Tag Archive for: data entry

Data Entry Outsourcing Explained

Outsourcing administrative tasks, such as data entry for CRM, is a common strategy to boost company performance. It reallocates the time that CRM users would otherwise have spent on manual data entry, and is a great way for employees to focus on core business tasks such as prospecting, selling, and attending to customer concerns.

If you are planning to outsource your data entry tasks, or you already are, or you’re simply planning to learn more about it, keep reading.

What is Data Entry Outsourcing?

Data Entry Outsourcing is the system of hiring skilled data entry professionals, or some other entity, to handle your company’s data. The people hired are commonly under an outsourcing provider or vendor which facilitates and acts as a middle man between the client and the data entry professionals. Going through a vendor is often cheaper, and more convenient than hiring people yourself.

Additionally, it’s good to note that most data entry professionals hired by vendors are people from English proficient countries outside of the United States, like India, Ukraine, and the Philippines. They are often highly trained and some of them are even required to have high typing speeds upon starting the job.

Why do companies choose to outsource data entry jobs?

Many companies outsource for various reasons. A survey by Deolitte shows us that companies are motivated to outsource due to these factors:

  • Reduced Costs (59%) – Outsourcing helps cut down costs, and increase revenue over time.
  • Focus on Core Business activities (57%) – It takes away tedious manual data entry tasks from your CRM users’ hands and allows them to focus on productive work.
  • Improved service (31%) – Data entry outsourcing is known to produce outputs with better data accuracy due to their high level of data entry service standards and training. This results in your in-house team serving your customers better.

Will your company benefit from data entry outsourcing?

Know and Assess your Business needs

Before anything, thoroughly assess the needs of your company. Know which areas of operation your company is weak at, gather statistical data, and decide whether it should be outsourced. Determine it should be outsourced either partially, or fully. Lastly, based on the company’s current standing, weigh in whether outsourcing will bring more benefits than risks, and if it is indeed the best solution.

Identify the specific services and requirements you will need from the Outsourcing Company

Narrow down the specific services that your company needs from an outsourcing company. This is where you expound on the idea of hiring a data entry service provider. Determine your requirements in terms of:

  • Budget and Costs
  • Technology
  • Turnaround Time
  • Scale and amount of tasks to be outsourced
  • Customer Support
  • Employees under the vendor
  • Privacy, Security and Compliance
  • Reputation
  • Scalability

Calculate the Return of Investment

Have an idea of how much your company can save, or earn, through outsourcing. Remember that you are outsourcing to cut on expenses, and increase efficiency, so calculating the potential ROI is essential. After assessing your company’s needs, you should already have an idea or an estimate of the costs. Also, calculate and compare how much it would cost to have your own team do the data entry tasks versus how much it would be to outsource them.

Conclusion

Data entry outsourcing can be a reliable course of action take if you believe your company will benefit from the extra time you buy back your employees to become from productive yielding in more sales and profit altogether.

 

Social CRM – New way of mining data

Social media has become the Holy Grail for the modern business. Nearly every company, established or startup, has 3 billion reasons to hedge its marketing efforts on social media. Social media usage has been surging, and there seems to be no bucking this trend. Data tracked in the past 10 years shows that usage has grown steadily by an average of 300 million users per year. From 970 million users in 2010, the figure has ballooned to a staggering 2.97 billion in 2020.

Tying in your CRM with Social Media

Gaining market insight is easier now than any other time in history. Technological innovations in data mining and analysis coupled with the transparency provided by social media have brought about this “golden age” of marketing insight. It is no surprise, therefore, that businesses are moving towards this trend in leveraging marketing campaigns and product development; resulting in more efficient business processes. It is no different on the CRM front.

Having permeated society in general, traditional CRM systems have morphed into Social CRM – systems that integrate social media platforms into their systems; think of it as CRM on steroids. Whereas before, it mainly tracked customer names, phone numbers, emails and such, today’s turbocharged CRM systems incorporate potential customers’ social media data into the mix. Integrating social media into data mining thus create more value that would correlate data to gain more insights to closing a sale.

Gathering Intelligent Data

Hubspot has developed specific functionality for social media integration. Social media lead intelligence automatically links Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to a company’s leads category. Data mining has never been more people centric than it is nowadays. Clicks, shares, schools attended, current jobs, previous jobs are just some of the information that can be greatly taken into account from social. This greatly benefits sales people, as they can learn about potential customers interests and challenges quickly, and without having to devote additional time into research. This definitely adds value to the data entered to your CRM.

They also included a feature that creates social media follow and share buttons on all marketing content. This helps in growing their audience, reach and leads. The last feature may sound trivial, but automatically adding a follow or share button, without IT intervention, greatly increases efficiency and was virtually unthinkable before. An automatically placed share or follow button is an added effort to increase presence – effortlessly.

Social media has become as ubiquitous as television, and is slowly becoming the go-to platform for advertisers and marketers alike. Having a solid CRM that leverages on this huge audience will prove to be a worthwhile investment. If you are still the exception to the rule, it’s high time to consider the tremendous benefits and jump over to the greener side of the fence.

The Information Gold Rush

When you hear the word “mining”, the mind often conjures images of people in hard hats and carts filled with ore under a hot dimly-lit mine. It’s a cumbersome, yet rewarding process that involves a lot of digging and sifting, and digging, and extracting and dig… – you get the picture. Data mining shares a lot of similarities, but instead of tunneling through a mountain or burrowing beneath the ground, analysts excavate and examine heaps of information stored in data warehouses and process it into meaningful reports for the end-user, like sales teams and managers.

The Process: A Quick Run-Through

Data mining starts with identifying data source. Let’s take your CRM database as an example. The information is housed in a data warehouse, which could be a local server or a cloud-based solution. This raw data is then organized and run for analysis to search for different patterns like purchasing behavior, web searches, social media interactions and so forth. The output is refined through a series of rule revisions and data queries – similar to processing ore in traditional mining – until the data analyst uncovers the outcome he is looking for. From there, the sales team or managers can formulate a plan of action based on the interpretation of the findings.

Get with the program

So you want to integrate data mining into your system. It’s not as difficult as it may seem. You need not look any further than your current CRM. Most popular CRM packages offer data mining add-ons or may have third party solutions already developed for it. You may be pleasantly surprised that the feature you’ve been wanting to add existed all along, right under the hood of your current system.  Hubspot is a perfect CRM system that enables you to perform data mining capabilities with partners that are quite experienced and capable. With evolving  This ensures that your system grows in tandem with the needs of your business, so you wouldn’t need to make a drastic shift to another platform.

Conclusion

When implemented correctly, data mining capabilities can effectively move your business forward to the next level. That is why covering all the bases with a solid program is the next logical step to any growing operation. The insight gained from data mining can be tremendous for your business. It can save you money on costs, increase your ROI, and most importantly, keep those smiles stuck on your customers faces. After all, a deep knowledge of your client base will do your business no harm – you just have to keep on digging.

The Value of Proper CRM Data Entry

Whether you are in the business of selling a product or offering a service, customer relations play a vital part to its success or failure. Installing a CRM system can do a lot for your business. It can generate organized data sets for analysis and customer insights, provide easy access to client contact information and automate processes related to sales, marketing and customer support – with one caveat. It needs to be filled with reliable data.

The state of data collection

Modern technology coupled with the Internet has given rise to new communication channels, resulting in an exponential increase to the amount of information that your sales team has to track. This means more data to encode and additional time spent on administrative tasks. On the average, a sales agent consumes 4 hours a week just to input his information into the system.

Free them from this tedious task – they’ll thank you for it. Implement a CRM data entry service – not only does this give them more time to sell, but it also makes for happier agents. But don’t just settle for any data entry service, practice due diligence and choose a provider that is fast, accurate and knows the workings of a CRM system.

Knowing is half the battle

It is worth noting that CRM data entry is different from normal data entry, in that it curtails a significant amount of analysis before the actual input occurs. Containing numerous data fields, these systems need precise data input for optimal operation. This is where a thorough understanding of CRM systems comes into play. Speed and accuracy is nice to have, but it takes a significant hit when it lacks familiarity with a certain system. The quality of data suffers and you may not get the desired results or any meaningful insight about your clients. In the end, managers and agents blame the system, when in reality, the fault lies with inferior data entry. As managers, practice due diligence in choosing the right data entry service to implement. This will save you a great deal in time and money down the line.

Realize. Specialize.

Hey DAN is a Voice to CRM service that utilizes a unique combination of intelligence and technology to achieve efficient and accurate data captures. It understands the inner workings of multiple systems – it not only inputs information with speed and accuracy, it also does this meaningfully – allowing for rich, accurate data sets and makes significant customer insights possible.

Final thoughts

A CRM system is not a magic bullet – it doesn’t guarantee an increase in sales performance. To get the most out of these systems, you need to constantly nurture it with applicable information. Incorporating a specialized CRM data entry service ensures fast, accurate and relevant data captures that greatly adds to the value of your data warehouse and client servicing.

The Biggest Challenges Faced by Sales Teams and How to Solve Them

Any business will tell you that the very hard working heart of any successful business venture is the sales team. These, after all, are the frontliners who sortie out into the world to convert interested parties into buying parties. That being said, it’s also one of the most challenging teams anyone can ever be on. Is it any wonder why they have the highest attrition rates of any team in any business?

Key to keeping your sales team happy is to ensure that they have the right tools to get the job done. In order to figure out exactly what they need, you need to understand the challenges that they face. Here are the biggest challenges faced by any sales team—and how you should work to solve them.

Accurate Data Capture

One of the key tasks undertaken by any sales team is lead generation. While social media and email have made this relatively easy to do online, many still swear by the traditional way of doing things: going out there and talking to people. The key to success in any such foray is the ability to accurately capture the details of the person you’re talking to. While simple note taking is often enough for one on one contacts, it can get tedious when there are many potential leads and not enough time.

Many have turned to simple voice recording to get the detail captured easily, you still have to transcribe things later on. This isn’t ideal if you want your sales team to be agile and on their feet. A better solution that’s also quite modern is voice to CRM. This kind of solution takes transcription to a whole new level and allows for integration into a database that is readily managed. This leaves your sales team free to focus on generating quality leads.

Inventory Update

Another aspect of sales that many consider to be very tedious is the management of inventory. The problems are of the same level of intensity whether or not the sales are done online or in person. After all, sales can be a fast and fluid affair at the hands of a skilled salesperson. But this doesn’t excuse the need to be able to accurately manage stock and inventory levels. This is a lot tougher than most people imagine even with a fully equipped sales team. Errors can arise from exhaustion or human factors.

Voice to CRM is again an ideal solution here given that advances in technology have allowed for clearer identification of what’s being said at any given time. Of course, in this application, there’s a need to integrate with those responsible for managing your high value data. The solution then is to go for a provider who can deliver both accuracy and effective integration. This way, the software can capture and record information regarding each sale as it happens.

Administrative Tasks

A final challenge that actually seems at first like a mere inconvenience is the handling of administrative tasks. These include the aforementioned entry of data gathered whether they are from leads or actual sales. They can also include, however, the creation of relevant reports and even management of scheduling. The difficulty here is usually compounded by the need to navigate through a CRM.

Again, if you aren’t leveraging newer voice to CRM technology, you’re potentially losing out on over 60% of productivity that can otherwise go to sales. With an effective solutions provider, you can allow your sales team to essentially do all these things as they talk the talk and walk the walk—with less chance for accuracy and recall errors down the line.

Sales Performance Management

One area where voice-to-CRM truly shines, however, is in sales performance management. The biggest hindrance, after all, to this key component of ensuring that you have a top notch sales is not being able to keep tabs on the key performance indicators of your team. Now, in order for that to happen in a very efficient and effective way, you need to capture data very quickly and with as little error as possible.

This is where leveraging voice-to-CRM gets tricky. You need to ensure that the provider you’re getting has a reliable means to bridge between the data gathering point and your CRM as well as ensure a high degree of accuracy when it comes to sorting the data. Thankfully, this is something that you can ensure with a comprehensive demo call. So, if you’re offered one for free, it’s well worth it to try.

Remember, though that the key is partnering with a reliable provider of modern voice to CRM services. Be very discerning in your choice so you can be sure that you’re getting your money’s worth. A good way to work this out is to sit down with them to talk about the challenges that you yourself have observed. The right provider will steer the conversation towards finding the best solutions for you.