Killer sales teams know how to collaborate
By: Siân Hunter
Tags: Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Teamwork, Sales, Remote Working

Collaboration has been tough this year. Working remotely can make you feel separated from your colleagues and your visibility of what’s going on in your team can feel restricted. With teams that deal directly with customers, such as sales teams, this can cause customer interactions to feel a little out of whack.

Collaboration is critical to sales

According to Salesforce’s State of Sales report, 77% of sales teams rate collaboration across departments as critical or very important to the sales process. Customers increasingly expect salespeople to be informed about their previous interactions with a business, even if this was with a different department. Having complete visibility of a customer’s journey within the company is crucial when you’re trying to understand their needs and how you can help them.

When colleagues across departments work together, there is more opportunity to discover new opportunities. Sales and customer service teams securely sharing information with each other can help them to work more effectively. Documenting customer interactions within a CRM such as Salesforce gives everyone with access to a customer account visibility over how well an account is performing, and understand the status of the relationship with the customer.

Accurately record customer interactions

Documenting customer interactions is no mean feat. But there are tools that can help. What if you had a solution that captured every single customer call, even on mobile devices, or over an IP connection? What if those calls were fully transcribed for an accurate record of exactly what was said?

Where traditional call recording solutions rely on expensive on-premise storage, and only capture a small fraction of calls made across a business. Unified Call Recording captures voice conversations directly from the service provider network, and from communication solutions such as Microsoft Teams. Companies who are looking for complete visibility across their business need agile communication solutions that fit with remote working practices.

Prioritising data security

Collaboration should not compromise data security. It is crucial that customer information is not shared with more parties than necessary, and businesses should look for a solution that allows for secure sharing of data. Audio files should not be downloaded, as this could allow the data to be shared with more than the intended parties. Sharing should be via expiring links, where possible — meaning that only the intended user can access a recording for a restricted time period and a limit on the number of playbacks.

Organisations should also implement teams with specific access permissions. Depending on the requirements of the team, recordings may only be accessed by supervisors with administrator controls, or may be securely shared with other team members for greater visibility over customer interactions.

Case study: APAC-Central

APAC-Central, Inc. supplies materials, paving and construction services across Northwest Arkansas, the Arkansas River Valley, Oklahoma and Southwestern Missouri. We spoke to their IT systems analyst Dustin Bowden about how Dubber has facilitated collaboration across the business.

Dubber: What was the challenge that brought you to choosing Dubber?

Dustin Bowden: We wanted a call recording solution that was compatible with our new phone system to ensure our customers are billed correctly.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

DB: The Dubber solution gives us the ability to error check ourselves after taking an order. If a dispatcher gets a call and then can’t remember a detail when inputting the order, they can just check the recording rather than calling the customer back. The team like that they have the ability to share recordings as well as being able to set up teams. This means they can reference each other’s recordings when talking to a customer who has previously spoken to a different representative.

D: What was the process of going live with Dubber like?

DB: I have received great customer service. Paul has been very helpful with everything we needed to get up and going. The Dubber system is easy to use and our users like it better than what we used on our old phone system. It fits seamlessly with our phone systems: it just works, and works well.

A version of this post was published over on the Dubber blog.