133948 Resource 102363 102466 102466 1152798517875 1152811613921 Controlled NetSuite for Geniuses, Chapter 6: Customer Service (Part 1)

You now have customers, so how do you take care of them and keep them engaged?

Customer service is difficult egg to crack for a lot of small and medium businesses. Not that they don't give good service, they do; but they do not often take the time to make service a process that they can track, measure and improve. More often than not, customer service means taking care of the problems, issues, questions and crises as they occur, without any thought about how to manage the process. In our NetSuite Consulting practice one of the major challenges is persuading client management that a customer service process is both efficient, profitable and well worth the effort.The first realization for the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) is that Customer issues are going to happen, regardless of who works for you, what you sell, or who your customers are. This realization is itself a small hurdle for many SMEs, many of whom do business with the assumption that each problem they solve will be the end of the problem, the end of the problem area, or the end of customers' concerns and questions about the problem area. Frankly, the problems, questions, issues and crises are not ever going to end, no matter how good you are. So instead of asking for the impossible, ask "How can I manage service like I manage operations, or finance and accounting?" You are going to have customer service problems just as sure as you will have Bill to Pay and Invoices to send out, so take the time to map a process to manage the problems.The answer to managing service is to create a process for managing service. Your NetSuite application has invaluable resources to help you manage the service process, so take advantage of them. How does it work? Or, Where do we begin? Like all processes, think about the physical context first before getting into the system.The phone rings. It's a customer with a problem. Does your business have someone designated to handle customer issues? A person, or persons, responsible for taking point on customer calls? This would be an excellent start. In many companies inside sales includes the customer service role, along with sales. In other business models, the sales and customer service roles are separate. Either way, you must designate a person or persons to take the point position for customer service. Now many SMEs are saying to themselves "Customer service is every one's job at my business." And you're right, it is. I am not suggesting that a single person, or several persons, be tasked with managing the entire process. A well thought out customer service process can include, must include, a broad cross slice of the business, from sales to operations and finance. In fact, the whole point of the customer service process is to make the customer service event easy as possible for the customer - one number to call, for example - while enlisting the whole organization to work on the customer's behalf for resolution. This is where NetSuite comes into the picture.First, one of the designated customer service point people takes the call, or the email, or the online service request, from the customer. A service request is normally called a case. Once the case is well understood it is documented in the system. Then, you have a few choices to make. You can create rules in the background to manage cases as they arise. For example, there can be a rule to route billing questions to the person who oversees A/R, or a rule to route product questions and issues to the head of Operations. Alternatively, you can task the Customer Service Rep with resolving the issue and only escalating the case when no easy resolution can be identified.At the outset, Customer Service looks like it adds a lot of data entry and extra work to the day. But like most of the work we do, taking a structured approach means a little more time up front, but a huge savings in time on the back end. Again, get past the idea that one day you're going to resolve the last problem and your business is going to be smooth sailing afterwards; this is the only scenario that has no chance of ever happening. Then, take a look around your business on the average day and ask yourself how much customer service work everyone is doing. Your inside sales people might spend 40% to 50% of their time resolving billing issues for the customer. How much more could they sell if you were able to reduce the Customer Service time to, perhaps, 20% of their day?But how can you reduce customer service time while still being customer focused? Am I advocating not bothering with customer issues? Absolutely not. What I am advocating is starting to enter and manage customer issues in the system. The benefits are huge: The process of resolving an issue is not track able, nothing falls through the cracks anymore; the right people work an issue at the right time, so perhaps a staff person can resolve a billing issue before your controller gets involved; you resolve a single issue once and instead of forgetting about it you now have a permanent record of what was done and by whom - the chances that you will one day be asked to resolve the same issue for another customer is, thank you Mr Murphy, 100% and you now know how to get started; you now have a measurable process which means that all the talk of customer focus actually starts to mean something to both you and your employees - like how many days does it take to resolve the average billing issue?Logging customer service issues will take to become a part of the regular workday. But eventually you can create a knowledge base of issue resolutions that you employees can use forever and continue to improve, as they resolve issues for your customers. As you grow and become a larger business the customer service module will be an invaluable foundation for your business. You will not be able to know every customer and every issue at some point, so you had better have a system where, at the very least, you can make sure that customer service issues are being tracked and resolved in a timely and rational process.Ok, so what's the process that I have been talking about these many paragraphs? Let's lay it out<ol><li>Case Event - customer makes problem known via email, phone or online Service Request Form</li><li>Case logged into system, or, if started via online form or email, the case (already logged into NetSuite) is grabbed by a service rep or staff member based on your rules and the case completed with additional information.</li><li>Case worked toward resolution</li><li>If no resolution found then the rep escalates the Case based on your rules</li><li>(For companies who deal with problems like software bugs, and Issue can be created and tracked from the Case)</li><li>After Resolution we publish the Case Solution and categorize under our Topics in the Knowledge Base</li><li>Case Event - Customer Service Rep searches Knowledge Base and finds resolution to similar problem</li></ol>Last note: At some point your business may have several customer service reps and NetSuite can handle the integration with a Call Center application. In fact, a company called Five9 has already created a great integration with NetSuite, via the NetFlex standard integration bridge, for call center reps, and it includes a predictive dialer for outbound calls from sales people, also. Check it out at <a href="http://www.five9.com/partners/netsuite/">http://www.five9.com/partners/netsuite/</a>. 10 application/xml false call center software integration netflex netsuite consulting netsuite customer service netsuite customer support netsuite implementation the value of customer service process Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; YPC 3.0.1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 tfoydel false true false false true 205861 false false true false false false true 102363 blog blogsite/SightLines/web