The 2014 CRM Service Elite
3CLogic Helps Home Buyers Gain Financial Footing
By integrating an automatic dialer with its existing CRM system, Rising Point Solutions dials up sales success
The mortgage crisis of 2008 left an unprecedented number of homeowners with bad credit. Many are bouncing back, but bad credit scores may still haunt them. Rising Point Solutions works with realtors and mortgage lenders to find these consumers and help them come up with solutions to their credit problems.
The Texas-based company has undergone significant growth over the past year. Upgrading its technical solutions has helped it to harness that growth, turning more leads into sales and nurturing its relationships with customers. First came the implementation of InfusionSoft, a CRM system that handles all client information and emails. For voice communications, the company selected 3CLogic, implementing the solution in April 2013. The automatic dialer was "the only one that would solely integrate with InfusionSoft without a lot of third-party programming duct-taping it together," says Tyler Wagley, regional manager for Rising Point Solutions.
3CLogic helps guide a salesperson's day, while keeping track of all of his calling activities so the telemarketer or relationship manager doesn't have to waste time logging phone transactions. "We use it every day all day long," says Allyson Edmonds, assistant manager at Rising Point. "I personally work with over 3,000 partners, and I couldn't do my job without InfusionSoft and 3CLogic." Because it is hosted in the cloud by Amazon Web services, 3C Logic is extremely dependable, with 99.95 percent uptime reliability.
In the first five months after implementation, Rising Point received more than 400 customer referrals. Almost a year after implementation, the pace has multiplied. "We do that in just a month or so now," Wagley estimates. Referrals went up 337 percent year-over-year in 2013, with sales increasing by 398 percent from the previous year, before the InfusionSoft and 3CLogic installations.
"A big problem with salespeople is they spend ninety-nine percent of their day figuring out who to call," Wagley says. To address that issue, InfusionSoft generates a list of clients that need to be followed up with on a particular day. If a batch of emails was just sent out through InfusionSoft, for example, the CRM system will send the contact information for the campaign to the 3CLogic dialer. The representative can then run through a list of people who need to be contacted using 3CLogic's mass dialing capabilities.
When an employee makes a call, 3CLogic will automatically pull up all the information in InfusionSoft and let the rep know what she is following up on. At the end of the call, that information gets pulled back into the system. "Whenever you have a result code in the dialer, like someone's interested, it puts a note into InfusionSoft automatically. We have a tag assigned to each result code, so it automatically puts it in the right campaign," Wagley says. The time-saving aspect was embraced by the staff. "You don't have to go back at the end of the day and put in notes. No other dialer really does that," he adds.
If a relationship manager doesn't reach a client, 3CLogic will pull in a prerecorded voicemail specific to the campaign. That means clients receive more tailored messages while the speaking voices of employees stay intact. "When you're making 150 calls a day, your voicemails are going to sound horrible by the end of the day. With standardized voicemails, you sound like it's your first call every call," Wagley notes.
The standardized voicemails also save time. 3CLogic will start dialing the next call as it's leaving a voicemail. At the same time, it will trigger an action within InfusionSoft, so the client will receive an email with the same information received in the voicemail. "It's a double touch every time," Edmonds says. The automated voicemails are one reason Rising Point Solutions saw average call volume increase from 60 per day to 200 per day after adding 3CLogic.
3CLogic's pricing structure allows customers to add or remove seats as needed, which has enabled Rising Point Solutions to hire more staff to keep pace with increasing leads. Such flexibility makes it easier for Wagley to scale up operations while minimizing risk.
With 3CLogic, salespeople spend more time on the phone with customers and less time on nonsales-related activities, opening up the staff's bandwidth. "We have significantly grown this year because of this integration," Wagley says of the synergy between 3CLogic and InfusionSoft. "I don't have to manage all these people. It does it for me."
Since implementing the automatic dialers from 3CLogic, Rising Point Solutions has seen:
- sales quadruple from 2012 to 2013;
- referrals go up 337 percent from 2012 to 2013;
- call volume increase to 200 calls per day from 60; and
- sales representatives enjoy 99.95 percent uptimes.
Get Satisfaction Lends a Hand to Booming Business
Online video service Ustream turned to the social community manager to help navigate a heavy customer load
Crowned the Guinness world record holder for the "Most Content Ingested by an Online Video Service" in June 2011, online video broadcast provider Ustream is no stranger to viral content. When Ustream set its record, the company had logged 37.05 million hours of content at 70.5 hours per minute—in comparison, YouTube was averaging about 48 hours per minute during the same time. As Ustream grew to host more than 60 million visitors per month, managing the volume of support tickets associated with this massive traffic became a challenge. The company turned to Get Satisfaction for a solution.
Ustream boasts more than 15 million registered users, ranging from NASA and the Library of Congress to some of Hollywood's biggest names—and the list is growing. The company needed to implement a customer support system that would rely primarily on self-service support supplemented by agents, rather than on agents alone.
"We were drowning in support tickets," Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable told CRM in February 2013. Before the company deployed Get Satisfaction's solution, Ustream customers in need of assistance were advised to contact the company directly, either through email or by filling out an online form. "This required individuals [at Ustream] to respond and...we couldn't get to them all," Hunstable said. After building a social support community with Get Satisfaction about a year and a half ago, however, the problem quickly became a thing of the past.
Get Satisfaction manages more than 70,000 social communities for a variety of companies and designed a support forum for Ustream and all 11 of the company's products. The support community enables customers to communicate with each other as well as with employees, according to Scott Hirsch, vice president of product and content marketing at Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction's tool also optimizes content for search engines, enables direct messaging and private conversations, and offers integrations with different CRM tools, including Salesforce.com.
Get Satisfaction's community tool lets Ustream users ask questions, share ideas, report a problem, or give praise. It also has other capabilities, including trend spotting. In April 2013, about 25,600 people were using the community to generate roughly 12,000 posts. By January 2014, however, those numbers jumped to 32,000 and 14,600, representing increases of 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively.
Users can rely on the vast database of troubleshooting content to pull up material relevant to their question, Hunstable explained.
"By providing a means for customers to troubleshoot their problems on their own or with the help of fellow users, [Get Satisfaction] slashed the number of support tickets Ustream received by over fifty-five percent," Hirsch says.
Though the community has made Ustream users more self-sufficient when it comes to support, the company still encourages them to submit a support ticket if their questions remain unanswered. Customers with free accounts can file their ticket online, but paying customers might be privileged to more personal support, such as a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, or online support from Hunstable himself.
Implementing Get Satisfaction's solution was straightforward, according to Hunstable. Ustream started with a gradual introduction and took time to train its employees and ensure "full exposure across the whole company," but once Ustream was ready for its full rollout, "we were up and running in about a week," he said. As employees got more comfortable with the new technology, they were encouraged to participate in the community and contribute articles that address potential problems before customers notice them, or troubleshoot common issues. Even with a commitment to employee involvement, Ustream hasn't had to add any staff. "We're just being so much more efficient now," Hunstable said.
Ustream hopes to expand its social communities by creating separate groups for broadcasters and viewers. The company also hopes to eventually set up subgroups to sort similar types of users by shared interests and create better pathways to content for its growing number of customers.
As of January 2014, Ustream and Get Satisfaction's efforts have been paying off. Not only have the numbers of community users and posts grown significantly overall, but the community also sees about 10,000 regular monthly visits and a revisit rate of 15 percent. "Customers are happy with the service and support this community is delivering," Hirsch says, "and over fifteen percent of customers are returning to get more value."
The social community and customer engagement platform that Ustream started with Get Satisfaction has:
- grown the company's user base to more than 32,000, with 10,000 regular monthly visitors;
- generated more than 14,600 posts;
- decreased the number of trouble tickets by 55 percent; and
- delivered a 15 percent revisit rate.