. These new hires will be representing your company to your valuable customers, so it is worth investing in training them well.
Start training on day zero. Start their training as soon as they are hired. Provide new hires access to a database of product and/or service knowledge, procedures, and call simulations to be reviewed before they start. You’ll have agents that will be more confident and capable of hitting the ground running.
Let them learn from the best. Choose your best call center agents to conduct training sessions and provide coaching. Give your new agents someone that can share their mistakes and successes, real-life call scenarios, and advice.
Never stop training. Be it a lunch and learn about new call center practices or a 15-minute session on a recent successful call, training should always be ongoing. No matter how experienced the agent, there is always something new to learn.
Tools
Besides providing good and consistent training, giving them the right technology will allow your agents to better serve your customers. Inbound and outbound tools can better support your agents and serve your customers.
Customer information, on-demand. Not just a useful tool for sales teams, a CRM (customer relationship management) platform is a long-term investment in the productivity and efficiency of your call center. The customer data stored on a CRM can give call center agents insights into the customer with whom they are interacting. Access to a centralized customer database helps improve call times. With a history of the customer’s purchases, services, issues, and their outcomes at their fingertips, agents can understand and even anticipate a customers’ needs.
Bridge the communication gap. CTI (computer telephony integration) software allows you to connect your call center’s computer interactions with your phone system and other communication channels like email, live chat, text messaging and even fax. Agents make and take calls from their desktops or laptops just by clicking on a number or a link. An added benefit is the software integrates with a CRM. This connection can retrieve a customer history so your agents know who is on the other side of the line and what their past interactions were with your company. In one click, agents can reduce their response time while being prepared for the interaction and greeting your customer by name.
Deliver one-click convenience. Sometimes your customer requires more than one interaction with your support agents. Finding a date and time that works for your customer can take more of your agent’s and customer’s time than expected. An appointment automation tool can simplify the booking process by giving your agents a single tool to manage appointments and enable multiple systems, like a CRM and calendars, to sync for full transparency across the entire call center team.
By providing a self-scheduling link in a follow-up email regarding a customer’s issue or case, your customer can self-schedule from an available set of time slots with the agent who knows their situation. This enables your agents to shorten their case close rates. A full service appointment automation tool will also provide real-time reporting and analytics. It allows you to build dashboards with the statistics that matter to your businesses. Your agents and managers can get real-time updates on customer experiences, and monitor important data such as appointment volume goals, staff utilization goals, and no-shows goals.
A puzzle worth solving
Effectively managing the Average Time in Queue in your call center certainly cannot be done with any one method or tool. The tools and processes you put in place are only as good as the people you have put in place as well. However as long as you support your investment in your people and provide them with a good set of call center technologies, you can deliver expect to deliver an excellent customer service experience and happiness more consistently.
If you would like to consider appointment scheduling for your call center, SUMO Scheduler includes all the features discussed above. You can even make your own custom reports on any table or field in the database and have a report or collection of reports emailed to you every Monday AM before your management meeting. And as a Salesforce native application, SUMO can extend the power of your Salesforce CRM and Service Cloud.
SUMO extends the Service Cloud® with powerful scheduling features like:
a host of powerful auto-assignment modes.
sending appointment invites from Salesforce to contacts from cases.
Inviting contacts to schedule with you or a co-worker.
Not to mention, the ease of data management as everything is in Salesforce with no need to manage two sets of customer data. Let one of our scheduling experts show you how we can help your agents be more productive, deliver better service faster, and improve your organization’s C-SAT.
In 2016, the Sales Enablement Optimization Study from CSO Insights stated that salespeople lose about 64.1% of their time doing non-selling activities. The loss of time to non-sales activities continues to be an issue for inside sales teams.
Fast forward to the present and time wasted on administrative tasks is still an issue. A few of the areas that tend to drain time from a sales rep’s day include:
Creating outbound sales emails and quotes
Documenting sales activities
Scheduling meetings with prospects and customers
Strengthening the Pipe
At any size organization, from small business to enterprise level, losing any amount of time on administrative activities can mean the difference between your team making or missing their quota goals. Optimizing certain sales processes with cloud-based automation tools can put a stopper in the these non-selling activities for your sales team. With a cloud-based solution, sales teams have full access to necessary resources and information at any time, from a desktop to a laptop to mobile devices, giving them the ability to be proactive rather than reactive. Let’s look at three areas that could be effectively improved by automating them, giving sales reps back valuable selling time.
Composing Emails and Quotes
Sales reps send out a lot of emails. The outflow is usually composed of email campaigns and related follow-ups. Cutting down on sending emails is not necessarily an option but providing an approved set of templates in a central location can cut down on composition and response times. The same strategy works for quote requests. A closed deal is more favorable for the sales rep who is the first responder.
Out of 433 companies tested for their response times, only 7% responded in the first five minutes after a form submission. More than half didn’t respond within five business days. Source: Drift
Manual Data Entry
Manual data entry is not only huge time suck, it can be costly and the data could be full of errors. Instead of selling, sales reps can be wasting this time managing the recording of every interaction, email and documents generated for a prospect account. Importing quotes, cutting and pasting in emails, and typing notes into a prospect or account record are not a revenue-generating activities.
In their 2017 State of Inbound, Hubspot reported that 45% of salespeople say they spend over an hour performing manual data entry. Source: Hubspot
A cloud-based automated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is the answer here. A CRM platform will help your sales team streamline and centralize, among many other sales-based admin tasks, the documentation process. Approved email templates can be pulled into the CRM for global accessibility. Emails can be simultaneously sent, logged, and even tracked within the platform. Every interaction with a prospect can be also be automatically logged with follow-ups and alerts scheduled.
CRM system adoption increases sales by up to 29%. Source: Salesforce
Cloud-based CRMs are continuing to prove to be one of the most invested technologies for companies looking to grow their businesses. Super Office shows the adoption growth of cloud-based CRMs over the past 9 years has overtaken the traditional on-premise solution.
Scheduling Appointments
Getting an appointment booked with a prospect is a hard task for sales reps. Beyond outbound campaigns, a good number of emails sent are ones trying to book a demo or discovery meeting with a prospect. Automated scheduling can reduce the time they waste on trying to schedule and reschedule appointments. The right online scheduling solution can have a positive impact on sales enablement and help drive revenue growth.
Roughly 12% of clicks turn into appointments: a survey by Pingup reported that 11.9% of clicks on “book an appointment” buttons resulted in scheduled appointments. Source: LSA Insider
Self-scheduling is one way for your sales reps to reduce time wasted on scheduling meetings with prospective customers. When a scheduling link is used in their outbound emails or even email signatures, they give their prospects scheduling control. Their prospect has the ability to easily select an appointment time convenient for them from your sales rep’s open time slots. An added convenience is that this is an activity that can be done any time of day or night since the link is not dependent on your sales rep’s office hours.
Scheduling happening 24/7: the company observed that 40%of bookings were happening after business hours. Source: LSA Insider
Online scheduling can lessen the time your reps waste on chasing prospects in email or on the phone to schedule and often reschedule appointments. Self-scheduling can also give your sales reps a greater assurance that the prospect will keep the appointment. Online appointment scheduling not only lets your sales reps get back to selling, no-shows become less likely.
Their Time is Valuable to Everyone
This list is certainly not representative of all the daily tasks that can consume a sales rep’s day while they are trying to hit their numbers. However, when automation tools are used, and used correctly, for these three tasks, then the time recovered for actual selling increases. An investment in automation tools benefits your sales reps with an upstream effect for your organization’s top-line growth. Win-win!
The Salesforce AppExchange is a veritable treasure trove of business applications. As the world’s largest application marketplace for businesses, every application listed endeavors to help companies further improve the functionality of their Salesforce accounts and their reach to their customers.
However, with over 3,000 apps, it can be a little hard to keep up with everything that happens on the AppExchange. Fortunately, the AppExchange team has a helpful resource available to all partners and customers. One of the ways you can keep in the know is by accessing articles on the Ohana page of the AppExchange.
Delivering an assortment of content and information, Ohana has something for everyone.
Last week SUMO scheduler, along with 8 other Salesforce applications, was included in an Editor’s PIck listing of apps that can help you and your team not only end your year with a bang but also set your business on the path to nailing your 2018 goals.
Before we get down to it, let’s start with a basic explanation of the terms SaaS and Cloud-native.
SaaS (software as a service) is a software distribution model. Companies purchase a subscription to a software application that is hosted or managed in the cloud rather than buying the software outright and installing it on their own hardware. SaaS is one of the three top cloud computing categories, along with IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service). SaaS is also referred to as web-based or on-demand software.
A cloud-native application is developed to be used on a particular platform or device. These type of apps are entirely built in the cloud which is why they are also referred to as cloud-native. Non-native apps are built outside the cloud then transferred over into one. They are also known as cloud-enabled applications.
Now let’s work through a few pros and cons to decide what’s so great about a SaaS app being native (cloud-native). There are a few cons to using a native app and here is a list that we think will help inform you about the key points and allow you to decide if a native app is the best choice for your organization.
Pros of Using a Cloud Native SaaS App
User Experience: This is perhaps the thing that native apps do best. The operations are smoother and provide a more intuitive experience for users accustomed to the functionality of a particular platform.
Speed: Native apps are inherently faster. This affects implementation and data retrieval which in turn affects productivity levels. Everything lives within the app itself so there is no dependency on browsers or internet speeds to keep things moving along quickly.
Data Access: Native apps tap into a platform more easily than a non-native app. Since data is retained in one place, there’s no need to have a request leave the platform to retrieve information being housed in another location outside the platform.
Scale: By being built in the cloud from the ground up, a native app doesn’t have any hardware limitations. This allows for continuous app development which means the application is more scalable, more adaptable to your business’ needs. The savings on hardware and software maintenance can also be significant.
For example, SUMO Scheduler is an online appointment scheduler built native on the Salesforce platform. This means the application can easily be implemented into an organization’s Salesforce org. Being a native application, SUMO allows users to interact with Salesforce’s many features and affords the same security parameters. It creates a seamless Salesforce experience that is highly customizable to your organization’s requirements and business processes.
Cons of Using a Cloud Native SaaS App
Platform: Native apps only live on the platform they are designed for and moving information between platforms requires integration.
Cost: There certainly are native apps that are free to install and use. However, most of these apps are not capable of supporting an enterprise level organization. Technical support is also not a given with even documentation not being available to reference. The other potential cost could be in the form of licenses and other fees that may be associated with implementation.
The cons are certainly shorter than the pros list but this does not mean the cons are not worth considering. Having the right personnel in place within your company to manage the app from implementation to daily use can help mitigate any potential issues. As for the costs involved, an enterprise-level application is generally an investment that provides tangible returns quite readily within a short period of time.
If you are operating a department within a large enterprise or foresee a significant growth spurt coming down the road for your area of the business, then a native application may be the best choice. It delivers a more cost-effective alternative to a traditional software purchase, allows your organization to respond to marketplace changes and capture new business opportunities much more quickly.
Scheduling appointments are common tasks in any organization but an efficient method of managing this process is essential for profitability and productivity. While traditional methods have evolved over time, they do present many drawbacks. Automated systems have innovated to address those issues, and go a step beyond in providing scheduling solutions that can easily improve upon current practices. While investing in a new application or platform can be a cause for concern, the risks experienced when not implementing such solutions are far greater.
My staff can schedule their own appointments.
The average sales rep spent up to 4 hours per day sending email, following up on calls, sending faxes, and other admin which can be reduced using templates and automation. Source: Insidesales
Scheduling an appointment is simple, right? Much as you’d like to believe otherwise, scheduling an appointment is cumbersome and typically takes multiple phone conversations and/or email exchanges before one is finalized. It’s not always the best use of your staff’s time either. Your people could be focusing on closing deals, providing support or services, and adding to the organization’s bottom line, not taking away from it. With appointment automation scheduling, steps are set in motion for reminders heading out prior to appointment, a ready history is captured for any follow-ups and reports can be generated for management or available documents for reference without the drudgery of scrolling through past correspondence. A lot of time can be saved with an appointment scheduling application, and you will also observe monetary savings since staff is now more involved in their primary responsibilities.
We’re winning customers without it.
There is a 10x drop in lead qualification when you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond, and a 400% decrease when you respond within 10 minutes versus 5 minutes. Source: Harvard Business Review
No deal ever came from an unqualified appointment. Scheduling software can help your conversion rates, customer satisfaction and churn. When you trade manual processes for automated scheduling, you can deliver a better customer experience. Greater flexibility and convenience is a given since automated scheduling can be available on your lead or customer’s schedule, not just during your business hours. When you make it a part of your sales campaigns, it can also speed up your sales cycle. Appointment requests are delivered immediately to your calendar, and the quality of the lead is highly increased. Automating scheduling reduces errors like double-bookings and no-shows, ultimately cutting down on all the back and forth of calls and emails that a traditional appointment scheduling method entails.
Our data may not be secure with an external application.
40% of salespeople still use informal means such as Microsoft Excel or Outlook to store its lead and customer data. Source: Hubspot
Manual scheduling cannot provide the sense of professionalism and a greater guarantee of security like an automated appointment scheduling application. Go with a native application and you can have the added benefit of your data staying within the same scheduling system, retained in one place for easy retrieval time and again. No client wants to work with an enterprise that has lost, or worse, mistakenly shared, information that is intended solely for the parties involved.
There are many appointment scheduling application vendors in the market and each has a different purpose/ value proposition. If you are looking to engage a service, the first step is to identify your objective and qualification criteria. Do your research on scheduling solutions, take the time to ask a lot of questions, and choose the scheduling system that best fits your organization’s particular needs. You will find one that can address the workload you demand of it, will integrate with your current software and processes, and can be easily navigated for your industry, staff and clients.
The tangible and non-tangible return on your organization’s investment in an appointment scheduling application can be immediately measured. You won’t be disappointed by the outcome.
SaaS applications, also known as web-based, on-demand or hosted software, are growing in scope and adoption. They help enterprises get things done efficiently and competitively. There are, however, choices aplenty in the marketplace, so it is in your best interest to choose the right application for your organization.
One study states public cloud platforms, business services, and applications (software-as-a-service [SaaS]) will grow at a 22 percent CAGR between 2015 and 2020, reaching $236B. The much larger cloud application market will also grow faster, with the 2020 total of $155B being 17 percent higher than their 2014 projection!*
Better get well acquainted then with the cloud applications available – prepare for the four main areas that are generally a concern in terms of adoption:
IMPLEMENTATION – Making the move
Many Fortune 500 companies are willing to pay for a familiar cloud-based CRM app like Salesforce. Migration to other tried and true systems, like email or ERP, to the cloud is also an easy choice. But it’s adopting a new cloud application that tends to be a hard decision. Understandably so. Change is always accompanied by apprehension. This is where the innovation that cloud applications have been bringing to the marketplace, combined with user demand, plays a role in the decision-making process. Your C-suite needs to see how the business can evolve from the inside out. Cloud applications built into an intentional strategy can serve the needs of an organization’s workforce and its corporate requirements.
MANAGEMENT – Ready to play
Who is going to manage your applications, from overseeing the installation to the everyday activities like training, bugs and renewals? A couple of stakeholders are involved in this area. Even before you can think of the applications you will use, you need to cultivate the workforce that will account for its smooth functioning before, during and after adoption. You’ve made the investment in researching your options so you know the application you’ve chosen not only is a fit for your use case, but you’ve also confirmed it comes with enterprise-level training, security and support. Now it’s important to ensure that the internal team is in place as well. More often than not, the barriers to adoption rest in the lack of skilled human resources to facilitate the process.
SECURITY – Locking it down
Security today, while still a topic for discussion, is not as great a concern for enterprise companies as it used to be when cloud technology was still relatively new. Sacrificing innovation and being able to compete in the marketplace is perhaps a greater fear. Security parameters are built into applications and the cloud, so a thorough review of privacy, reliability, infrastructure, supports and standards is warranted. But the other review that you should not overlook is internal. Remember that AWS shutdown earlier this year? The effect of that simple command typo by an employee was a critical error experienced worldwide. Be aware of potential errors that could occur and have checks and balances in place to address those issues should they arise.
SPEND – But first you gotta pay!
When you are accountable for a departmental budget, a free version of an application is always more appealing than a pay-to-play option. The temptation to do more with less is enticing, and might even pose an exciting challenge. The problem with this scenario though is the free version often does not live up to your expectations. These freebies are typically built with a ‘one size fits all’ outlook and tend to lack the level of security and technical support that is necessary at the enterprise level. If the free version of the application does not implement easily with existing systems, then management and compliance are also not guaranteed. Before you invest financially, invest in the research to understand the applications available and their value to your enterprise.
Having a plan to navigate the options available is crucial, and a list of requirements is a good starting point. Keeping these in mind, you can narrow down the choices that cater to your enterprise’s specific needs while addressing any concerns in these above-mentioned areas. A failure to plan can cost you time, and money, and let’s not forget the sleepless nights trying to THEN find the right solution.
It’s been a week of celebration here at SUMO. Our SUMO engineering team has been burning the midnight oil to deliver our latest release to the world.
SUMO 5 delivers some exciting new features built on the feedback of our enterprise clients. In addition to these features, we are also very proud to announce SUMO’s new Salesforce Lightning UI experience.
In a continued commitment to providing value to businesses using SUMO Scheduler with Salesforce, SUMO5 offers the improved user experience and easier navigation of Salesforce Lightning. Our goal is to make SUMO Scheduler the #1 option for enterprise organizations by building their company’s success with every appointment they make.
Excited about the new Lightning experience but still want to know more about the new features? The details can be found on our Release Notes page.
Our widely anticipated release of SUMO Scheduler version 5.0 is now generally available for all customers.
In addition to a ton of new features, we’re excited to introduce our first iteration of the new and improved Lightning Experience user interface. NOTE: SUMO5 will also continue to run in Classic Mode.
Release details
What’s in SUMO5? A good start would be to read the SUMO5 Release Notes.
How do I upgrade to SUMO5? Existing customers may start by sending a request to support@sumoscheduler.com.
How do I learn more about SUMO5? Contact sales@sumoscheduler.com to get a custom demo, pricing, and more.
Anything else I can read about SUMO? Our recently re-designed web site, SUMOScheduler.com is a great starting point. You may also browse our Support KnowledgeBase.
