Top 5 Sales Challenges that Salesforce Can Resolve Effectively
Impeccable customer service isn’t just a way of building customer loyalty; it’s also what sets you apart from your competitors and reflects your digital readiness. Salesforce® has been the game changer in achieving this. Today, customers expect you to deliver the right answer the first time, every time, on whichever channel they choose. Keeping up your customers’ expectation means more than just providing the right answer at the right time. It indicates delivering a personalized experience for every customer and efficiently collaborate internally. Gathering customer’s data at this stage is important to be able to qualify your lead effectively. Businesses must boost their sales process and invest in the right tools and intelligent technology to stay ahead in the digital world. Organizations not well-equipped for this face regular challenges like: No single unified view– One of the main challenges lies in integrating data from various disparate sources and create a single unified view. For example, a customer’s data might be stored in a CRM, or their order history information might be in a custom legacy system, their purchase data might be lying in some POS system such as Shopify during their social media data on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the like. Lead qualification is a crucial part of the sales process. Long customer decision time frames-Long sales cycles are a nightmare for all sales staff, which means delayed ROI and uncertainty about winning the deal. If the existing systems can’t provide complete visibility at each stage, the customer acquisition cycle prolongs. Disjointed sales processes- It results from the fact that every sales team member without unified software for streamlining sales management, applies different methods to handle the sales process. Bringing transparency to the sales process- Managing nitty gritty about deals, the accounts they are dealing, and the number of potential sales scattered can be quite a challenge for sales managers. The communication gap between sales and marketing- Sales and marketing being two different worlds existing in parallel with each other is the status quo. The lack of communication between these two important teams eventually leads to their poor performance. According to the [i]E-consulting study, four out of five US customers don’t believe that the common brand understands them as an individual. Personalization depends on your customer and in many cases, that’s where small and large companies fall short. Another report by a major analyst indicates that organizations that deploy CRM strategies such as Salesforce will return at least 25 percent better ROI than those that don’t. The Salesforce solution has the capabilities to enable you to successfully manage your sales process throughout the stages of qualifying to closing and follow-up. Understand your potential on Salesforce A robust 360-degree view helps businesses to reduce costs by providing a single source of clean, integrated customer data. Successful organizations understand the potential of Salesforce goes beyond it and know ways to integrate & enhance their existing system’s capabilities. It undeniably enables organizations to drive better marketing, increase sales growth, understand their customers’ behavior deeply and, most importantly, deliver unique personalized customer experience. In conclusion Investing in reliable automation software such as Salesforce undeniably pays off in the long run while providing employees with the right tools. Applications developed and integrated on Salesforce enable organizations to achieve shorter sales cycles, create efficient proposals, and improve sales and marketing collaboration. Tavant’s FinLeads product does all of this and goes beyond it. It’s a Salesforce-based customer engagement and aggregation platform that acts as one-stop-shop for Sales & Marketing teams to quickly convert your leads to customers. To gain more insights, visit our Salesforce partnership and FinLeads pages or just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting. [i] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insi…
Re-invent Dealer Experience with AI Platform
The automotive and automotive aftermarket industries are some of the oldest and most established industries. Historically, these industries have faced less disruption than their equally-established counterparts. But aftermarket industry as a whole is drastically affected by several major disruptions, in particular, digitization, shifting competitive dynamics, and changing consumer preferences. And, unlike other sectors, it is changing faster, and the shift has been dramatic. First, new players are beginning to enter the automotive market and established companies have been changing their business models – a trend that is expected to continue in the future. When it comes to consumer preferences, millennials are less interested in car ownership while stricter regulations on emissions are giving rise to electric vehicles. Additionally, with the sudden expansion of next-gen technologies such as AI, IoT, cloud computing, and human-machine interfaces, the automotive aftermarket is facing a wide range of challenges. Some challenges faced by enterprises today in the aftermarket industry include: Aftermarket processes suffer from high latency and lagged response due to legacy and disjointed systems, Lack of customer analytics across channels Increasing regulatory, quality and environmental compliance needs Long cycle time for ‘detection to correction’ in case of issues to be resolved Revenue leakage to spurious spare parts in the market Lack of feedback system for gauging the effectiveness of change management, warranty management Legacy systems are not enabling the customer to do self-service Yet, along with these challenges, warranty management remains one of the industry’s most important and imperative issues. Auto manufacturers and their dealers must leverage an effective warranty management system to win and retain customers. Adopting a few important approaches can help businesses address these challenges, optimize their warranty costs, and enhance their customer experience. Consolidate warranty systems & processes Build extensive validations into the claims entry processes to capture accurate and consistent claims data to manage entitlement verification, pre-warranty authorization, claims verification, and approvals automatically. An efficient and streamlined claims process is important to automate warranty management. Instead of maintaining several systems, centralize all aspects of warranty management including analytics, registration, claims, part returns, and supplier recovery. An integrated system that provides a single view of all information will undeniably cut down duplicate manual efforts and also improve the data consistency. Minimize repeat part returns to reduce warranty cost Companies should only request returns if they need to perform failure analysis or drill down the trends in consumption to proactively identify future problems. For this, it is crucial to automate your supplier claim process to: Decrease the amount of time from failure to claim Minimize the corrective action cycle to avoid continuing to manufacture defective products Reclaim more warranty costs faster from a broader base of suppliers Create a more credible and cleaner supplier claim data Promote supplier collaboration in cut down warranty costs Improve Warranty, Quality, and Reliability Analysis Gaining good failure data from customers, dealers, and distributors will enable brands to enhance product quality and recover a higher percentage of warranty costs from suppliers. Businesses need to analyze warranty data to identify and address emerging issues and factors contributing to warranty costs. Also, to prevent further warranty failures, organizations need to monitor key warranty metrics such as warranty as a percentage of revenue, cost per unit (CPU) Incorporate warranty management into your analytics and decision support systems Managing a warranty in a reactive mode is no longer adequate in today’s digitalized manufacturing industry, which is under a lot of pressure from evolving customers’ expectations. Companies need to react to customer demand more efficiently, and for this, they need to have proactive warranty management to make an analytics-driven decision in three significant areas, such as: Issue prediction, detection, and warning Warranty and accrual forecasting Service parts demand management and service contract optimization Based on this data, organizations can anticipate emerging issues and determine potential recall, predict future warranty costs, scrupulously forecast spare parts demand, and subsequently, plan inventory and production accordingly. Build customer experiences from meaningful insights Businesses must integrate the customer data, store the information in place and keep it integrated for a personalized experience to delight their customers. Get a unified 360-degree view of your data to enrich personalization, segmentation, behavior analysis, and loyalty programs to improve your customer experiences. The Road Ahead: The digital transformation can lead to a significant opportunity for aftermarket businesses to streamline their operations. It can be done by shedding non-value-adding functions and unlocking capital from redundant infrastructure while taking in a broader service portfolio that contributes to better margins. The task of optimizing controls on warranty spend is daunting. The needs of the dealer as well as customer experience, both are of paramount importance at every stage. However, leveraging an intelligent aftermarket platform, organizations can realize a significant reduction in warranty costs, increase operational efficiency while improving product quality and customer satisfaction. Reshape business with AI Our customized warranty solution with its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can help you increase aftermarket revenues, calculate accurate warranty pricing – as well as manage claims and warranty reserves. Tavant Warranty On-Demand is an AI-powered enterprise warranty platform offered on the Salesforce cloud. The on-demand platform offers end-to-end warranty lifecycle management and is the only solution of its kind on the force.com platform. It provides cross-functional integrations with legacy and ERP systems for data consistency and integrity and enables organizations to reduce warranty costs, increase supplier recovery, and improve aftermarket efficiency. Want to Explore More? To gain better insights and to learn how to optimize your warranty cost mail us at [email protected].
How to Create a Targeted Ad Experience with Addressable Advertising?
The Changing Television Landscape Technology now exists to seamlessly integrate identified audiences (who have voluntarily declared intent to known data sources) with the content that these audiences consume. However, there are many challenges to be overcome both on the data as well the business side. The data available on households which consume TV (whether linear or through streaming options) is patchy at best. There are different techniques which data marketers deploy to make the data closer to reality. They deploy probabilistic and stochastic methods to project data audiences. However, with these techniques and such fragmented, time-shifted audiences, advertisers do not always reach the right viewers with the right message. Addressable Advertising is the Need of the Hour! One of the ‘buzzwords’ in recent days in the media world has been addressable advertising. Addressable advertising is a name given to personalized advertising or messaging sent to an identifiable audience segment referred to as addressable. Addressable advertising allows marketers to reach more specific audiences with greater creative flexibility, deep insights, and reliable ROI data. Moreover, with much more granular TV attribution and measurement, advertisers can understand the real performance of their ad – including engagement, brand lift, and conversions. The addressable segment is identified by specific characteristics that could be demographic or behavior oriented. It is coupled with the ability to deliver campaigns tailored to the desired demographic and behavior intent. Among all advertising’s holy grails, addressable TV is often held out as the holiest of them. The difference now as compared to some two years ago is that the inventory that was made available for addressable is hugely expanding. Earlier, there were only two minutes out of an hour’s programming was available for the MSO’s for addressable targeting. Now with the significant MSO’s owning much of the content as well courtesy their big-ticket acquisitions, they are continuously working to expand their addressable inventories. Not only this, all VOD available on STB or streaming box options is also identified as addressable. Final Thoughts: The business of selling inventory needs to change as well, to offer scale to the buyers as traditional media space selling does. Advertisers need to shift towards buying audiences than being media space. Addressable is an excellent option in this space as it offers exceptional value regarding money spent on buying audiences as almost no leakage takes place. The delivery is 100% to the desired audience as long as the data is correct. The hit rate in traditional advertising is supposed to be not more than 10%. This means that there is ten times more leeway that the broadcaster or owner of the inventory gets regarding addressable. Addressable advertising is the future of TV advertising. It might take a while more to become completely addressable, but the road is becoming more evident every day. How Tavant helps organizations deliver intelligent interactions with their customers? Tavant has been very actively involved in media measurement technologies for more than 12 years. Tavant has been working actively on addressable TV advertising with its clients who are in the data and broadcasting network space. Tavant also has a solution accelerator around media planning, execution, and measurement, which enables buying of the media space for the addressable audience. Ready to start talking one to one? Connect with us today at [email protected] to strategize your next addressable TV campaign.
Want to Accelerate your Sales Funnel? Ignite the Core!
Long lead conversion cycles are the biggest impediments to the sales and marketing professionals in the fast-paced technology-driven financial services industry. In the digital age, your customers are more capable, smarter and better informed than ever before. This modern breed of consumer needs a superior kind of marketing engagements and quick sales cycles. According to a research done by [i]Harvard University, over the past five years, the average sales cycle length has gone up by 22% due to more decision makers being involved in the buying process coupled with sluggish economic growth. Furthermore, over 25% of sales cycles take approximately seven months or sometimes longer to close. That’s why it’s important for salespeople and marketers to start thinking about the health of their sales cycle. However, an efficient lead management system can undeniably improve sales and marketing alignment and positively impacts the pace of the sales cycle. Is Your Sales Funnel Management Platform Really Customer-Centric? There are all the twists and turns that the average customer takes on his or her journey with your brand—various touchpoints including social marketing, call center, mobile apps, traditional advertising, and website interactions. While introspecting the current system, ask these questions: Do you have an efficient funnel management system? Does it help you in shortening the sales cycle and sell better? Does it provide a consolidated 360° view of operations and customer transactions? Is your sales process in sync with all other customer messaging across channels such as email, mobile, social, etc.? Top 3 critical Customer Engagement & Acquisition challenges to focus: Disparate Data – The customer information is often siloed in multiple systems, including data within the organization as well as from second and third parties. It may include e-mail messages, interactions from social forums, data from weblogs, and much more, making it extremely difficult to systematically collect, centralize, and share with other groups internally. Lack of control– Organizations often lack a practical means to analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data resulting from customer interactions to surface customer sentiments, rising trends, competitive advantages/disadvantages, and other information for timely decision making. There is a scarcity of data scientists who could wrangle that data for you and already engaged with other requests from across the company. And the analytics tools that you have at your fingertips don’t have the comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of your customers that you need. That makes it too difficult to engage and acquire right people at the right time. Inconsistent customer experience– The rise of technology, the empowered customer, and legacy strategies and solutions have caused the customer experience to become fragmented and disparate. And we should face it that there are many fragile and often broken moments in the customer journey. Additionally, the change in the channel typically adds complexity and threatens to derail purchases and sometimes even hurts loyalty. How to Address Such Challenges? A single, unified view of all the disparate customer data can streamline your sales and marketing process and help you to build relationships throughout the length of your sales cycle with lead nurturing and automated follow-up. Needless to say, companies must apply advanced analytics to gain a 360-degree view of their customers and engage with them in the early stages of the cycle. They must act fast to streamline their prospect funnel management and have a complete integrated view that could help them to efficiently navigate while maintaining a strategic focus on maximizing sales performance. The Final Thoughts As the old adage goes, a leaky ship sinks an empire. It holds true in today’s competitive market as having a leaking sales funnel can be depicted as the difference between putting money in your pocket or handing it straight to your competitor. So, if you’re committing these blunders, it’s time to fill the gap now. Consider making use of the right blend of data strategy and technology to acquire, convert, grow, retain, and win back customers in one seamless omnichannel journey. Identify the “gray areas” in your processes and how they are they affecting your business. Dig deeply into the customer list, re-tune it through an easy filtering step to pair tactics to the specific customer cluster and ensure to bring at-risk customers back into the fold. How Tavant helped New Penn Financial to bridge the gap between legacy and digital Recently, FinLeads was selected by New Penn Financial to transform its digital lead engagement processes together. FinLeads helped their sales and marketing teams and loan officers to manage sales funnels more effectively. It also elevated their business performance with real-time analytics, enable a faster loan process, and digitally enhance their overall customer experience. Want to explore more: Tavant is committed to helping clients deliver next-gen customer experience. To gain more insights, visit our FinLeads page or just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting.
Empower your Aftermarket Business with Intelligent Decisions
The Changing Aftermarket Industry According to a global strategic business [i]report, the global automotive aftermarket industry is expected to reach $722.8 billion by 2020. This rising demand for aftermarket parts and services is driving new growth and revenue opportunities for automotive aftermarket organizations. Moreover, digital transformation is re-imagining the automotive industry. Platform-based innovation and hyper-connectivity are shaping the new world of the automobile. Interestingly, aftermarket, the secondary market of the automotive industry is also experiencing this paradigm shift from traditional legacy systems to the digitalized world powered by AI, Machine Learning, IoT, Big Data, Analytics and Mobility. Rising Customer Expectations There is a significant change in the customer buying behavior which has acted as a catalyst in the progress of automotive aftermarket. Interestingly, today’s consumers are keeping their vehicles longer and are more aware of the importance of preventive maintenance and scheduled servicing to maximize the lifetime value of their vehicles. Furthermore, in today’s modern parts marketplace, the millennial customers have become more sophisticated and mobile-oriented while staying connected with their local automobile retailer. They are more in control of the buying process than ever before – with the ability to price, source, and obtain products and parts from a wide variety of sources, including spurious parts suppliers who don’t have the same overheads as the OEM. Needless to say, the consumers are now expecting a seamless experience spanning via omnichannel including physical retail supply shops, apps, websites and so on. Data, Data Everywhere The exponential growth of connectivity and data in manufacturing is drifting aftermarket services towards a new era. The next generation of tools and processes is equipped with next-gen technologies that enable unprecedented collection and transmission of data, which can be exploited to improve aftermarket operations. However, the aftermarket value chain is still highly segmented in disparate data silos. Each player focuses on its perimeter, where it exercises a strategic control thanks to its assets (parts IP, integrated offering, global network, and so on). Business models are still primitive and rely on service contracts (diagnosis, repair, parts, and maintenance) using a transactional mode (cost per operation). Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning to Rescue Leveraging IoT technologies and platforms built into devices have increased the potential for new revenue streams through innovative data sharing/insight opportunities. And the good news is the large volumes of data generated by IoT devices can now be understood, acted upon and monetized with the help of AI and ML. Organizations can consider integrating IoT data with the existing warranty data to obtain new insights into their customers, products, and operations. In turn, this can lead to optimized product service, enhanced support processes, and the provision of new and differentiating customer experiences, all of which can help in driving revenue. Eventually, improved warranty performance has a direct impact on the customer experience; for example, if a consumer feels that a company acknowledges when products fail to meet up with their expectations, they are more likely to stay in the future, building brand loyalty. The time to act is Now If you are looking to implement a world-class warranty solution without investing heavily in infrastructure or the resources required to deploy & maintain the solution at your premises; our on-demand solution is tailor-made for you. By applying AI and machine learning algorithms to massive amounts of customer data, Tavant’s enterprise warranty solution TWOD on the Salesforce Cloud combines its warranty solution expertise with industry best practices to offer end-to-end warranty lifecycle management. It provides enhanced visibility and proactively populates business opportunities for the sales, service, and marketing teams in their CRM. Want to Explore More? To delve deeper, attend our engaging session on ‘Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the world of making smarter, faster and better decisions’ at WCM 19 and learn how to unlock your sales and revenue potential or just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting.
Delivering Value Chain Performance Through AI in Warranty
Long gone are the days when we had to remember dates for our next free service, oil change, tire rotation, wheel alignment, etc., but time has changed now, these days we receive notifications about these things via SMS, calls or e-mails. Do we comprehend what happens, what components come together so that your mobile phone can chime in a juicy offer on your next car service? Let’s just clear the air about Artificial Intelligence (AI) first to completely understand why it is a driving force that every organization wants to do something with it. AI in its crudest form is reacting to scenarios with actions that are meaningful but isn’t that what we humans do! Yes, but when we consider thousands of customers with vehicles bought at various times, with multiple requirements and problems, the number of data points run into billions, and it becomes humanly impossible to make even a tiny impact. This is where AI becomes the pivot to recreate success in all the scenarios and for all the data points. With the vast amount of data, a human would get overwhelmed to act accurately, whereas an AI works better with a large number of data, it can create and evaluate patterns in the data that hold good and learn from them. It can create new actions and repeat old actions to any amount of data points without fatigue. Aftermarket is the perfect place for an AI system, the vast dealer network, millions of vehicles, each with thousands of components that are serialized, and many more non-serialized parts, numerous variants, and configurations. That’s all well and good only if it benefits all the stakeholders in the aftermarket process, customer, manufacturer and the dealer. As a manufacturer, they can benefit at every stage of the product lifecycle; AI can help with product design, product safety, R&D, Material design, and styling. It can speed up the design and production of new products; AI can manage the supply volume better and in a streamlined manner. All these improvements add up to provide an edge over other players in the market in cost and market share. Like all businesses, the dealer will always benefit the most from a returning customer than a new one. The real money is in service, spares, and campaigns on the existing models of vehicles. AI can help with a predictive and preventive plan for thousands of customers and help improve the total earnings of the dealership. Additionally, the credibility that the dealer amasses with these transparent campaigns would be immense and everlasting with the existing customers and new customers as well. Most of the customers know little about servicing the vehicle that they are driving, many would not even know all the components, this lack of knowledge is a curse to the customer. Customers will want to come back to authorized service centers if there is a transparency, constant support system as well as a positive experience with the brand. AI can help with all these scenarios, help in the analysis of the vehicle for faults, DIY repairs, deploying services such as road assistance and service dealers and make driving more convenient. In Conclusion: We are always in search of a better solution, a better way to deal with issues and problems, AI is that tool that can deliver at all the above and many more scenarios and help grow Aftermarket revenues, after all, everything from lead-scoring to car-sharing to vacation-rentals has been disrupted through AI. Customer Convenience is essential for brand survival. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning can increasingly be deployed to manage customer experience across ecosystems. Meet our AfterMarket experts at Warranty Chain Management conference, WCM 2018 in San Diego from March 6-8, Booth 11.
Transforming Customer Experience with AI
Eighty-five percent of customer relationships will take place without human interaction by 2020 and AI-derived business value will more than triple to $3.9 trillion by 2022, according to Gartner. By 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will be supported by some cognitive computing or AI effort as predicted by IDC. Furthermore, Servion has forecasted that AI will be able to power 95 percent of all customer interactions by 2025 and it will do it so effectively that customers will not be able to ‘spot the bot.’ Many organizations are at the center of this digital transformation and are turning to the emerging technologies such as chatbots, intelligent ad targeting, recommendation engines, personalized communications, and image recognition to gain business value, bolster their relationships, differentiate themselves from their competitors, and increase revenues. AI is quickly becoming a mainstream technology in consumer devices and services. In 2018, the business conversation in boardrooms on Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, print media, and conference keynotes about AI, machine learning, RPA, chatbots, and virtual assistants have reached the new pinnacle. Surprisingly, nearly two-thirds of consumers are already using AI without even realizing it with products such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Watson. Thanks to the adaption of AI into CX, we are witnessing how enterprises are attempting “true” personalization with predictive capabilities in real-time. This indicates better listening to your customers, understanding the context and providing them with a CX. Organizations are embracing AI to enhance the customer experience by: Intelligently augmented self-service technologies Collating data to enable price and feature comparisons Gathering data by smart assistants Using sentiment analysis to track customer emotions and respond accordingly Forecasting customer needs and then responding proactively Gaining more information about the customer based on data patterns Discovering user interaction on websites to determine if they need help Giving recommendations based on the behaviors of similar customers How can AI Enhance CX? Customer Insights Bring Important Findings for Businesses Leveraging AI can help unleash actionable customer insights that can help in driving impactful business decision-making. AI has also transformed how organizations get customer insights. Leveraging the vast amount of data that is available on customers today, AI can keep a track on trends and predict what customers’ need in the future. One of the best examples of this is Spotify, which used data from its more than 100 million customers to create a compelling ad campaign. The Use of Personalization Improves Customer Experience In customer experience, personalization is a significant advantage to AI. Modern customers expect offers to be tailored to their needs—a blast email with some general offer won’t appeal to nearly as many people as a targeted offer that directly addresses what precisely a customer wants. However, creating those personalized experiences is extremely difficult and tedious for humans. AI can quickly sift through millions of pieces of information to figure out exactly what matters to customers to create a personalized experience. Process Automation Increases Business Efficiency Streamlining repetitive tasks is a big change happening across industries. Deploying AI to automate the process efficiently and effectively can save time and increase efficiency. It provides a seamless experience for the customer by having a near 0% error rate. Additionally, it becomes easier for service representative relaying information and responding to the customer’s needs. This efficiency enables them to take care of more people in a much shorter amount of time. By automating processes and allowing for real-time data integration, communications are significantly improved. Looking ahead AI is undeniably a powerhouse when it comes to customer experience. This technology will not only allow organizations to create faster, more personalized experiences but will also help in gaining customer insights to deliver better customer experience in the future. Companies must unleash the potential of AI and act now to reap its possible rewards to gain a better competitive advantage in their business. Reach out to us at [email protected] to know how we can enable your business garner customer loyalty, improve experiences, and help you stay relevant in the business.
How to Leverage Your Field Service Automation
From a system perspective, Field Service Management (FSM) is a combination of inventory management, vehicle tracking, scheduling, customer portals, and more. All these components work together to achieve optimized results in the field and seamless communication between the back-office personnel and the field technicians on the job. The cloud portal is accessed from the mobile devices for better flexibility. While most of the adopters are using field service automation just to automate a once manual process, other field service organizations have reached ‘field-service maturity’ already. The latter organizations are unleashing the transformation of the customer-centric cost centers into profit-making centers. These organizations have already achieved efficiency by automating their scheduling, dispatch, and routing by successfully leveraging FSM. Enhance Productivity of Both the Managers and Technicians Advanced algorithm task allocation and flexible access to real-time data on any devices save a plenty of time and energy for both managers and technicians. This advancement makes them available to perform the core job more efficiently and flawlessly. From the back office, managers can supervise technicians’ jobs easily through real-time analytics and live video feeds. FSM Helps Perform Numerous Tasks: 1. Create work orders from cases 2. Manage and monitor technicians 3. Scheduling and order management 4. Vehicle/technician location tracking 5. Job status updates 6. Route optimization and GPS navigation 7. Time tracking and driver logs 8. Knowledge and asset repositories 9. Parts and inventory management 10. Integrated invoicing/payment processing 11. Customer portals 12. Regulatory compliance measures Anticipating Customers’ Needs – Making Customers Loyal: Predicting customers’ needs has become much more effective by analyzing patterns of existing customers’ service records, buying habits, and knowledge gathered during past field services. Inventing and offering products and services with the help of the analysis, even before the customers realize those needs, will bring in higher loyalty across the customer base. Upsell, Cross-Sell – More Sales FSM can empower the field technicians to become field salesmen. Enabling these technicians to offer additional products and services on the job, renew contracts and collect signatures will result in saving massive sales and marketing efforts and expenditures, as well as boost sales and increase customer loyalty. Information, Insights, Improvements Field services that include maintenance or break-fix operations are an excellent source for collecting relevant information about commonly occurring errors. This data can later be utilized to improve the products and services in-house and adds supportive insights for the other field technicians. Are we seeing an opportunity for an internal social network for the field technicians to share inputs on the kinds of issues they frequently encounter? IoT Augmentation Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities can bolster FSM efficiency even more. Introduction of IoT can remove unnecessary human interference for monitoring the emergency or maintenance needs of equipment. It is also useful in regularly collecting data on various parameters so the data can be analyzed to improve the products or services. FSM’s scope is wide open to increase profit and improve efficiency in the coming future. Companies that are still in the ‘thinking mode’ to make a strategic move into FSM, will fall back in the race. The global field service management market is estimated to reach $3.52 billion by 2019. That’s a compound annual growth of 17.3%. North America is expected to become the largest market in terms of the market size. Europe and Asia-Pacific are expected to experience an increase in market traction. Customers are expecting FSM as a standard feature for their service. According to market research, 89% of customers prefer modern technology, like the kind used in on-demand cab-booking services, applied to their technician scheduling, and nearly as many would be willing to pay a premium for it. How’s your organization pulling in the race? Let us know with your comments below. Sources: 1. https://www.salesforce.com/hub/service/what-is-field-service-management/ 2. http://www.oracle.com/us/field-service-cloud-ebook-3033411.pdf Meet Tavant at the Automotive Warranty Management conference. We are a Gold Sponsor at the event and Atul Varshneya, VP Artificial Intelligence, Tavant will be delivering a keynote on ‘Intelligent decision making using Artificial intelligence.’ http://bit.ly/2npFJWM
Why ‘Repeat’ Customer is the King
Post-sale services aim to create and reinforce positive brand image in the minds of customers. They are an essential component of the strategy to retain existing customers. Depending on the industry and customer demography, acquiring new customers can be 6-10 times costlier than keeping existing ones. A significant factor influencing the customer’s decision-making process is the ease of access to post-sale services and how promptly the current company has honored the warranties of the purchased product or service. Unreasonably long service time, or prolonged disruptions to the customer business or daily life due to faulty products, leaves a negative impact on the customer. As manufacturers consider post-sale services, the warranty is often viewed as a cost center, resulting in below par post-sale service offerings. Warranty Systems to the Rescue Warranty claims processing systems act as an essential enabler in achieving the post-sale service objective by providing the following benefits. 1. Self Service: By leveraging customer warranty portals, the end customer can clearly determine the current warranty status of the product and the extent of coverage, thereby enabling the customer to approach the correct post-sale service provider for resolution, saving both time and money. 2. Hassle-Free Warranty Claims: Simplicity in submitting and processing a claim, maximum automation in claims processing by using a business rules engine, and auto-detection of coverage and claims eligibility vastly reduce claim processing time, enabling service providers to provide post-sale services to the end customer efficiently and within a set time frame. 3. No Ambiguity in Claims Processing: As the claim processing is driven by an automated set of business rules, clear and non-ambiguous reasons are provided when a claim is rejected, thereby reducing the chances to create a negative brand image in the mind of the consumer. 4. Recall Campaigns: Warranty systems enable efficient handling and implementation of product recall campaigns. This allows customers to get defective products fixed free of cost, before experiencing a failure, which reduces the risk of the customer having a bad experience with the product, resulting in a positive brand image in the mind of the customer. 5. Maintenance/Service Contracts: Service contracts enforce periodic maintenance and overhaul of the products, thereby extending the product life and performance parameters over an extended period. 6. 360-Degree Visibility: Warranty systems provide complete visibility of the service life-cycle to the customer, enabling the customers to know and predict the exact time frame in which the products will be serviced, allowing them to assess the corresponding business impact accurately. A Happy Customer Is a Repeat Customer Seamless post-sale services, along with minimum disruption in the daily life or business of a customer, add to the positive product experience. An integrated warranty claims management system plays an integral part in re-enforcing a positive brand image in the minds of customers. Considering warranty cost as a necessary expense to retain existing customers will bring a change in manufacturers’ mindset, encouraging them to build a robust post-sale services offering. Tavant at Automotive Warranty Management Conference 2018 Tavant is excited to sponsor the Automotive Warranty Management Conference and showcase our enterprise warranty solution, Tavant Warranty On-Demand, offered on the Salesforce Cloud. To experience precision and quality in aftermarket warranty, connect with our warranty experts today and schedule your PERSONALISED DEMO!
How Can Salesforce Magic Transform Digital Customer Experience?
Businesses are in a constant struggle to improve agility and reduce costs. Organizations are looking to unlock the power of data for better customer management and great customer experiences to improve efficiency and increase productivity. Companies that are reluctant to put the customer first will surely strive for relevance in an increasingly competitive market. Moreover, they will also be threatened by the growing number of businesses that are leveraging customer experience to drive loyalty and adoption of their products. Needless to say, organizations must reinvent the power of customer experience in the era of the connected customer and need to embrace the customer-obsessed culture and create a single view of their customer. They should be able to understand their customers, resolve their queries, and anticipate their future need and understand the paramount value of following their customer’s point of view. However, for an organization to gather information on its customers in order to facilitate better a working relationship can be a daunting task. Salesforce makes it easier for businesses to sell more and grow. Benefits of CRM A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship. Here’s how a CRM system can help your business today. Make direct improvement to the bottom line Adding a CRM platform to the business has demonstrated real results – including direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM applications have a proven track record of boosting: Sales by up to 37% Sales Productivity by up to 44% Forecast accuracy by 48% Recognize and classify leads A CRM system can enable you to identify, add new leads quickly, efficiently and categorize them accurately. By focusing on the right leads, sales teams can formulate the opportunities that will close deals, and marketing can classify leads that require more nurturing and prepare them to become quality leads. Boost high-quality referrals from your existing customers Understand your customers better and drive cross-selling and upselling opportunities and win new business from existing customers. Provide Better Customer Support Customers expect real-time responses and interactions at every level. A CRM system helps you to offer the superior quality service that customers are searching. Improve Product & Services An efficient CRM system gathers information from multiple sources across your business and beyond. It gives you unprecedented insights into how your customers feel and what they are speaking about your organization — so you can revamp what you offer, recognize issues early, and identify gaps. Tavant will be showcasing Tavant Warranty On-Demand and FinLeads at the Dreamforce 18. FinLeads is the mortgage industry’s first customer engagement and acquisition platform. It drives and automates a streamlined prospect funnel management process that helps engage prospects, educates them, qualifies them, and accelerates their transition from lead to customer. It integrates the omnichannel engagement across digital assets owned, third-party sources, call centers, and field operations. It brings together the best sources of industry data and leverages an intelligent algorithm to inform how the acquisition journey should be personalized for customers and recommends and automates next best engagement actions. It supports multiple lines of business (Wholesale and Retail). TWOD– Tavant Warranty On-Demand, our enterprise warranty solution offered on the Salesforce Cloud, combines our warranty solution expertise with industry best practices. Tavant has experience of over a decade of working with leading customers to develop and implement enterprise-class warranty solutions. The On-Demand solution offers end-to-end warranty lifecycle management and is the only solution of its kind on Force.com platform. If you are looking to implement a world-class warranty solution without investing heavily in infrastructure or the resources required to deploy & maintain the solution at your own premises; our on-demand solution is tailor-made for you. Want to explore more? Meet our Tavant experts at Dreamforce 18 to learn how to unlock your sales and revenue potential, just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting.