To this day, however, statistics regarding conversion to sale motivators in direct mail are still hard to source, so CDMS decided to commission a survey to find out which factors made British consumers more likely to make a purchase as a result of direct mail. The findings are extremely clear: the ability to respond to the campaign online was rated the most important factor of all, making consumers 20% more likely than average to respond and purchase. Timing of the campaign to reach the recipient when in purchase consideration mode (17% more likely) came in second with personalisation of the campaign rated as 14% more likely than average.

UK consumers are clearly calling for the ability to respond online, indicating that the internet is becoming ever more strategically important to the direct marketing process. Savvy marketers are thus investigating various new techniques for tracking online response to direct marketing campaigns. One such tracking technique deserves a little more attention due to its popularity and promise of success: personalised URLs. This technology allows marketers to generate a unique and personalised landing page for every client in their marketing database. It typically takes the form of www.domainname.com/name. When the recipient receives a piece of direct mail with a personalised URL printed on it and type it into the web browser they are directed to their own dynamic microsite containing the mailings, offers, products, and/or services especially meant for them.

On these personalised micorsites the activity of respondents can be minutely tracked, providing an organisation with valuable information such as customer appreciation of content. With the learnings taken from customer behaviour on the site, it is easy to improve the accuracy of offers and select content more relevant to the customer for display. Online and offline data can also be connected by sending personalised URLs in the form of a link on customer e-mails or even by SMS.

Consumers rated appropriate timing as the second most effective at inspiring response and purchase, at 17% above average. By registering customer attitudes from all touchpoints, and not focusing only on one or two channels, businesses have access to fresh information with which to create time-sensitive, “event-triggered” messages sent to customers via immediate delivery channels such as online or SMS, but only when they behave in a particular way.

A business can set these event triggers for anything from a customer birthday to proving responsive to a particular kind of personalised URL (pURL) and not another, to their following of a specific series of image click-thoughs. Tracking which content drives the customer towards a purchase and which turns them away provides valuable long term insight into likes and dislikes but also highlights a previously unavailable time-frame in which to correct targeting by offering something more appealing. With all this cross-channel data available, marketers cannot afford to ignore the importance of using all available information on the individual to ensure better personalisation is provided as this is ranked at some 14% above average as a driver of response and purchase.

Consumers are clearly indicating that the option to respond online, appropriate timing and accurate personalisation are very important to them and are the most significant drivers of response and purchase to direct mail campaigns. The three factors are related and depend on each other, allowing marketers to use the most up-to-date online information on the consumer to be combined with rich offline datasets to create campaigns that make the right offer, to the right person, at the right time. These practices yield a treasure trove of data to constantly refine and improve the cross-channel direct marketing process.

Article written and contributed by Richard Higginbotham

Recent developments in variable colour printing – where content and text can be altered for each document printed – are revolutionising the extent to which communications with existing and potential customers can be personalised.  Recent research from GI Insight has confirmed the close correlation between the personalisation and relevance of customer communications and the levels of customer satisfaction achieved.  So personalised communications and reporting tangibly help to cement and develop customer relationships (and therefore the amount of business done with each customer).  Digital print means that there is now no need for minimum quantities.  And because the technology can now operate at high speed, then the economies of production scale are available to commercial printers to pass on more affordable pricing to customers.

Personalised marketing and customer communications used to be very much a service only for the highest value customer segments.  This is no longer the case.  The economics offered by high-speed variable colour printing mean that even the low value customers can receive such a service.  This is a critical point for the whole theory of database marketing.  Here, the job is not just to identify who the lower and higher value customers are, but also spot the segments with the greatest value growth potential and create strategies to migrate them from a lower value to higher value group.  If we cannot afford to communicate in a personalised fashion with the lower value groups, how can they ever be persuaded to upgrade?

Finally, the new capabilities and economics of variable colour printing are also being harnessed to greater web usage.  Here the process can become very interesting – we know of at least one firm that is using personalised colour to encourage the whole (connected) customer base onto the web, which then encourages the customer to create and use a personalised version of the firm’s website, where they can access all their details online. Throughout this process, targeted additional product advertising is served up to the customer with the aim of increasing their value via product offers they are likely to be interested in.

So much for the new capabilities of communicating in personalised colour.  How should the outcomes of this targeted activity be measured? In order to answer that question we need to examine the key underlying business measurement, which should result from efficient and effective database marketing.

As a result of the Internet, available markets have expanded enormously.  The tiniest firm can now access global markets.  Yet at the same time, the transparency – especially in terms of price – which the Web has allowed has also meant that competition has increased enormously at the same time as national boundaries and local anomalies have disappeared.  Consequently, product differential has diminished and the customer relationship will become virtually the be-all and end-all of a successful ongoing commercial relationship.

This has made business focus on two things:  firstly, to ensure that they provide such a good proposition for customers that they stay, increase their spend (if possible) and become more profitable; secondly, to understand better the cost of winning, keeping and growing customers, so that value is returned to shareholders.

The database marketing industry has produced extremely affordable customer relationship management tools (increasingly on a pay-as-you-go basis), with which to analyse and target the right people with the right offers.  But unless one understands profitability trends at the individual customer level, then companies will not know who to target, why, and with what.

Profit per customer helps to measure the value of different customer groups and the efficiency with which that value is produced.  It reveals whether firms have to recruit twice as many customers to achieve the same profit growth – and therefore whether or not current growth rates are sustainable.  By extension, profit per customer is the final output of earnings minus costs of obtaining, keeping and growing the customer.  Also by association, the quality of the value proposition being put to customers is being measured – i.e. more compelling proposition, greater efficiency, higher profit per customer.

In summary then, new print and web technology capabilities mean that organisations can now affordably generate personalised, high-quality marketing and customer communications. However, none of this is of any use unless a sound, accurate database drives such communications and campaigns.

Contributed by: Yolanda Noble, Chief Executive, dsicmm

With consumers tightening their purse strings and seeking cheaper alternatives, one of the best ways for marketers to spend their reduced budgets is on customer retention and development, i.e. focusing on the key customers – the 10% giving you 50% of your turnover.

The discount end of the high street is where this strategy will certainly pay off. With more and more people turning to value retailers, marketers will need to think about how they will encourage shoppers to stay with them when the economy is looking up. These new customers might very well return to their usual shops, so the key action for value retailers is to develop customer relationships in order to keep customers after the recession.

In order to do so, a mechanism needs to be put in place to help them understand who their new recruits are and encourage similar prospects to walk in the door. If there is a loyalty scheme in operation new customers should be incentivised to sign up with the aim of identifying new customer profiles. Once identified, they are available for immediate analysis with two areas key to successful customer development and retention:

1.    If some new customers are already walking in the door the retailer can look at who they are, what they are like and where they are from. This will allow them to select ‘lookalikes’ for prospect campaigns to encourage even more people to make the transition from premium retailer to value retailer.

2.    They can understand the new customer better in order to develop strategies for retention once the downturn is over. This might be as simple as adding new product lines to the offering or creating incentive barriers to keep them attracted to the retailer.

At the other end of the scale, premium retailers are suffering from customer defection and unless they fundamentally change their pricing structure customers will keep defecting. Evidence of this move try and prevent loyal customers seeking out cheaper alternatives has started to emerge. Last year Tesco introduced a range of discount brands aimed at discouraging shoppers from going to value alternatives such as Lidl and Aldi; in the run-up to Christmas M&S held two one-day sales slashing prices in store by 20%; and Waitrose has recently started a direct mail drive to promote its latest in-store promotions.

Further to this, premium retailers should also be looking to identify, through transactional analysis, whose spend is not dropping. This can be used to drive campaigns to recruit similar kinds of shoppers in a bid to replace lost custom.

Finally, stores should keep in touch with lapsed customers throughout this difficult period in a bid to draw them back again when consumer confidence returns. This is particularly importance since the value retailers will fight to keep them once the economy has recovered.

So, both ends of the retail spectrum have their work cut out for them over the ensuing months as value and premium retailers fight for customer share and aim to keep or win back customers when the recession is over. Most importantly, the customer should not be neglected during this period of financial instability and transactional analysis should be maximized.

Written by: Andy Wood from GI Insight

Information is expected to be readily accessible online and the boom in comparison sites is testament to this shift in consumer mentality that sees sourcing information and deals as an integral part of the buying cycle.  However, as channels multiply and independent information can be accessed from hundreds of user reviews, websites and blogs, marketers are struggling against their shrinking budgets to secure an authoritative presence for their products and services across the media spectrum.

While there is plenty of evidence of consumer responsiveness on each specific channel and that individuals are very active researching, enquiring and purchasing online, the stages of the customer journey are much cloudier. Exactly how a consumer reaches the online shop or decides to make a telephone purchase is yet unexplored territory.

Mapping the itinerary that led the individual customer to making a purchase or filling a basket and then abandoning it can make a world of difference to a business trying to contain marketing costs. As budgets are squeezed it becomes crucial to only invest in what actually makes an impact and not waste budget on ineffective communications.

For example a customer receiving a solus piece of direct mail featuring a personal URL printed on it in the customary form of www.domainname.com/name, might be tempted from the microsite to the main website and finally make a purchase. Someone else on the other hand might click through the targeted selection of items on the personalised website but choose to order them via the telephone.

It is obvious of course that given the current economical climate, endlessly multiplying the channels to the customer in a bid to keep up with the latest developments from social networks to tweets, will hemorrhage resources. Marketers need to focus on understanding how consumers use different channels for different purposes and leverage real customer preferences.

Although UK consumers make a massive use of text messaging evidence tells us that this is not regarded as a welcome promotional medium and commercial communications via SMS are still largely shunned. SMS, in fact, owes most of its unpopularity to the untargeted batch-messages that consumers have been subjected to. By delivering messages right into the handbags and pockets of people, mobile is perceived as very intrusive medium. This is why a high level of personalisation and time-sensitivity become absolutely essential.

The new-breed of channels offer exciting and unprecedented time-sensitivity. Rather than simply processing regular campaigns to customers in a batch fashion, some organizations have started to leveraging their database marketing systems to target offers at customers only when they behave in a particular way.  These ‘event triggers’ – which might include a customer service call, a type of transaction or going through a spending level in a particular period – instruct the system to send a targeted offer to the customer in a reduced time frame ranging from the same week to the same day, depending on time-sensitivity and marketing medium used.

Recent CDMS research set about analysing the different uplift rates of various media against a solus direct mail piece with a postal response mechanism and found that in all cases, the addition of extra response media to the customer journey was felt to produce a significant uplift.

Among the most interesting findings it is worth noting that by adding alternative response channel uplift varies from 12% (SMS) to 21% (Freephone) and personalised URLs (19%) produce a remarkably higher response uplift than non-personalised Websites (14%).

Overall UK marketers are becoming more capable in the way they communicate with customers and prospects, but keeping up with consumers is a difficult task. At a first glance it seems to follow that as consumers are better connected than ever before, the more media an organisation employs, the more response they will get. However simply expanding the channel choice without making any real effort to personalise the campaign and tailor it to customer preference will simply result in a waste of resources and irritated customers.

Written by Richard Higginbotham, Marketing Manager, CDMS
For more information, contact CDMS by visiting www.cdms.co.uk.

While the importance of getting targeted communications out of the door has achieved mainstream awareness, there is still considerable potential for improved return on investment from CRM systems.

Too often, companies are compromising when it comes to communicating with customers and prospects. The lack of attention to the actual delivery of personalised messages to customers or enquirers is making a nonsense of many companies’ marketing strategies.

Arguably, the need for sophisticated mail has never been greater. Customer retention has become a major issue, with today’s multi-channel environment making it easier than ever for consumers to switch brand allegiance. Consumers are acutely aware that the balance of power has shifted in their favour. It is an accepted mantra that attracting new customers costs more than retaining existing customers, and suppliers operate knowing that bad service, or even perceived bad service, is more likely to be met with defection.

Today, businesses of every size are realising that intelligent marketing to existing customers can have a profound impact on customer retention and customer growth. High volume prospecting activity has given way to tailored, targeted communications to existing customers – the first line of attack in the battle to stem customer churn rates.

Building a relationship with the customer via the mailstream, therefore, is becoming an integral part of any business proposition. You need to make sure there are solid IT management systems in place first, however.

To maximise the effectiveness of these customer communications, it is necessary to integrate them with the appropriate business processes they connect with, however disparate these processes may seem to be.

It is the integration of key business processes and their related information streams into CRM that defines and drives Customer Communication Management (CCM). CCM harnesses the power of specific business processes and ties them to the CRM initiative – in order to create, develop, manage, and maintain more effective customer communications.

CRM is fundamentally customer facing and outwardly focused. CCM takes this to the next level, by capturing the external customer information and linking it to internal business processes in order to create a more comprehensive picture of the customer’s behaviour in relation to the company. The goal is then to stay in repeated contact with customers via a continuing stream of out-bound messages that are highly targeted to individual needs and structured to facilitate easy payment or customer action.

But, with so much channel-choice available, is mail still a viable channel? Undeniably, yes. The EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, in tandem with local telephone privacy laws, places increasing limitations on unsolicited prospecting. Mail, however, is often seen as a non-intrusive and valued means of communication by both businesses and consumers. What’s more, response figures remain steady.

Any fears about email displacing mail have long since been dispelled. Contrary to popular belief, Internet users receive more mail than non-Internet users and the difference between the two groups is growing. The claim that a wired household is ripe for substitution is unfounded. Wired households include attractive consumers who will continue to receive mail along with other media from businesses eager to get a greater share of their wallets.

CCM can uncover opportunities for lower costs and higher revenues both by developing customer relationships that are more rewarding in every sense and by streamlining business processes so they are less costly, more integrated and more effective. Put simply, CCM is directly focused on determining the best and most cost-effective way for engaging in a continual and profitable dialogue with your customers.

Sophisticated data collection and analysis techniques are not enough. Businesses must ensure that this sophistication translates to customer-facing documents if the full value of the mail channel is to be realised.

Article written by David Jefferies, Marketing Director Pitney Bowes

Research group after research group report that an extraordinarily high percentage of software projects either fail to meet their goals after completion, are delivered over-budget or late, or are simply cancelled outright.

Gartner says half the projects in their study exceeded their initial budget tolerance by 200%. Standish Group suggests fully 1/3 of software projects are scotched before a single user has drawn benefit from the application.

CRM – Customer Relationship Management – projects are no different; they are subject to the same torques and tensions that tear other projects apart. In fact, the numbers are higher with CRM projects; studies show up to 70% of CRM projects fail. What is the source of so many CRM failures? Are there characteristics of CRM projects that make them especially vulnerable? More important, what are the remedies?

Defining Success

Ask anyone at your company what CRM is, and you’ll get your first clue about the source of the frequent project failures. Too many people, from staff-level to the corner office, from IT to sales, believe that CRM starts and ends with software.

In fact, the core of good CRM is the same as it’s been for decades: the right people executing the right processes, using the best possible tools at their disposal. And these days the ‘best tools’ means software that support the relationships between companies and clients.

To get your project off on the right foot, you’ll need to embrace a balanced view of the current situation that accounts for people, process and technology. That starts with some self-analysis covering all three components:

• Assess and Benchmark your current team. What does the organization look like? Who has a customer-facing role, and what do they do? A basic organizational map, along with a list of each team’s assigned roles is an essential first step. If you don’t know what you have to start with, it’s nearly impossible to map out next steps and improvement points.
• Map out the basic contours of the key customer-centric processes, including those that generate new business, as well as those that work to support existing clients. Who does what and in what order? What tools do they use to accomplish these tasks? Think about supporting processes as well, like prospect generation, lead qualification, or contract writing. The most important rule? Be honest about how it actually works, not how it’s supposed to work.
• Create a vision of the future by modeling the way your customer-centric processes ought to be. Now you can set your “AS-IS” information aside and start working through how things should be. For each existing process, you’ll want a corresponding future state.
• The difference between your IS and SHOULD processes represents your path for change.

While technology is an important piece of CRM, companies that focus solely on buying or building the best IT components will too often become another statistic in another research group’s report. Meanwhile, companies with healthy CRM implementations have inevitably taken into account all three of the primary components for success: people, process, and technology.

CRM Off the Rails

With so much focus on technology, it’s no wonder CRM projects often fall into a second major trap: lack of stakeholder commitment.

When CRM software is seen as a panacea, the important players at a company forget that they have an important part to play in a project’s success. As a consequence, there is an endless parade of organizations who spend millions on software, only to find that their people – field sales professionals, sales engineers, anyone engaged with the client – continue to make the same mistakes they made before.

To get through the surf, all company oars must be in the water, pointed in the same direction, and rowing in unison. Too often companies start down the path of change without key people’s participation, either in body or spirit.

The fact is customer relationship problems are typically organization-wide. They require a commitment from decision-makers and staffers to make real changes to how they operate. Those changes may require new people with a different mix of skills; they may require a new approach from the management team; it may force a company to re-evaluate the way it performs basic tasks. Above all, CRM success is dependent on a company following through on its commitments to align people, processes, and the right technology components.

A CRM project team that follows a few basic steps can go along way to getting those oars lined up:

1. Dream big: define your team’s business priorities. Sure, we know it’s to make customer relationships better, but what does that mean exactly? In one company it may mean shortening the sales cycle, in another it may mean making more up-to-date intelligence to the process. Laying out the company’s needs in discrete, measurable terms is a good way to get everything thinking the same way about solving the problem.
2. Face the truth: acknowledge current challenges. If it were easy, you would have done it by now, right? As a part of the early definition of what you want to fix, you have to acknowledge the obstacles.
3. What’s in it for us? Measure the impact of resolving these challenges. If the problems were resolved and you met your business goals, how much would it help? Measure the hypothetical results in terms of reduced costs, increased revenues, or other hot-button metrics and you’ll start to get everyone’s attention
4. Nothing comes for free: do an honest cost-benefit analysis of making the required changes. This step helps you determine the extent to which the team should go to solve its problems. Consider best-case and worst-case scenarios…and don’t forget to show what happens if you do nothing at all.
5. Write it down: create a CRM business case. You’ll want to define all the points above, and puts it into a format all the stakeholders can quickly read and understand. CRM is an investment, just like building a new factory, or hiring a new employee. Modeling the return on investment is the best case for nudging even the most cautious executives toward making a change.

Snatching Success from the Jaws of Failure

With stakeholder commitment, and a holistic view of the solution that touches people, process, and technology, you must now face the final obstacle on your way to CRM success: failure to plan.

At this point, you’ll notice the stakeholders being drawn to slick CRM software brochures like moths to a bright flame. But there’s work to be done before the team starts thinking about technology.

The IS/SHOULD assessment and the Business Case should be the starting points for an overall CRM Strategic Roadmap. The roadmap defines how the company is actually going to accomplish the required tasks, in a step-by-step fashion. The time horizon for the Strategic Roadmap may extend beyond the immediate budget, and it may become more vague as it discusses steps further into the future. But it’s a critical document because it provides overall direction for the team and for the stakeholders. And above all, it maps specific actions to remedy every need defined in the business case.

The early phases of the CRM Strategic Roadmap should be further defined in the form of an Implementation Plan and Budget. The Implementation Plan offers a specific schedule of events for actually implementing the chosen solution.

People may be impatient for change at your company, but planning pays for itself many times over. Too often the planning process is lampooned as a paralyzing activity that brings projects to a halt. Building the Strategic Roadmap and Implementation Plan & Budget is a critical information-discovery and analysis step, and it’s one that companies who have experienced CRM success know to be essential to a project coming to full fruition.

Conclusion

You might hear that CRM is nothing more than the company rolodex. Or you might believe that CRM software starts and ends with a sales pipeline tool. If you fall for that, you might believe that making improvements to how you win and manage customers is easy. In fact, it requires careful planning, and it requires buy-in from key players in your company, starting in the corner offices and moving down the organizational chart from there.

In the real world, CRM is a system of interconnected elements comprising people, process, and technology; any improvements to that system have to be carefully planned and executed. Fortunately, finding the right mixture of those three ingredients for your company is possible.

The road is treacherous, but with the right approach, you can reach your destination.

Are you ready to go?

If you would like to learn more about how to apply these best practices to your CRM projects, please visit http://www.ismsystems.com/lp/crmfails-webinar.php. Also visit our website www.ismsystems.com or call us at 877-553-0485 to set up a consultation. We look forward to working with you.

ISM helps clients successfully leverage CRM through leadership in strategy, business process requirements, technology selection, implementation, and support. Our methodologies and expertise adhere to the best practices from the most respected minds in the CRM and business process consulting industry.

Steve Snapp is a Sr. CRM Consultant at ISM. He has over 15 years of sales and marketing experience in various industries. Since 1995, Steve has helped build the CRM practice from implementing CRM technology to a full-service CRM consulting firm.

Swain Scheps is a technology professional based in Dallas, Texas. His experience includes solution design and project management in a variety of IT specialties including CRM, Business Intelligence, and E-commerce. He is also a writer and author; his latest book “Business Intelligence for Dummies” (Wiley) came out in 2008.

Given the current climate, many companies are focused on maximizing their existing resources. Salesforce.com Administrators often times play an instrumental role in boosting company productivity and increasing the bottom line. Based upon daily interactions with Salesforce customers over the past few years, below are several tangible ways Admins are making a difference:

1. Sales Efficiency Salesforce Admins often serve as a Business Analyst, interfacing with key business units and understanding their processes. The Admin knows how to translate these processes, particularly as they evolve, into Salesforce. Results can include capturing, routing and tracking all incoming leads and ensuring cross-functional teams interact seamlessly. For example, many companies are currently asking their Customer Support reps to identify new revenue opportunities. An Admin, serving as a liaison between the two groups, ensures all leads identified by Support are properly captured in Salesforce and automatically routed to the appropriate Sales Reps. Lead follow-up and pipeline are tracked in real-time analytics resulting in a closed-loop process.

2. Delivering Analytics Data analytics are often times the driver for key business decisions and strategic direction. Understanding both the business and Salesforce functionality, Admins deliver key metrics to management via customized reports and dashboards. They can create real-time reports and period snapshots for valuable metrics to include: best selling products, top producers, stalled opportunities, lead follow up and marketing ROI.

3. Cost-Effective Marketing Salesforce’s mass-email functionality offers companies a cost-efficient way to reach prospects and existing customers. If your company has the Campaigns functionality, your Admin can create HTML emails, pull the correct target audience and track ROI. Many Admins are also familiar with various Marketing applications on the AppExchange, which offer additional functionality such as tracking customer click-throughs and managing bounce backs.

4. Boost User Adoption As the Salesforce champion, your Admin generates enthusiasm within the user community, resulting in higher adoption and ultimately accurate metrics for management.

5. Subject Matter Expert Salesforce Admins typically serve as the “go-to” for questions related to the application and also train new users. The result is consistent use, accurate data and again accurate metrics.

6. Monitoring New Solutions Salesforce.com’s AppExchange is constantly adding new applications which add value to and seamlessly integrate with Salesforce. Admins monitor these new options (including many free apps) to improve production and visibility.

7. Control Spending An Admin monitors the current number of active salesforce users compared to total licenses purchased, to ensure your company is not paying for any additional unnecessary licenses.

As you can see, there are a number of ways Salesforce Admins contribute directly to revenue production and cost-savings. Hopefully the above may have triggered some ideas to use within your own organization. To hear how companies in your particular industry are leveraging their Admins, feel free to contact us to learn more.

The Monday night gala was excellent though featuring Foo Fighters live and an open bar. The buffet and assortment of desserts was also delightful especially if you like chocolate. If you weren’t aware, Journey was supposed to play Dreamforce instead of Foo Fighters but for some reason ended up canceling. Lots of people were bummed out but Foo put on a great show regardless!

Something else that I noticed was the plastic badge holders you got once registering. Very nice and professional-looking. In fact, the whole registration process is automated (you check in via their laptops) it makes things quite easy and painless. Times have sure changed and for the better. The only thing I didn’t like was the size and placement of your last name and company. The font was too small so I had trouble reading other people’s company names when speaking with them. Such a minor thing but important when trying to network and read names.

I also noticed the Salesforce.com employees had retractable badge reels for their company badges which I wish my company had. It’s much easier than having to unclip your badge each time you had to scan in. Just another minor observation. I’m not sure which company they used to purchase their badges or reels, but I found one called ID Superstore online and they sell all sorts of things related to plastic ID card printers. It’s important to look professional and this site appears to have good products.

In summary, Dreamforce was a great learning experience and a chance to network with other Salesforce.com users. Admission is a bit expensive but if your company will cover you, it’s well worth the trip. See you next year!

Some call center products are bundled with these tools but most are weak or non-existent. This is where a dedicated solution that provides things like individual customer scorecards, detailed support metrics, and other key metrics that give managers needed insight into their call center team. As we learn more about these requirements and business needs, we start to notice companies like call-center-metrics.com pop up to fulfill these business needs.

Being a call center manager, it’s very important to understand overall customer service efficiency so you can improve your internal operations as well as reward your employees based on their performance. Say, for example one of your call center employees does a great job and you’re unaware of this deed. A post call survey for the customer would be able to provide an opportunity to give this feedback, hence later rewarding the employee.

All things set aside, call center metrics are very important and a necessity in all businesses. If you don’t have anything currently in place, I recommend checking out these trial versions and seeing for yourself. I personally haven’t used them yet but based on what I’ve read thus far, they could be a great solution for you.

If you have any other suggestions or comments about general call center metrics and how you currently measure them, please let us know!

AIMpromote is an on-demand web-based software application to manage the handling of sales leads. It is essentially a CRM, but is focused particularly on handling leads. There is also the ability to sell leads (lead aggregation business). AIMpromote takes a different approach and focuses more on lead management which for some, is plenty. If you check out their crm features, you’ll see most of them are in the sales lead management section which is great when it comes to lead management.

I have yet to sign-up for their trial but when it comes to sales management software, I’d consider evaluating AIMpromote along with other traditional players. Since they are relatively new and they don’t mention the price on their website, I’d first give them a call to find out more details. Based on the screenshots and feature page, it’s hard to decide if it’s worth the investment without knowing more information. Regardless, for a pure lead management solution they might be the exact solution you’re looking for.