Endless points to connect seamlessly and integration of multiple communication platforms such as business voice, text, and conferencing services over a single platform not only simplifies connectivity but, also enables businesses to explore new business avenues.
And thankfully, advancements in technologies have opened up new gateways to meet such needs of businesses and embrace new business opportunities.
The latest technology fad cloud solutions have brought a significant shift in IT landscape and are fundamentally changing the way companies operate. Cloud computing is all the rage.
“It’s become the phrase du jour”, says gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. And cloud SaaS offerings are enabling companies to fasten the speed of running various business processes.
SaaS adoption is mainly concentrated on four segments such as customer relationship management (CRM), human resource management (HRM), procurement solutions and collaboration software (e.g., email) and an increased appetite for SaaS in a broad range of other areas has been predicted.
Ranging from low maintenance costs, reduced time spent in installation and configuration to instant scalability – SaaS offerings simplify business functioning in various ways.
Using marketing automation tools
Implementing these tools streamlines marketing efforts in a variety of ways. From optimizing your workforce time, managing the entire customer list to reaping information about your sales team focused efforts, the scope of marketing automation tools goes far beyond managing repetitive tasks of marketing department.
It not only helps to reduce sales process glitches but, also augments accountability and gives a birds-eye view reporting of company’s pipeline.
Streamlining sales process glitches, replacing manual repetitive tasks with auto-pilot campaigns, marketing automation benefits company’s productivity in many ways by shifting sales department focus on variety of creative work.
You can refine the entire customer’s journey life cycle and set a lead nurturing process with marketing automation software such as Marketo (with powerful lead management capabilities), customer.io(suitable for growing SaaS or ecommerce business ).
The ability to reach out to 1000 different customers with specific messages for each, in a fully- automated way streamlines the marketing functionality and opens up the gateway to revenue-generating sources.
You can segment the campaigns based upon data received from CRM systems and infact, CRM systems can be integrated with marketing automation software.
For instance, when website’s “contact us” form is merged with this tool then data submitted via form gets reflected in the CRM. This helps to easily filter the potential leads and nurture these leads by constantly updating them with promotional offers.
Setting up a virtual contact center
Hosted PBX providers have enhanced contact center performance by offering them plethora of features at a minimal cost. Cloud hosted solutions offered by service providers not only helps businesses to make big savings on capital expenses but also, makes administration of security system really effortless.
Free upgrades, high scalability, much efficient call routing backed by business continuity plans makes cloud SaaS solutions a must-have solution for contact centers.
Using SaaS solutions, contact centers can easily establish a unified communication architecture and enable faster access to new software and applications.
Without administering expensive equipments, you can run various contact centers functionalities smoothly by connecting to private cloud built to support various contact center solutions such as virtual ACD, call recording, virtual predictive dialing, call blast, real-time reporting and much more.
Setting up business rules becomes so easy. Agents’ get the flexibility to log into system only when they are scheduled to; access networks, resources and applications whenever they want to.
Calls can be routed to agents based upon skills and even custom scripts can be sent to agents’ during the call enabling them to calm down an irate customer or even make an cross sell/upsell at junctures pre-determined by the management.
Managing remote workforce
Large percentage of organizations are using cloud-delivered collaborative tools to manage virtual teams. Video conferencing solutions form an essential part of cloud-based solutions. From managing multimedia interactions to sharing documents simultaneously. Using these collaborative tools, participants can post videos, send emails, documents and other useful links.
A pioneer of SaaS model and now, emerging as one important name in CRM – Salesforce allows to manage prospects, customers data and other contact history all in one place. It can be customized as well to match the needs of specific target groups and modify the fields as per preferred language of communication and specific time zone.
A copy of email sent by sales team or received by them can be logged instantly in Salesforce. This streamlines sales operation in many ways for instance, in case of non-availability any sales rep who manages a specific customer data, any issue associated with this customer’s account can be easily accessed by sales manager using the information available from email communication record.
Wrapping it up
An easy and fast access to data over the internet gives companies option to process data quickly and multiple options to collaborate. And cloud-based solutions offer amazing way to run wide range of applications, reduce capital expenses and streamlines business operations in many ways.
