Companies are not taking advantage of tools that will improve customer retention, increase sales and reduce company costs. Hopefully this blog will make it easier for your company to improve their implementation of their Support CRM.
A Support CRM's raison d'être is to help its customers with the product or service they are offering. So doesn't it make sense to utilize all possibilities in the selected platform to achieve that goal? Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.
Admittedly we are Zendesk experts, but this blog is essentially product independent.
This blog will give an example of a business case in Customer Service and how they could apply their CRM better. See if any of the issues are relevant to your own company. The blog is also just as relevant if you do not already have a support platform. Consider this article to be a checklist of expectations.
Our Example Business Case
A (fictional) company in the financial industry has a leading solution for buying and selling shares. Their solution is available in a browser and mobile app. The customers frequently have questions of differing types such as how to buy&sell, credit card issues, balances and other related issues. They have 20 active agents in two distinct locations worldwide offering 24/7 service and six team leaders. They are manually addressing every customer query.
First Shot at Implementation - Anything seem familiar in Your Company?
They implemented a Support CRM 12 months ago. It contains a bedrock of excellent features for improving the customer experience. Essentially, they took the system out-of-the-box with minimal adaptations and changed things internally to ensure their workflow was simple enough to sit (technology-driven rather than business-driven).
For those interested, the table below describes what they did. The next part of the blog explains what they should be doing to maximize their investment and customer experience.
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Channels Little encouragement for customers to self-service
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Integrations No integrations with external systems
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Automations Small efforts only to increase efficiency
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Analytics Only using built-in, not specific to company
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What they Should be Doing - Are You?
Our fictional company have implemented minimally, losing so many in-built features of the Support CRM. This is what they should be doing. Our descriptions are brief. If you need something expanded, it means that you probably have a need for the feature, so maybe drop us a line to talk about it.
If we put it in one paragraph, this is what they should be doing:
Create a business flow that's ideal for the business that the support CRM should follow. Customers should have many options to help them self-service their own problems. The CRM should be integrated with other critical business apps (such as sales, finance, ERP, phone, etc) so the agent experience should be all available from the same application. Managers should be able to access detailed configurable statistics on demand and per schedule.
In detail, we can flush out the table above to show what they should be doing. Notice how it will increase both the customer and agent experience. More help for the customers and more efficient workspace for agents.
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Channels Offering help content when it's needed to reduce tickets
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Integrations Enabling 360 degree view of all relevant systems
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Automations Creating the ideal blend between automatic and personal
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Analytics Fully measuring performance to improve
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What's Next for You?
The company in our example will begin to see reduced tickets as customers self-serve and the agent experience is so much quicker due to the integration with other applications. It would not be too much to claim that support-time will be reduced by over 30% from the solutions we have discussed.
The table above is a good checklist for anyone planning to implement a fully operational and effective Support CRM in their company. For optimal results we recommend using our experts at ContextEngage.
If you feel that your company does not have a Support CRM or they have implemented a Support CRM but are not utilizing it (this is the most likely), you have two options:
- Develop your own workplan for purchase and implementation.
- Ask us at ContextEngage to help you implement the above. It's not as involved and complicated as you may think. We have been there and done it, so we can make it easy for you to succeed. Our tool of choice is Zendesk, which supports ALL the features in the table above. Your customers will appreciate it.
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