The CRM news is full of stories about the
automation of Sales. But sometimes the forgotten space of Customer
Service and Support creeps in.
Give service personnel more CRM power
Service
employees, whether in a call center or providing support at a customer
location, can be invaluable for sales…Create a cross-functional team
and you can drive revenue in aftermarket parts as well as have more
informed sales reps. – 10 Tips To Help New Reps Increase Sales with CRM
CRM tools have
brought so much power to the sales force that it’s not surprising for
the enterprise to get bedazzled by the acquisition phase of owning
customers. But we’ve always focused on aiding customer retention at
Dovetail. Other companies feel this way too.
Empower your customer service team.
“We
focus on delivering the best service possible, that’s why we call our
service [team] the customer loyalty department,” Judd said. “We
understand that creating long-term customer relationships is key.” The
Zappos.com management team also believes that customer loyalty is an
investment, not an expense, and communicates that attitude throughout
the organization. – 10 Rules To Creating a Customer-Centric Culture
At Dovetail, our focus has always been on the CS&S portion of CRM, the Customer Service and Support. We break this into four major services:
- “call handling”, i.e., assisted support
- eService,
or Self Service. This embraces some level of customer-facing Service
Resolution Management, and Knowledge Management, with a mechanism to
fold new, collaboratively generated knowledge into the available
content set
- Field Service, which comprises the ability to Dispatch a Field Engineer, to Log Parts Used, and to Log Time & Expenses
- Service Analytics.
Here’s
one example of giving agents more flexibility in their service calls.
Users of the Clarify™ ClearSupport and ClearLogistics applications have
always hated having to switch back and forth between the two apps, so
Dovetail’s clients made it so they don’t have to. One of many
improvements to the business process that helps the agent give better
service.
Support is the forgotten space, and you will hear
us call it this time and again, for good reason. We do find the notion
of retaining precious customers arising sometimes in enterprise
strategy retreats (though often in the shadow of more drives to acquire
new ones), and in the same way we also find that when Support delivers
its miracles, the rest of the company sometimes takes notice.
With
one Dovetail customer we saw that their field engineers started
producing such great information in their reports that other
departments got jealous. Soon the Dovetail deployment grew from Field
Service to the entire Customer Support division.
There are happy stories in the Forgotten Space: this has been one of them :)
