businessinfomag.uk magazine 14 CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT Emotion is a powerful force in business, helping to secure opportunities and motivate teams. Without emotion, there is no trust – and trust is the foundation of business, both internally between teams and externally across companies. In a challenging economic environment, emotion has never been more vital for companies wanting to establish meaningful relationships with their customers. In our new global report, The Voice of SMBs 2024, more than half (54%) of organisations stated that the biggest growth-driver in 2024 would be increasing connections and relationships with customers. This was the top growth-driver across every region surveyed (North America, Australia, France, Germany, Spain and the UK). Almost half (46%) of UK employees surveyed said that meaningful conversations and connections with customers were only becoming more important. Despite the value of such interactions, our own AI Index report, released last May, shows that teams are spending just 4.2 hours per week on meaningful interactions with customers, leaving businesses with limited means of cultivating emotion in their customer engagements. For SMBs, the challenge is to identify and address inefficiencies and use any time clawed back to Show some emotion develop a competitive advantage out of more meaningful conversations. But in a world where resources favour bigger organisations, how can they do this? The answer, in short, is technology, specifically using technology to restore the lost art of meaningful conversation. Building relationships As a specialist lender for SME property developers across the UK, CrowdProperty has always placed a high value on the human voice. From that initial conversation through to the acceptance of an offer, it regards phone calls as essential for building relationships with customers, understanding their needs and finding solutions. To help it achieve these goals, it uses Aircall’s customer communication and engagement platform, an entirely cloud-based voice solution designed specifically for sales and customer support teams and integration with CRMs and other business tools. Aircall enables CrowdProperty to work more efficiently and provide a better customer service, for example by following up all leads within 30 minutes, by saving five minutes per call through better designed processes, and by improving the team’s call answer rate. With Aircall’s bird’s-eye view of caller and customer activity showing that calls were going unanswered from as early as 8am, James Mensforth, Sales Director UK&I at Aircall, the customer communication and engagement platform, discusses the role of emotion and human connection in business CrowdProperty adapted its working hours accordingly and in the process boosted its call answer rate from 60% to 97%. AI efficiency Last year, Aircall gave SMEs even more scope to make efficiency gains by introducing new AI features designed to reduce the workload of sales and support teams, including call transcription, call summaries, key topics and advanced analytics e.g. talk-to-listen ratios. Such data is valuable not just for coaching purposes but also for identifying the ingredients of successful calls that can then form the basis of playbooks and development programmes. Used in this way, AI can empower customer-facing teams to get their time back, build stronger customer relationships and human connections and restore emotion to the sales function. In last year’s AI Index, two thirds of respondents said they expected AI to improve customer service and support (68%) and contribute to greater sales performance/revenue growth (65%). Particularly for SMBs, data-driven decision-making and innovative technologies hold the keys to competitive advantage through increased efficiency that will give customer-facing teams more scope to create the human connections that they and their customers crave. https://aircall.io/ The Voice of SMBs 2024 Actionable global growth insights for customer-facing teams Key findings: Voice of SMBs 2024 Global Report n UK businesses (66%) are more optimistic about growth next year than their European counterparts – with France and Germany 10% lower. n 75% of UK SMBs say their main focus next year will be customer satisfaction – higher than the global average of 72%. n Globally, 61% of businesses say they are prioritising customer experiences above growth in 2024. n 46% of UK employees believe that meaningful connections with customers are becoming more important. These are seen as the top growth driver in every region. n Less than half (45%) of UK SMBs say AI-supported tools will help drive customer satisfaction in the year ahead (the lowest rate out of all countries surveyed, other than France with 39%). n 40% of UK SMBs have included upskilling, training or coaching as part of their growth strategies, far higher than the global average of 32%. James Mensforth
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