June 24, 2016
By David Myron, Editorial Director, CRM and Speech Technology magazines and SmartCustomerService.com

Bullhorn Unearths Hidden Value in Email Interactions [Video Interview]

One of the original value propositions of CRM systems was that by storing customer data in a centralized system, sales, marketing, and customer service reps would have a unified view of updated customer information. While this investment has proved to be valuable for organizations, there's still a lot of knowledge that isn't making its way into CRM systems. Much of this information resides in email and phone interactions with prospects and clients.

Vinda Souza, director of marketing communications at Bullhorn, spoke with David Myron, CRM's editorial director, at the 2016 CRM Evolution conference in Washington D.C. to talk about the need for organizations to "eliminate the siloes." She claims businesses need to automatically gain access to hidden information inside of email, phone conversations, and text messages and share relevant insight with key people inside the enterprise.

David Myron: From…your clients' perspective, what are the pain points they're experiencing now?

Vinda Souza: The number one problem that we're seeing, as far as the salespeople within our prospect and customer organizations and the challenges they face, is that they're losing knowledge when their best reps leave the business. They're losing knowledge, and then the new reps starting don't have that level of knowledge and insight into where an account stands. Whether that's from people churning from employee turnover, or whether it's simply from diverse siloes of information residing…between departments, the bottom line is there are barriers and walls to collaboration. And only through open collaboration can you get the best sense of customer health at any given moment.

So, if you think about it, you are trying to sell me a product or service. You are scheduled to meet me for coffee in a couple of hours. How do you get information on me? You go into your CRM system, you look up my contact record, you see my address, my phone number…maybe a few notes that someone's added in before. You don't know how accurate those notes are. You don't know how complete that information is. You have no sense of who I am as a person. You can't actually create a meaningful connection with me, because you don't have enough information to determine my identity beyond a simple, tangential record.

What we're trying to do right now is eliminate the siloes. The best way to create meaningful connections with key stakeholders is to destroy the walls. Now, if you think about within a corporation what signifies the most obvious wall, it's email. Email is a closed-off system, and it has, especially at recent points, become even more siloed in that it's a locked-down mechanism of communication. It's not like a conversation, which is free-flowing and in the ether. Email has walls.

So, you may talk about the idea of living an open concept life and having free collaboration between colleagues, [but] the bottom line is you would never look at your colleagues' email. That seems almost sacrosanct, but we believe that that's an outdated and outmoded philosophy. Communication should be open. All communication should be open. If you could listen in to recorded phone conversations in a call center, for instance, for quality assurance, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to have that same level of visibility into email communication.

For the full interview, and to learn how Bullhorn's Pulse product can find valuable information within email interactions (such as the quantity and quality of email and trigger words), click on Part 1 of this two-part interview below.