I'm fascinated by service. We are all consumers, and in this day and age of fierce ecommerce competition for goods where low price is the entry point to survival, how do you separate yourself from the competition? A CRM strategy around providing your customers with good service can make the difference. And real improvements in this area do not require additional budget. Knowledge about your customer should be alive and well in your CRM system, and appropriate mining of that knowledge is key to improved service. Relevant information like customer inquiries about your products, their buying habits, problems they may have and, finally, customer measured satisfaction, should readily available. Armed with these facts, it is easier to achieve company buy-in for change. And with buy-in, you can implement changes, improve company policies and business workflows, and create a customer service-centric company. Lacking the information to back up your case for change, your ideas may go by the wayside. Busy colleagues who are not convinced that your company needs to improve customer service, or that improved customer service can help achieve top and bottom line results, will turn their attention to other tasks at hand. A new adword campaign is an intriguing challenge and may jump start sales, but you know that in three months you'll be looking at the same customer service issues and the same lack of repeat customers. So what are a few questions your CRM system needs to answer for you to take control of customer service and start implementing change? Here are a few analytics that we find useful: 1. Do you know how many inquiries you receive about your products and how quickly your team responds to those inquiries? 2. Can you track how your customers feel about your product/service or their interactions with your company? 3. Are you able to identify high return items which, in turn, help you identify manufacturing partner problems? 4. Do you know what your top customer escalation issues are? 5. Can you track service improvement goals easily and share it across the company in real time?
Of course, we implement NetSuite Customer Service for our clients, so we are naturally partial to NetSuite, but all CRM systems should deliver these answers and more. Some of the most important functions of a good CRM platform, from our experience, include: Ability to take customer cases, or incidents, from multiple channels like email, online form, or telephone, of course Service integrated with full customer record including sales history Configurable service escalation paths by product, department, severity, service rep seniority, case creation time and date, or any combination of these
The key message from these bullet points is that customer ease of use and the structure of our response system translate to fewer lost customers. Having customer service incidents is not the problem, and if you have customers, you will have service incidents. The problem is not managing them professionally through a strong and clearly understood business process. Are you just selling widgets? Or are you selling the experience the widgets provide? If it's the experience, and I hope that it is, then you need to protect and nurture that experience from the first sale to the next, and the next, and the next. Tom Nguyen |
