Last Updated on September 16, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta
In today’s world, customer engagement stands at the forefront of business innovation. The world’s top companies are leveraging scheduling automation and the power of data and analytics to maximize client interactions; having a strong data engine that empowers connections between business teams, prospects, and customers is an absolute must for any successful organization.
SUMO Scheduler, an online appointment, event & course booking software platform, is leading the way to help companies incorporate smart data into their clients’ day-to-day customer meetings. They’ve identified 5 best practices for incorporating data into an automated scheduling flow to increase sales, ensure customer retention, and boost employee satisfaction.
Know Your Customer
Sales intelligence data and key demographics like your customer’s geo location, age, and gender provide valuable cues for approaching every interaction in the most impactful way. You want your meeting to be data-driven and well organized to ensure it reaches the right prospects at a time that’s convenient for them. Since demographics add necessary context in covering basic data points to make conversations relevant and productive, you have to be well prepared.
Salesforce-native applications such as SUMO Scheduler allow your sales team to gather necessary information and build a detailed customer profile in preparation for a discovery call. SUMO’s calendar syncs contact info with the customer’s Salesforce record allowing the business account owner to easily see and analyze details before approaching the prospect. This feature is key in determining the right sales strategy and ensuring effective communication with your clients.
Educate Your Buyers
Research has found that nearly 65% of the general population are visual learners. And since your brain can process images and videos 60,000 times faster than text, image-based communication became remarkably valuable. While getting to know your prospects by understanding their demographics is the first step in building an impactful relationship, offering timely information to help them make a decision about your brand is also very important.
SUMO’s Salesforce native appointment and event scheduling application makes educating your buyers a breeze. Its file-sharing capability that syncs directly with the extensive content library and CRM database allows your sales team to auto-generate and share important documents while giving contacts the freedom to upload files on their own time straight from their view.
Connect with Customers Where They Are
In today’s world of virtual interactions, consumers expect to connect with companies from anywhere and on their own terms. Making an appointment with a New York-based firm from Sydney should be as easy as scheduling a call in the same time zone regardless of how it’s booked. From online chatbots to website scheduling portals and social media messengers, customers want to engage with your brand just when ad where they need it.
That’s when the right omnichannel scheduling system comes into play. SUMO’s location-agnostic approach seamlessly connects teams with customers regardless of their physical location and time zone. You can schedule a location-based meeting or a conference call straight from their Salesforce record. Your customers can also self-schedule appointments and get matched with the right resource within a matter of seconds.
Optimize Your Customer Engagement Process
Achieving your monthly goals is great, but won’t it be nice to have a robust data-driven system that can streamline your sales process and make it even more successful? Analyzing multiple data points can be a daunting but necessary task and Salesforce Analytics alone may not provide a full view for making a sound decision. Additionally, appointment scheduling analytics such as the number of meetings booked, canceled, or rescheduled paired with your key performance indicators (KPIs) and business goals can become a powerful tool for driving a meaningful change in your organization.
SUMO’s Analytics Builder leverages Salesforce Object reporting and is packed with over fifty out-of-the-box dashboards to track your appointment volume trends, no-shows, reminders, and other important KPIs. Depending on your business needs, you can create custom reports and auto-schedule them for recurring delivery. As a result, your optimization efforts are built on full transparency in your sales processes and customer engagement insights instead of guessing.
Maximize Your Most Valuable Resources
People are your company’s most valuable resource, and a fully utilized staff is every sales manager’s dream. Even your top performers can quickly become disengaged if they feel like their skills are not being fully applied. That’s why it’s extremely important to understand assignment volume and workload before making process improvement decisions. And here again, knowledge is power.
While staff-related insights can be derived from Salesforce Analytics and appointment booking reports, it’s also important to have a system that offers advanced appointment assignment logic with clear visibility into availability, territory, and location. With SUMO Scheduler, managers have a real-time view of staff appointment availability and utilization so they can quickly decide how to organize their talent.
About SUMO
Sumo Scheduler is a customer engagement platform that offers a plethora of ways to power customer conversations and transforms your customer engagement strategy into a streamlined pathway for acquiring, growing, and building brand advocates. SUMO’s smart engine drives business growth with appointment, event, and queue automation by leveraging Salesforce-native integrations to provide you with infrastructure, security, and reliability you can trust. Learn more about SUMO.
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