How to improve customer experience by aligning sales and support

80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of its existing customers. (Gartner)

That’s a lot, isn’t it? It puts the pressure on teams directly involved with your customers, namely, sales and support. While sales hustle to upsell bigger deals, support needs to make sure that every customer remains a happy customer.

But often, sales and support are at odds. There’s a chance that in pursuit of closing a deal, sales may overpromise on the product capabilities. When the disgruntled customer raises this as an issue, the support agents have to bear the bad news. On the other hand, support may be dealing with an overload of tickets and may miss out on answering a few which turn out to be of high priority.

This misalignment can be easily solved by introducing the right tools. Sales executives can add notes of each use case and product solution in the right record using a sales CRM. And support agents can have more insights into support tickets using a helpdesk tool.

However, if the tools used by the teams aren’t integrated, they end up working with partial or incomplete data. The sales team does not have insights into customer queries and end up contacting customers for upsell opportunities, without knowing that they’re still waiting for an issue to be resolved. The support team tries to answer each ticket as fast as possible without enough context on who the customer is; sometimes, important customers wait while the team handles low priority tickets. This disconnect in information leads to delayed responses and affects your customer experience.

To bridge this gap, you need to bring your helpdesk and CRM together. With the Freshdesk-Freshsales integration, you don’t have to work with siloed data. Sales and support teams get a 360-degree view of customer queries and extended customer information, in one place.

  • View data within an ecosystem

With the two-way data sync, support agents can gather information about the lead or customer from Freshsales and view it within the ticket on Freshdesk. As they move from one ticket to another, support agents can have complete context on who they’re talking to. For each ticket, view contact information like plan details, account owner, and any previous tickets raised.

View Freshsales information in Freshdesk

Similarly, sales reps can view open support tickets in the lead or contact profile. To do this, all they need to do is visit the lead profile and click on the Freshdesk icon. All available tickets are displayed here and the sales rep can view more information by clicking on the ticket.

  • Identify the right time to upsell

The sales process doesn’t end when you close a deal. You must nurture customer relationships for the long term and increase their trust in your organization. This helps open doors for upsell and cross-sell opportunities. For salespeople, upselling to a customer is just as important as winning new deals. In fact, many companies attribute 28% of revenue to upsell. But before they explore an upsell opportunity with a customer, they need to make sure that the customer is satisfied with the product.

Salespeople can view existing and previous support tickets across all modules—leads, contacts, accounts, and deals. This helps them understand if the customer has raised any major concerns or feature requests. With the ability to add private notes, both teams can inform each other of important pointers that will assist in taking the conversation forward.

Add private notes to tickets

  • Bring together data from both tools for combined insights

Without a deep-knit real-time integration, the data residing in your CRM and help desk are siloed. This could potentially lead to loss of insights and dampen the customer support experience. Say, a customer upgraded from the non-paid plan to a paid plan. The salesperson would have to send emails back and forth to keep the right support agent in the loop.

With the real-time sync between Freshdesk and Freshsales, sales reps and support agents are on the same page, without the added effort. Any update made to a ticket on Freshdesk is updated on Freshsales and is available for the salesperson to view. Additionally, when there’s a high inflow of support tickets, support agents can prioritize tickets based on the plan value.

  • Create leads from support tickets

A lead visiting the business website may have questions that need to be answered and may contact the support team. These website visitors are potential leads that now reside within the helpdesk. Support reps can answer their queries and create them as leads or contacts from Freshdesk. Using territory management in Freshsales, these leads can be auto-assigned to the right sales rep. Each time a lead is assigned, the salesperson receives a notification in Freshsales and they can view information about the lead, along with the resolved ticket.

Convert ticket into lead

Break down data silos with the Freshdesk-Freshsales integration

When you integrate your helpdesk and CRM, you bring your customer data into one place. With the Freshdesk-Freshsales integration, set up your sales and support teams for success. Leverage the real-time data sync to couple insights from both tools and understand how to improve customer experience.

Here’s how OmniPACS is supercharging their business with the Freshdesk-Freshsales integration:

When existing customers come back with queries, OmniPACS manages it with a Freshsales-Freshdesk integration. Jordan tells us that the Freshdesk support software has become an integral part of tracking more advanced user requests or technical issues with other systems that its solution interacts with.

Want to get started with Freshdesk-Freshsales integration? Here’s how you can do it.

Watch our webinar where we talk about how to enhance customer experience with sales and support alignment.

Cover illustration by Ashna Liza Sunny