Four great things customer service systems can provide

Companies care more these days about their customers and followers and how they can be an asset to their lives, but they are also beginning to wake up to improving the experiences their customers encounter using their products and services.

With customer satisfaction and customer service in mind, we will talk in this article about four ways in which companies can interact with their service users in order to improve not only the customer experience but also increase the performance and productivity of customer service teams using great customer service systems, meaning a great CRM system; in this case from the customer service aspect.

Let’s start this journey with one of the most important considerations for customer service teams, which is customer satisfaction. It is widely known that it is always simpler and cheaper for organisations to retain and build on customer loyalty than to acquire new customers (it is widely estimated that it takes between 5 and 20 times more effort to acquire new customers than retain existing ones, depending on the area and size of the business).

Having this said, it is fundamental that the organisation provides the teams working on this conundrum with a system that not only allows them to know who the customer is and the kind of person with whom they are communicating, in order to adjust their tone of voice and positioning, but also gives visibility on their purchase history and previous orders, in order to understand whether they have an open balance or to be able to provide a more tailored response in the case of a complaint.

An also growing theme is building a presence across multiple channels of communication, and going beyond traditional channels, such as website, email and telephone. It is increasingly important to have a consistent presence on social networks where customers and followers of the organisation will be present, not from a prospect marketing perspective (marketing is a topic already covered in other articles and which we will continue to give continuity to) but from customer support and service perspective, helping them communicate with the organisation, clarify questions or solve problems.

Therefore, it is important that a collaborative system facilitates easy interaction with these methods of communication, so that response time may be short and information consolidated and aggregated. Thus, our employees can take advantage of data they’ve already collected, in order to increase satisfaction, as we discussed in the previous point.

Turning now to the outdoor teams, those that provide service to customers in their homes or at locations outside the organisation. These teams usually have a well-defined calendar and may also have a planned route, against which we can associate cases/tickets.

For these teams to be more productive, they can take advantage of collaborative systems, which must be interconnected, either with integration systems or by adding modules (which happens in most current CRM systems). The fact that they are modular systems allows time and cost savings for organisations, since there is only one database and no need for propagation times between systems, and reduced susceptibility to network breakdowns, amongst other problems.

Focusing again on the customer, there has been a growing need to provide customers with ways to self-diagnose problems or solve less complex situations.

Usually, these sources of help are provided on the company’s own website and linked to collaborative tool portals, such as a CRM, where the articles provided originate from a set of common cases/tickets. By adding artificial intelligence, enables the discovery of new patterns that employees may not be observed immediately.

Such articles are written by our own teams and approved, via internal application approval processes, by elements with their respective competencies. Only after the process has been completed can they be published in the so-called knowledge base, along with known FAQs, in order to help customers and, once again, increase satisfaction with our brand.

To sum up, we can see the potential of a collaborative CRM system, from the customer service point of view. Not just to improve the internal productivity of the organisation, but also to enhance customer satisfaction. As for macros, the following insights can be inferred:

• Increase customer visibility, through the aggregated view of the information provided by a set of screens and dashboards.
• Provide documents that allow customers to interact in real-time, making them feel part of the company, with the use of self-service portals.
• Omnipresence towards customers, by utilising the information obtained via various channels of communication between the company and the customer.
• Increase the productivity of street teams, with the help of field service components.

The mission of these teams is to keep the customers satisfied, as people usually return to their favourite brands. Plus, where they get good service and enjoy a good experience, more than 70% of customers remain loyal.