Sugar Sell Named Leader on G2 Crowd for CRM Software

Sugar Sell, the world’s first no-touch, time-aware CRM has been named a leader in CRM software for the 4th consecutive year by G2.

It may seem like a small feat, but G2 is actually the world’s largest technology marketplace where researchers can figure out which platform could be an ideal fit for their business.

How does this work?

G2 scores products and vendors based on reviews gathered from their user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. They apply their unique algorithm to this data to calculate customer Satisfaction and Market Presence scores in real-time.

G2’s Market Presence score is a combination of 15 metrics from G2’s user reviews, publicly available information, and third-party sources.

Both the software vendor and the individual product are measured on various criteria. The criteria are listed below in order of importance. Product metrics receive greater weight than vendor metrics.

Each input is normalized by category and segment. This means that scores are relative to other products in the category/segment and may change from segment to segment. The scores are then scaled from 0–100.

For the 18th consecutive quarter, Sugar has been named a leader for the mid-market. Sugar received high customer satisfaction scores for ease of doing business, ease of administration and meeting overall requirements. With a shorter time to value than other leaders, highly ranked features for Sugar Sell include customization, contact management and contract management.

About Sugar Sell

Sugar Sell enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative sales automation solution on the market. Sugar Sell consolidates customer data into one place and builds on top of that underlying data a comprehensive system for sales automation, including management of contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities, forecasts, quotes, contracts, communications, and reporting. With Sugar Sell, customers are able to drive revenue, increase efficiency, reduce sales costs and deliver unmatched customer buying experiences.

DOWNLOAD THE G2 REPORT HERE

 

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5 Tips for Reducing Email Bounce Rate

The most effective and reliable marketing tool your business has is its email list. In terms of return on investment (ROI), nothing else — social media, AdWords, SEO — even comes close. Unfortunately, email marketing also has a major drawback. To maintain the effectiveness of this channel, your email lists need to be actively cultivated, managed, and updated. When your email marketing resources aren’t handled properly, your campaign results quickly begin to atrophy.

One of the first signs that there’s a problem is an increase in the email bounce rate. This key performance indicator (KPI) allows marketers to see how many of their emails “bounce” back from the addresses on their list. If the bounce rate is steadily rising, it’s a clear indication that there’s trouble brewing in the company’s email marketing methodology.

Email Bounce Rate as a KPI

To understand why the bounce rate is such an important KPI, it’s important to explain what the bounce rate actually measures. It’s a surprisingly simple calculation. Take the number of bounced emails in a given campaign, and then divide them by the total number of emails sent out in that campaign. Take that number and multiply it by 100. The resulting product is the bounce rate.

For example, if 1,500 emails bounced back from a campaign with 125,000 recipients, the bounce rate would be 1.2%. As bounce rates go, that’s not bad.

Most marketers would expect to see a 2% bounce rate on a typical campaign. Bounce rates can vary significantly over time — anything up to 5% is widely viewed as acceptable — and a sudden spike in the bounce rate in a single email or campaign isn’t necessarily cause for alarm. One example of this would be an increase in “soft” bounces caused by temporary technical or network issues. The real concern is a steady increase in the email bounce rate over time.

What we’re really concerned with here are “hard” bounces. These can be caused by a wide variety of issues, such an email address that no longer exists or an email that belongs to an expired domain name. The worst-case scenario, however, is that campaign emails are being bounced because they were blocked from being delivered at all. When this happens, it’s usually because the sending address — your marketing email address, or even your entire domain name — was placed on a spam blacklist. That’s a problem you want to avoid at all costs.

To keep your bounce rate as a reasonable level, it pays to follow some basic guidelines.

Here are five of the most important things to get right:

1. Don’t Act Like A Spammer:

   If you don’t want to find your email address or domain name blacklisted, don’t send emails that look like spam messages. Avoid spammer-like language (“act now!”), pay attention to your formatting, and always include your company’s contact information. Also, don’t do sketchy things like buying email lists from questionable sources, as using these lists can increase the odds of your emails getting flagged as spam.

2. Clean Your Lists:
   

   One of the most effective ways to reduce your bounce rate is to regularly review the addresses that bounced, and then remove those which are no longer active. If you’re a B2B company, for instance, you may be sending hundreds of emails to contacts who have since moved to other companies, or even to companies that no longer exist.

3. Confirm Your Opt-Ins:
   

   The best email marketing results come from lists with highly engaged recipients. People who opt-in to your newsletters and email updates tend to have very high conversion rates, and this is even more true for those who follow through on a “Confirm your account” link sent after their initial sign up. Your company may see slower email list growth using this method, but your bounce rates will also be extremely low. More importantly, your marketing ROI with these engaged subscribers will tend to be very high.

4. Segment Your Lists:
   

   Your company may have emails from a wide variety of sources — signups from promotions and trade shows, emails from lead generation on your website, customer lists — making it a challenge to craft an effective marketing message that fits all of these groups. So don’t try to. Instead, segment your marketing lists by bounce rate. This allows your marketing team to focus on your most engaged subscribers first. It also justifies investing less resources in reaching those less-engaged, lower ROI segments.

5. A/B Test Your Content:

   It’s always a good idea to A/B test your marketing. There’s even more value to doing this if your bounce rate is increasing. For example, by tweaking the language and formatting of your emails, you may discover that something in your content is triggering a spam filter.

By consistently applying these tips to your email marketing campaigns, you can gain a new level control over your bounce rate. This allows you to keep this all-important KPI steady, while also giving you new methods for maximizing your campaign ROI.

These tips only scratch the surface of what’s possible for optimizing your company’s email marketing results. To take your results to the next level, you need more than a quick blog post. You need expert insights. Let FayeBSG show you what’s possible. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

 

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Two Ways to Build Authenticity and Better Serve Customers with AI

One of the biggest misconceptions about artificial intelligence (AI) is that it is swapping out human interaction with machines for different business functions. That’s simply not true. Great AI is not trying to replace members of your team, but instead it uses technology and machine learning to make your team better by being more in tuned with your customers.

How? With today’s AI, your customer-facing teams, such as customer support, sales and marketing to better understand your customer, and quickly, to provide the best customer experience possible.

There are many different AI capabilities in the market today, so it may feel a little overwhelming when determining where to start. You want to build a better, more authentic experience for your customers and prospects, but you don’t want to just toss a bunch of technologies at them without guidance.

In order to determine which AI applications make the most sense for your business, first consider your business goals.

AI capabilities enhance your team capabilities. In fact, some recent reports state that AI improves agent efficiency. By automating agent functions, companies are improving efficiency by 31.1%, or about 12 hours per week.

While there are many routes to travel with AI, there are two major ways your customer-facing teams can help build authenticity is through sentiment analysis and creating specific brand assets. Here’s how:

Sentiment Analysis

AI can do more than just make processes more efficient, it can also help you remove the barriers in understanding your customer. Not just in an overarching way like helping to shape your buyer personas or ideal customer profiles, but in how your customer is feeling in real-time. For many customer service and marketing teams, gathering this type of information and customer feedback takes extensive work and can help in the long run, but not always the short term.

With AI-powered sentiment analysis, you can let the AI do the leg work of sorting through data, providing insights in how customers are seeing your company, and how your current customer is feeling if they reach out to you.

This analysis extends past just a positive or negative rating, but some newer AI capabilities are even able to weed out sarcasm and other descriptive wording that shows the truth behind your customer’s sentiment.

With AI-powered sentiment analysis, you can equip your customer support team with data, so they are never caught off guard when speaking with clients. They can also prioritize their queue with this information in mind.

Are you curious how sentiment analysis can work with your other technology to build authenticity and better serve your customers? Check out the video below to learn about Flare Sentiment Analysis for Zendesk.

Brand Assets

It’s not just your customer support team that can utilize AI capabilities to build authenticity. Your marketing team can use AI to help drive initiatives with design and content. For instance, there are some text-to-image generation and generated text capabilities developing that are really interesting and can play an important role in making a prospect’s experience with a brand more authentic.

AI does not mean that machines are taking over the branding or customer support, instead it is a way to have more information to leverage to better these experiences.

Authentic brands can take the beginning of data presented by AI, and fine tune then into the strategic initiatives. AI-generated assets can sift that focus toward the customer experience, so marketers can then focus their time on taking assets that will resonate with their audience.

Conclusion

While AI is not necessarily a new concept, it is continually evolving and its capabilities continue to grow. Whether you are looking to better your customer service teams, your overall branding or somewhere in between, AI can help you acquire the data points you need to do this the best way you can.

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7 Tips for Not Getting Stagnant with Employee Satisfaction a Year into the Pandemic

It may be years until we fully understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but even now it’s becoming obvious that big changes are on the horizon for business. These new trends are most visible when it comes to how companies adapt to the post-pandemic needs, priorities, and expectations of their employees.

While many companies are desperate to get back to the business-as-usual status quo of 2019, the reality is that it’s not going to happen. Workers have seen the benefits of going remote, and now most of them have no intention of coming back into the office five days a week.

It’s a brave new world out there. If you want your company to thrive in this new era, it’s time to rethink some things. There’s no better place to start than how to improve employee satisfaction in a remote-work reality.

The Basics

Many companies now have a year of experience managing remote teams, making it almost impossible to argue against the viability of a work-from-home model. While some workers will eventually want to return to a physical office, a recent PwC report claims that as of January 2021, an astonishing 83 percent of employers say the shift to remote work has been successful for their company. Additionally, over half of employees would prefer to be remote at least three days a week moving forward. Hundreds of major companies are now offering work-from-home options as a kind of job perk, and even reducing the size of their office space in anticipation of a smaller in-person workforce.

It’s clear that the new “hybrid work model” isn’t going anywhere. But how do you actually make it work for your business? How do you keep your employees productive and satisfied without those daily face-to-face interactions? Do you want to prevent stagnation? How do you improve motivation, and keep productivity levels high?

Here are seven tips to keep things dynamic and fresh during this post-pandemic remote-work restart.

1. Provide Clear and Consistent Communication:

   One of the drawbacks of a remote-work system is that there is less opportunity to casually check in with team members throughout the day. This means that it’s essential that the communication workflows — particularly when it comes to things like assignments, deadlines, and status updates — are as clear as possible. This also means investing in the right communication technology, including cloud-based solutions for video conferencing, project management, and virtual workspaces.

2. Focus on Giving Timely Feedback:
   

   Constructive feedback is one of the keys to strong employee satisfaction. This is relatively easy to do in a traditional office setting, but it’s surprisingly easy to overlook opportunities for this feedback in a remote-work context. Something as simple as an end-of-week email or instant message recognizing employees’ efforts can have huge results in overall employee satisfaction.

3. Invest in Productivity-Tracking Tools:

   It’s not exactly a secret that some workers struggle to maintain their normal levels of productivity in a work-from-home context. They may get distracted without in-person oversight, or even become a little lazy. Productivity-tracking tools help to keep everyone honest. These tools can also help to identify potential problems with tricky assignments or heavy workloads before they start to impact employee job satisfaction.

4. Motivation is More Important Than Ever:

   Many of the most-effective and time-tested methods for improving employee motivation just aren’t as effective for remote workers. What good is taking everyone out for lunch, for example, if half your team doesn’t even live in the same city? One option is to have a virtual lunch. You can buy  delivery service gift cards for employees and then they can pick what meal they’d like to purchase for the virtual meeting. While thing can boost team morale, it might not be enough to truly motivate your team. It’s worth considering some remote-ready motivation strategies instead. One great example? Use a gamification platform, such as Splash for SugarCRM or Flare Gamification for Zendesk, to motivate your employees to do exactly what you need them to do in your software.

5. Find Opportunities to Build Trust:
   

   It can be difficult to build a sense of trust and comradery between team members when they work in a distributed workspace. This can have a negative impact on morale. This is particularly true during crunch periods or when team projects get bogged down by delays. By creating a space for casual interactions, team members can steadily build up those all-important trust levels. Try chatting for a few minutes immediately before a video conference or hosting an after-hours game or trivia contest.

6. Rethink Your Onboarding Strategy:

   Your company has changed during the pandemic. Why would you force new employees to learn the old way of doing things? Now is the perfect time to update onboarding processes for new employees. The truth is, many of them may never set foot in the company’s physical offices anyway. Hiring priorities may also need an update. Think about what the skill sets your employees may now need to have. These could include more of a focus on computer literacy, technical skills, and an improved understanding of distributed workflows.

7. Schedule One-On-One Meetings:
   

   Even if face-to-face meetings become a thing of the past, it’s still important for managers to have strong personal connections with their workers. One-on-one video conferences are a great way to do this. They provide an opportunity to talk about issues outside of a conference call or group chat. This is essential for things like performance reviews, constructive criticism, and other personalized guidance. One of the most important things for any employee is to understand his or her place within the company. How does their role matter in the big picture? It’s something employers sometimes forget to show in a physical office, let alone a distributed one. Having these one-on-one meetings allow you to regularly check.

Conclusion

As the world adjusts to the “new normal,” it’s tempting to obsess over the things we’ve lost. Forcing employees to fit into the old workplace model is a recipe for resentment, frustration, and plummeting job satisfaction. Instead, let’s focus on rebuilding a better, more efficient, and more satisfying workplace. Acceptance can go a long way.

Is your company struggling to come up with a post-pandemic strategy for its workforce? FayeBSG can help. Let us show you how to use today’s smartest technology — CRM, ERP, CX, and more — to improve your business, streamline your workflows, and increase your profits. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

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5 Benefits of CX for Transportation and Logistics Companies

For many transportation companies, gaining and retaining customers is a huge deal. Once a customer signs up for a shipment or two, you can easily still be vying with your competitors for loads three, four, and five. So how can you better serve your customers? How can you best engage with them, while still being able to balance everything else on your plate?

Utilizing CX for transportation and logistics software, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system, can go a long way in establishing a relationship with customers and keeping them around. When you have CX software that focuses on logistics, you can customize the process to meet your specific needs. Whether you need to integrate your CRM data with your TMS data or have a clearer understanding of every step of the transport process, having proper software can extend your capabilities far beyond any Excel program a company may rely on.

Here are 5 benefits of CX for transportation and logistics companies:

1. True Team Collaboration

In any business, silos can be real challenges. But for transportation companies, they can be even bigger headaches. If a customer calls wanting to know where an order is, they will quickly get frustrated when their simple question doesn’t receive a simple answer.

A CRM system includes all the data about leads, prospects, and customers. So everyone who needs to see it can.

Once you add in integrations into other software, you have broken down significant boundaries. Now anyone who gets a call can look up the caller’s data and handle quick information. And if it needs to be passed off, you can send it to the right person. Your team can now better monitor the workflow and communication with your customers.

Even better, onboarding new employees moves faster when they can have all of a customer’s information at their fingertips—instead of having to engage with multiple team members, just to get a glimpse.

2. Automated Request Processing

Not only does CX-centric software help your team gain information more quickly, it also streamlines their work processes by automating routine tasks. From the beginning of a customer’s journey to the end, you can automate processes, such as receiving requests, assigning them to managers, managing orders, and invoicing.

Your customers want fast, accurate support. And with proper CRM software, you can provide it to them.

3. Better Data Management and Reporting

Both logistics and transportation have a lot of moving parts, on and off the road. Understanding your customer’s needs is important. Having the ability to forecast their needs? Even better. When all your data is connected and accessible, you have a better data management system and way better reporting capabilities.

For instance, with integrated, CX-focused software, a manager can look through a client’s previous orders to see if there are any spikes or valleys in their loads. Maybe a client ships live plants. If so, you always reach out to them right before spring time—every year, like clockwork.

Yet once you have your CRM data in place, you uncover that winter loads spike up, too. Previously, you never considered the Christmas tree market for this client.

Ultimately, you can analyze all your previous interactions with customers, prospects, and vendors.

4. Better Sales and Marketing Performance

When you have better insight into your customers, your marketing team can build better, more accurate buyer personas. They can also create better sales enablement collateral for your sales team, which means they can close more deals.

By adopting a CX system to manage your customers, your sales and marketing teams can:

• Offer support through multiple channels of communication.
• Identify the best channels to attract customers.
• Better manage requests that can lead a prospect to the first sale.
• Analyze each stage of the sales pipeline and better understand each piece of the customer’s journey.
• Set up calls, Zooms, and emails—right from inside the system.
• Create drip campaigns to current and past customers that support reengagement efforts.

5. Increased Cost Efficiency

The better the workflow, the better the cost efficiency. The more you can automate mundane tasks, the more your team can focus on speaking to clients one-on-one and handling more difficult tasks.

When applicable, let the software do the work. For instance, if a client sends in a new billing address, one team member may have to upload that information into the accounting system. If your accounting is integrated with your CRM software, then that information can get sent directly. There is no need for another team member to have to go into another system to update that information.

Or worse, the information never gets updated in all the places it needs to, and no one knows the best address—because it’s inconsistent throughout your systems.

CX for transportation and logistics software allows you to eliminate such mistakes.

Conclusion: A Better CX Strategy Leads to More Business

If you are already using CRM and/or TMS software, then you have already begun to see the value of putting an emphasis on the customer experience.

It’s the same with the structure of the supply chain. When all the pieces of your technology come together and work together, it’s a better experience. And a better customer experience can lead to more business.

Want to learn more about CX for transportation and logistics? Great! Contact us today.

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Where are Customer Service and Support Leaders Spending In 2021?

There’s no question that the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound — and largely disastrous — impact on almost every sector of the global economy. For most companies, 2020 was a year defined by catastrophic breakdowns in supply chains, chaos in distribution, crashing product demand, painfully halted production, and a frenzied transition to an untested work-from-home workflow. Even companies that did do well in the tough business environment had to adapt to new safety regulations and finding the most efficient way to serve customers. But it wasn’t all bad. In some ways, the COVID-19 crisis helped to make a great case for a new, modernized approach to business technology. These changes are apparent in the field of customer service and support.

In October of 2020, more than six months into the pandemic, business research firm Gartner conducted a poll of 106 customer service and support leaders to gain some much-needed insight into coming industry trends. What did this survey reveal? COVID-19 changed the game. Well, that’s not surprising. However, the survey specifically showed significant acceleration in several already-growing trends relating to customer support technology. Later reporting by Gartner, and other firms, has only confirmed the durability of these trends.

So, what are these trends, and what can they tell us about spending and investment in customer support in 2021/2022? Let’s take a look at some essential findings.

The Big Three

Gartner’s survey uncovered three top priorities for customer support and service leaders heading into 2021. The first is increased investment in upgrading outdated “legacy” support technology in favor of modern support tools. Those old systems were designed for the needs of a different era, and they just can’t keep up with the needs of today’s customers.

Automation of customer service processes — including AI-based solutions — was another major priority. Modern customers already understand how to interact with computers, and are increasingly comfortable with chatbots, menu-driven support resources, and other related systems to find solutions to their problems. Not surprisingly, spending on these solutions is also on the rise.

The third priority was an increased focus on migrating contact volume toward self-service channels. Human support workers are expensive, and it’s not easy or fast to scale traditional support services in response to increasing demand. That’s not the case with self-service support solutions. All three of these concepts are likely to see substantial investment in 2021.

Ramping Up Digital Channels

Roughly 70% of customer service and support leaders plan to increase spending on digital channels in 2021.

Customer Support and Service Volumes Are Skyrocketing

One of the major reasons that self-service initiatives are on the rise has to do with an unprecedented increase in customer contact volume. Around 85% of those surveyed by Gartner reported big increases in support and service tickets in 2020, with the bulk of those increases happening at B2C companies.

Self-Service Isn’t Optional

Most of those surveyed reported rapid growth in customer support and service volumes. 39% of companies said their live support staff handled the bulk of those increases. This not only placed an additional burden on the customer experience (including longer wait times), but it also resulted in an uptick in reports of burnout among employees. To continue to meet customer expectations, companies are increasingly investing in modern, self-service ready support technology. This also helps remove additional pressures from workers.

Customers Don’t Mind Self-Service

One of the more surprising trends to emerge from recent reporting is that customers appear to be content to use self-service options for many common support and service tasks. This suggests that moving to a self-service support model could result in a substantial cost reduction for many companies.

Multi-Channel Support Is Essential for Self-Service

Behind-the-scenes investment in support technology for CRMs and support desk systems is increasing. Yet, the customer-facing elements of these solutions are also becoming more visible. Many companies report plans to update their websites, mobile pages, and even their apps to allow for improved access to self-service customer support options. This also includes an expansion into other channels, such as social media.

Data Collection Is More Important Than Ever

Companies consistently report that customer data collection plays a crucial role in their development of cost-effective support solutions. Moving into 2021/2022, this customer data will provide fundamental insights into the development of self-service and automated support models.

More importantly, the reporting created from this data will also allow companies to make targeted, informed decisions as they form new strategies for the post-COVID-19 economy. Not surprisingly, spending on customer data collection and analysis is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.

Conclusion

The world is changing, and your customers are changing with it. The good news is there are ways to meet and surpass expectations. Your company can access to the best support and service solutions modern technology can offer.

As a Master Zendesk Partner, FayeBSG implements, customizes, integrates, manages, and supports all Zendesk platforms. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

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Using Technology to Overcome Support Hurdles in CPG and Retail

Even before the massive disruptions that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, big things were changing in the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries. The old status quo was being shaken up, with everything from Brexit to climate change policy having real and surprising impacts on how everyday goods make their way into consumers’ shopping carts. For a customer-centric organization, these uncertainties can create a chaotic situation where agents and other support staff are blindsided by issues that they couldn’t anticipate. It has become even more of a challenge to overcome support hurdles.

Effectively responding to these challenges requires a new, technology-driven approach to CPG and retail strategy. It also requires a shift in perspective, where current business tools can be upgraded to become full-fledged assistants to your support teams. By letting the technology manage the messy details of monitoring customer behavior, your support teams can focus on delivering the best possible service.

Utilizing the Framework

Building these customer experience (CX)-oriented solutions is easier than you may realize. The essential framework of this technology is customer relationship management (CRM) software, which almost every CPG and retail company already has in place in some form. These systems generate a wealth of customer data, but it’s not always accessible because of how that information is stored, accessed, and used within the company.

With today’s CX technology, CPG and retail companies can empower their teams to best serve their customers. How? By having information about product discounts, availability, and recalls right at their fingertips. By using data that is already collected in new and innovative ways, CPG and retail companies can avoid many of the expensive support headaches that result from today’s erratic consumer markets. The result is a better customer experience.

Solutions

Consider a system like Flare CPG, a solution FayeBSG built for our clients that use the Zendesk Sunshine CRM platform. Sunshine already does an excellent job at connecting data for improved customer experiences. Yet,  the out-of-the-box experience isn’t optimized to measure and track CPG-specific data. By adding on another layer of resources, companies now have access to highly specific customer insights.

These tools allow a Flare CPG user to do things like:

• Anticipate potential product recalls
• Consolidate, normalize and respond ‘in-line’ to client inquiries via ‘any’ social media, messaging app, chatbots and email/phone
• Improve in-store product search
• Generate physical mailings for coupons or refunds
• Leverage product feedback and surveys to inform product development decisions

These are more than just quality-of-life improvements for support staff and agents. It’s a new way to exploit the valuable data that’s already being collected within the CRM. More importantly, tools like Flare CPG just scratch the surface of possibilities for CPG and retail applications. Existing CRM data can be reshaped in countless ways to fit new needs and solve new problems.

The result is this new approach to CRM data is a flexible, adaptable CX framework for providing a truly exceptional level of customer support. In the CPG and retail industries, shaken by years of instability, this new technology couldn’t come at a better time.

Is your CPG or retail company looking for a smart way to improve CX and overcome support hurdles? FayeBSG can help. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

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