There are a Tsunami of applications floating in the cloud available and waiting to be connected to your customer tech stack. (wait...can you have a Tsunami in a cloud? Perhaps it's a thunderstorm?)
However, we usually firmly advise our clients against creating a Frankenstein's monster of applications from many different firms, connected via less-than-perfect APIs or via expensive custom code. Many providers have acquired technology to build into their own product stack rather than build it from scratch, which is simply putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
So we have seen the powerful benefits of one unified codebase across your customer stack It's clearly the preferred solution. It creates a great deal less friction in your business. You spend less time doing your work. You learn a single user interface. Less things go wrong or stop working. The connections between software providers don't fail. The end result is significantly better and faster ROI.
That's the reason we have stuck with HubSpot for over ten years. It's been built organically from one single codebase. We've known it's the best customer tech stack out there and now it seems users agree, ranking HubSpot as the #1 CRM, according to G2.
So it's a rare occurrence for us to become a partner for a new technology firm. However, that's exactly what we have done! We are very excited to become an Aircall partner. Aircall provide an all in one cloud based phone system that fully integrates with HubSpot.
It seems HubSpot themselves agree, they were sufficiently impressed they have taken a significant stake in the Aircall business - Here is the announcement.
Why did we decide to add a cloud based telephony solution to our portfolio?
We firmly believe having a cloud based telephony solution that integrates seamlessly with your CRM is a key foundation stone of a successful customer technology stack.
Increasingly we hear about the friction caused by disparate, partially functioning, unconnected customer facing applications. Time is being wasted, customer satisfaction is worse, close rates are lower. Managers can't see what is going on with their teams and are struggling to coach the gaps. As a result remote and/or digital centric work can lead to worse outcomes for the customer.
"You simply cannot outrun poor retention"
At the same time more and more businesses are turning to "as-a-service" business models (or were always that way) and the focus on keeping and growing your existing customer base is increasing. You simply cannot outrun poor retention. So we are seeing more and more businesses invest in the retention phase of the customer lifecycle. Authentic relationships between provider and customer become more important than ever.
The business problems it helps to solve
- Clear obstacles and friction from the daily roles of their team so they can focus on converting sales or taking service calls
- Create as much efficiency in workflows as possible to support higher volumes of calls
- Supporting their team to achieve or beat their targets & be rewarded
The challenges these managers were experiencing were:
- Lacking visibility of sales rep and agent productivity, especially in a remote or partially remote working world.
- Unreliability of phone solution; outages or bugs that impact usage.
- Having to go to IT every time they have problem with the phone.
- Managing their teams’ workload, especially when they have to spend loads of time on after-call work, manually entering data into the CRM.
- High employee turnover, and having to onboard and train new team members.
What capabilities should you look for?
- Is it easy to setup?
- Does it Integrate with existing business tools & have the potential to grow with you?
- Is it easy to scale and train new team members?
- Can you monitor productivity and performance through analytics and reporting?
- Can you coach and provide feedback both in real time and through call recordings?
- Does it have the ability to support high volumes of outbound calls?
What we loved about the Aircall solution:
- It's extremely easy and fast to set up for both the users and administrators
- It's more affordable than many comparable solutions
- Easy for managers to see call activity and to collect and analyse call activity data.
- Aircall is fully integrated with HubSpot's CRM, sales and service hubs (this is HUGE!)
- Upload your contacts, pick a number from your HubSpot CRM and click to dial. All calls logged in the HubSpot CRM
So what are your next steps?
If you are curious enough to set up a free trial, use this link. It will take you to the Aircall site.
But If you're not ready yet and would like to read around the subject a bit more first here is a good short read.
Of course if you like to talk through your challenges feel free to contact us or set up a time that works for you here. We'd be happy to chat through your current challenges and objectives.