How a CRM Helps Customer Support
Every business person knows it is cheaper to keep your current customers than to gain new ones. Customer support is often thought of as a necessary cost of business, and a cost that grows as your business grows. But good customer support is also the lowest cost means available for gaining additional sales of any form.
To do customer support well, your support reps need reliable, current information about your customers and any outstanding problems. Without good data requests are missed, responses are duplicated, and your company ends up looking incompetent at best and uncaring at worst.
A CRM can empower your staff to make your customers truly satisfied and help lower the cost of doing so.
Here are six ways a CRM can help customer support:
1. Centralize Multiple Channels
Interactions with your customers can occur in many ways (web site visits, phone calls, email, chat) and through multiple staff (billing, account managers, technical support). A CRM serves as a central repository to show all interactions with all staff through any means. Now you KNOW what is happening with your customers, your staff never looks uninformed, and your customers never need to repeat themselves.
2. Bridge Support and Sales
Since a CRM is also usually a critical sales tool, bringing customer support into your CRM bridges the gap between sales and support. Sales reps can be notified when support cases with their customers go unresolved and can check in advance to make sure they are not planning a sales call on an angry customer.
3. Track Cases
A CRM provides the tools to create and associate support cases with customers. The cases can be assigned to reps, escalated if needed, and tracked to completion. Nothing gets lost, and no customers fall through the cracks. Automating regular support procedures such as an initial email response or a case closure email soliciting feedback can make the process even better.
4. Create a Knowledge Base
Many CRMs include a knowledge base section where procedures and articles can be accumulated to support your support activities. This is especially helpful for technical support processes. Once you’ve established a knowledge base, you can make it accessible to your customer base as well. Providing customers with information they can find on their own without ever interacting with your staff is nearly zero cost customer support.
5. Provide Self-Service
A self-service portal is a CRM extension that allows customers to create support requests from your website that are automatically populated into your CRM. As your sales reps respond to and update the case, the customer can status their requests from the portal. This minimizes time-consuming follow ups and status checks for your support reps and let’s the customer know you value them and are responding to their issue. When tied in with a customer accessible knowledge-base, a self-service portal can increase customer satisfaction while decreasing your costs.
6. Know How You’re Doing
As with any business critical process, if you want to get better, you need good data. How long does it take to respond to a customer request? How much time elapses before a case is resolved? Is the number of requests increasing or decreasing? Where are support cases getting stuck? How are your reps performing? Reporting tools and charts allow you to see this kind of data at regular intervals and in real time, providing the information you need to continuously improve your processes.
Know of other key benefits of a CRM for customer support? Share your thoughts below.
If you’d like to know more about a CRM, visit our CRM page or give us a call.
