Gain the information advantage with a complete 360-degree customer view – Part 3

Modern sales and customer service teams need centralized customer information to achieve operational excellence. In Part 1 of this blog series for Sales professionals, we explained how operational improvements can help you sell faster, and in Part 2, we explored how improved customer information management can help delight customers. Part 3 of this series expands on how bringing together people, processes, data and documents, can help Sales teams sell smarter with a 360-degree customer view. This centralized view of customer information provides staff with a deeper understanding of the customer and their needs to serve them better. 

Sales representations spend less than 30% of their time actually selling.
– Salesforce, State of Sales, 5th edition, 2022

For most organizations, valuable customer information is the lifeblood of operations as it flows through the business throughout its lifecycle. A 360-degree customer view must include not just real-time data from a CRM, but also, connected mission-critical content that can be actioned together across all sales processes.

Enabling sales teams with this valuable information can be difficult because it is often disorganized and disconnected from Salesforce® processes. Manual document intake is time-consuming and repetitive, causing bottlenecks and costly errors. Mismanaged and missing documents provide poor insights delaying or derailing sales opportunities, and poor communications can scare prospects away or create bad customer engagement experiences.

Sales teams currently struggle every day with a flood of documents that need to be captured, managed, and delivered as part of critical information workflows. An integrated approach to streamlining the processing, access and delivery of information, provides faster access to customer insights for smarter selling decisions that reduce sales cycle times, accelerate sales operations, and ultimately improve customer satisfaction.

Look for opportunities to streamline the customer information lifecycle

Looking at how your customer information enters, is used, and flows through lead-to-order processes to communicate effectively is essential to gaining the information advantage. With more reliable, thorough and insightful customer information, staff can spend more time selling smarter and delighting customers to clearly set you apart from the competition.

One way to streamline sales processes is to automate incoming communications via AI-augmented intelligent capture tools to deliver efficient customer tracking and ensure customer wishes get actioned quickly and consistently. By automating this task, staff can deliver increased productivity and agility with a focus on value added tasks instead of routine or low value administration.

AI-assisted machine learning capture capabilities can also automatically classify the intake of customer documents and extract textual data to be used directly inside CRM systems. Automation like this frees up more time that staff would usually spend on manual document processing and data entry workloads.

Making better (and faster) use of customer information adds to the 360-degree customer view. By identifying trends in the collected customer information, staff can:

• Identify additional upsell opportunities
• Compose better RFP responses
• Construct better deals

Sell “smarter” through enhanced information management

 In many cases, the information organizations need to better understand customers and their needs is available, but where it’s available and to whom is often the challenge. Is the information stored somewhere easily accessible to staff that need it? During the sales process, do staff know what type of customer information is available to support interactions and where to find it quickly? Do staff find current customer information management solutions reliable enough to arm them with the latest and most accurate customer data?

Put the customer and their information at the center of your sales operations to ensure customer experiences are positive and memorable. Enhancing customer information management is a critical step towards selling smarter with a complete 360-degree customer view and includes:

• Centralizing information needed by all staff interacting with customers:  All relevant documents are collected, categorized, and mission-critical data is captured to have the information needed to make the right decisions when it’s needed
• Connecting information across systems and applications: Fast and accurate access to customer data and all related documents managed intelligently together in one view provides a 360-degree view to act quickly to changes in the business
• Communicating information unique to the customer’s needs: Deliver impactful messages to your audience when they really matter quickly and consistently to keep customers engaged and loyal with your organization

Gain the information advantage to complete a 360-degree customer view

Are you ready to sell smarter to achieve operational excellence? Take these steps to gain the Information Advantage!

Step 1: Capture Information
Digitize the inbound processing of business content so sales and service agents have early visibility and can prioritize urgent, value-add tasks. Automating repetitive tasks streamlines processing, ensuring improved customer satisfaction and a better employee experience.

Step 2: Manage Information
Produce a complete view of the customer across the enterprise, including structured and unstructured information, to improve sales and service processes. Achieving deeper insights into related content speeds decision-making and generates more opportunities while promoting greater customer loyalty and stronger relationships.

Step 3: Deliver Information
Reduce sales and service cycle times by generating pixel-perfect, personalized customer communications that nurture closer relationships, delight customers, and engage them at every step of the decision journey.

OpenText is the industry leader in document and records management. With over 25 years of experience, we have deep insights into the information needs of today’s sales organizations. OpenText solutions for Salesforce connect all Sales and Service touchpoints for a full 360-degree customer view that enables outstanding customer service, increased sales performance, and on-brand customer communications.