Do you use CRM for customer service?

Most business people understand a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is great for maintaining a central source of customer details, contact and address information, key communications and appointments. However, if you are not using CRM for customer service, you’re missing an opportunity to improve your company’s customer service levels.

Here are five must-read reasons why CRM enables better customer service:

1. For efficient case management

The core case management functionality in Sage CRM is very powerful. Support cases, properly managed, are great opportunities to demonstrate your commitment to customer service. Customers may report support issues for several reasons including software bugs, product defects, unclear installation or operating instructions, or general questions. With Sage CRM, support cases can be created from incoming customer emails, from support forms on your website or from customer telephone calls.

Once in Sage CRM, the cases can be easily managed by a case workflow with escalations, automatic notifications and cases can be tied to service level agreements.

Remember the saying “an issue is an opportunity in disguise?” Many support cases can be solved by products or services that you sell. The Sage CRM case workflow supports automatic transfer of cases to sales opportunities – another great source of revenue for your company.

2. For storing support information in your Knowledgebase

For many companies, patterns can emerge for support calls. Several different team members may receive calls for the same issue. Sage CRM’s Knowledgebaseenables a customer service representative to record the issue and how the issue was resolved. A typical example for a software company is a hot fix or patch that, when installed, corrects a software bug. The rest of the team can then access this solution. This should dramatically improve customer service by shortening the response time for subsequent support calls.

CRM supports quality control through a review and approval system for solutions. Solutions are posted by the customer service team as drafts. Once reviewed, the solutions can be accepted and published to the rest of the team or rejected as unacceptable. The Sage CRM Knowledgebase can therefore provide a source foraccurate and reliable solutions to commonly reported customer service issues and an easy and effective method of increasing the wow factor of your customer service efforts.

3. For team management

If you manage a customer support team, you probably understand the challenges involved with establishing clear communications and effective customer service. For example, with a disjointed system, a customer may call the support team and be given a suggested solution that does not work. They may then call back and have to explain the details all over again. They may even receive the same suggested solution a second time.

With Sage CRM it is easy to record the details of the support call and the suggested solution. If the customer has to call back, the details of the case are carried forward, even if their case is handled by another customer service team member. Sage CRM enables your customers to benefit from the power of a team approach to customer service without the common irritant of having to repeat their complaint multiple times. For effective team and volume management, Sage CRM also provides metrics like case volume, history and resolution times.

4. For becoming more productive

With Sage CRM’s dashboards, your customer service teams can manage customer queries and support cases from one intuitive, graphical workspace. Team members can access current, accurate information on a single screen. You can configure the dashboard for all aspects of your company, but it is especially powerful for customer service case monitoring and processing.

As a customer service team member, you can use the dashboard to see which cases are queued for me and their priority. As a team supervisor, you can view the entire service case list, identify which cases are beyond their SLA response times, and increase their priority. You can also review and adjust the case load for each team member.

You and your team can create dedicated dashboards for priority customers who need a higher level of care.

5. For reporting

If something is important, measure it. If you measure it, report on it.

For customer service teams, support response time is often the best metric to measure. This critical component of customer service can easily be reported on with Sage CRM. The program provides a comprehensive list of standard reports and, if required, custom reports can easily be created with the CRM reporting tool.

Key metrics such as case volume and resolution times can be displayed and reported on. Sage CRM reporting is an essential part of the cycle of delivering service, measuring results, reporting on the measurement and improving services.

It is easy to underestimate the value of excellent customer service and to concentrate on sales and on acquiring new customers. However, if you don’t serve current customers, you will lose a critical source of referrals and ongoing revenue. If you want to WOW your customers to increase loyalty and build a strong referral base, Sage CRM is a key tool to deploy in your company.