A sales force automation system can give you templates for follow-up emails, and a knowledge management system can give you step by step troubleshooting directions to pass along to customers, but make no mistake: you can’t automate communication. You need to be genuine and transparent in your dealings with consumers; you need to put a personal face on a corporate logo. But that doesn’t mean that a CRM system can’t help.
When you’ve got a large number of customers to reach, it’s tough to stay personal. But with CRM, you can keep track of all of your customers, with relevant purchase histories and individual notes that personalize every interaction. What’s more, when those customers get in touch with you, a list of prior service cases can help you solve recurring problems and be armed with the information you need to answer specific questions quickly, because you already know what products they’re going to ask about.
Continuing on the service side, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of customer service fails because it’s perceived as impersonal. Too often, call center agents seem like they’re trying to get rid of a caller and move on to the next one without actually listening to the caller. Or email responses that give broad troubleshooting tips and leave the customer to figure out where their problem fits into the solution. If you can change this perception, you can change how your customers feel about your service. Here’s how a CRM system can help you do that: it makes support agents more efficient. Efficiency is what you’re looking for, that’s why cases are handled as quickly as they can be. More callers per hour means your agents are working harder, and you’re providing more solutions, right? Right. But this isn’t always necessarily good. You’re providing more service, but you’re not providing better service. With a CRM system, your agents become more efficient because they can find solutions quicker and they don’t have to worry about the bureaucratic tasks that case studies that aren’t automated require. They now have more time to listen to the customer and try to provide a personalized solution, one that shows empathy and concern instead of haste and a desire for better metrics. And that’s what this is all about: we want to create relationships with customers, we want to listen to what they’re saying and provide the solutions they’re looking for.
Let’s see how the Red Cross does this.
Practical Application
Bay Area Red Cross
Faced with a huge database of contact information and no real effective method of using it all, the Bay Area Chapter of the Red Cross turned to a CRM system to sort it all out. They had thousands of contacts, training and certification records, and information that needed to be accessible during emergencies. How’d they organize it? With a CRM solution that incorporated knowledge management and contact management to keep track of the information, they were able to set up a system to allow easy access of data throughout the organization, send personalized emails and widespread newsletters from the same application, and respond to up-to-date information during an emergency. And they did it all without disrupting their everyday operations.
t seems to me like the biggest problems with CRM arise from poor training/implementation and design issues with the product itself. We are trying to develop something that combats these problems in an innovative way. You guys are all professionals.