CRM and CS&S – Breaking in the New Deployment
An enterprise deploys a CRM
suite in the first place to assist its business processes as they
relate to the customer; it’s an especially sensitive time during the
learning stages, as agents become familiar with new interfaces and
procedures. Nowhere is this more critical than with support, where the
customers whom the agents manage are in trouble of some kind and
require extraordinary assurance from the enterprise. Customers in this
situation are also hyper-aware of the degree of competence they are
dealing with.
"For companies that have only recently implemented CRM and have to get all their service reps up to speed at the same time, the training challenges can seem especially daunting." – Getting New Reps Up to Speed with CRM
Customers with complaints or problems are the
greatest opportunity for any business: help out a customer who cares
enough to call you (rather than abandon you without a word), and you’ve
probably just created a customer for life, and an evangelist for your
company.
Marketing has long believed this, and gradually the
concept is being absorbed by the technologists who create software
systems. The most interesting part of CRM
today lies in the area of Customer Service and Support, CS&S. This
is where the acquisition cost of the customer is either preserved or
thrown away.
Customer retention, as analysts have encouraged for years, is gaining traction as a focus in enterprise thinking, and the CRM space now needs to see this reflected in the dexterity of CRM
software. Customer-facing agents need to be able to manage their
desktops for ease of use under pressure, and to retain key information
as they switch between screens and functions.
A good IT
department, or proactive engineers from the software vendor, coupled
with extensible and flexible software design, is the heart of smooth
deployment and good, responsive CS&S and CRM once installed. Ideally you want three things:
1. The ability to integrate new software with existing systems.
2. The ability to stage in new software incrementally.
3. The ability to customize.
As an example of flexibility, Dovetail Software’s customers
are able to use Dovetail’s more than 500 APIs, and find that they can
craft almost any kind of custom feature with simple calls using one
line of code – executed, for example, from a simple right-click that
brings up a context-sensitive menu. Agents then can make specific
queries and updates to the Clarify™ database, assembling customer-,
case-, or issue-specific lists, for example on the fly.
It’s
the simple things that turn an agent into a superhero for a customer,
and it’s healthy software that makes IT people heroes for the agents.
We’ll be illustrating more of these simple things, stay tuned.
