Wednesdays With Will: Improving The Service In Customer Service
Wednesdays With Will: Improving The Service In Customer Service
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
In our last few installments, we touched on how your marketing and sales teams can more easily acquire new business by leveraging a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). As a business owner, you know that client acquisition is only half the battle. Once they become your customer, that’s when the real work starts. Sadly, this is often an overlooked aspect for some businesses which can lead to frustration for both the client and your own employees in supporting them. Today we are going to cover how you can help setup your customer support and customer service teams for success.
During the sales process, your marketing and sales team have set the expectations as to what will be delivered when a prospective customer becomes a client. As we all know, a promise is only as good as how well you are able execute it into reality. Sadly, there is a common tale of the chasm between what was promised by Marketing/Sales and what is delivered by Services. Worse, it will sometimes lead to finger pointing as to who is at fault…Marketing/Sales for overpromising or Services for under delivering. What if there was a way to mitigate if not prevent this from happening by having everyone on the same page.
In the previous blogs, we discussed the benefits of increased transparency and collaboration between your marketing and sales teams as you bring the prospective customer through the sales cycle. What if you could take it a step further to provide a streamlined handoff to your Services team? By leveraging a platform like Microsoft Dynamics CRM it is now possible. Under a single pane of glass, you are able to collaborate more easily between disparate teams (Marketing, Sales, Services, etc.) while coordinating enterprise-level support services. It enhances ease of use not only for your internal teams but also from the customer perspective. Let’s discuss how.
As I mentioned, there is often a disconnect between Marketing/Sales and Services. One of the most powerful aspects of collaboration is enhanced communication. If your Marketing/Sales team has a better understanding of what Services are capable of delivering, there is less chance of overpromising. If your Services team has a clear understanding of what the client is entitled to, it makes it easier for them to deliver or prepare and make adjustments accordingly.
Dynamics CRM provides your Services team with the tools to successfully deliver. A service agent will be able to view pertinent information regarding the account such as service entitlements, case history, customer service scripts, and context-based information. The context based information is pretty interesting because it uses machine learning to recommend information that would be most useful based on similar past experiences. Great time saver! Besides the information that is provided some of the tools include a Service Level Agreement (SLA) timer, a guided resolution process flow, and resource management/dispatch. What I love about the resource management/dispatch function is the ability to easily find the person with the correct skillset that is closest to the service destination. Another great time saver and a way to improve customer satisfaction.
Speaking of customer satisfaction, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will help make your customer your greatest advocate. As times change so have the ways customers prefer to interact with their chosen partner. Did you know the average customer uses 3 or more different channels of engagement with a company today? Dynamics CRM is able to provide a consistent customer experience whether your client chooses to communication through web, chat, social, email, or phone. Giving the client the option to interact the way they feel most comfortable promotes a stronger dialogue.
Social media has given businesses a new level of insight as to how they are doing as an organization and how they are perceived. This is important because it allows you to rectify an error before it becomes “big news” and pinpoint areas of improvement. On the flipside, it also lets you know what you are doing great and why your clients appreciate you.
One of the most popular methods of customer support today is self-service. It makes complete sense as to why it has become the trend. With the increased popularity and use of internet search engines over the past 20 years, most people are more comfortable searching for an answer themselves vs asking for assistance. Microsoft has recognized this trend and recently incorporated a solution into Dynamics CRM. Clients now have access to the answers they are seeking regarding your product or service through a company branded online portal. Once again, it leverages machine learning so it provides recommended context based topics to assist as you type in your query. If you are unable to find the answer to your questions, you can easily create a new case in the same portal. It will then be answered, saved, and available for future use for others with the same question.
The last topic I would like to touch on is engagement experience and brand loyalty. A platform like Microsoft Dynamics CRM will help streamline how your internal teams work together and hopefully improve employee satisfaction and retention but that’s only half the story when it comes to Services. Having the ability to effectively assist your clients and for them to easily be assisted is the beginning of the story around brand loyalty. The more they enjoy interacting with your organization, the greater chance there is of them becoming not only a loyalist but an evangelist for your brand. This will often lead to new leads, opportunities, and sales generated by your clients!
There is much more to discuss when it comes to the Services portion of Dynamics CRM but I like to keep these articles short and to the point. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
Wednesdays With Will: Empowering Your Sales Team With Microsoft Dynamics CRM
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
As a Business Owner, VP of Sales, or Sales Manager you are heavily invested in the level of success your sales team can reach and rightfully so. If they are unable to close enough business in a set period of time it may lead to the downsizing of your overall staff. If they are greatly exceeding company goals, this can lead to challenges for your operations teams to meet the expectations of your clients. It may also lead to a secondary adverse effect on your customer service team in keeping current customers happy. It seems to be a delicate balancing act in this ecosystem you call your business.
Last time we discussed a smarter way to market, “smarketing’, by using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The methods highlighted in last week’s post were suggestions for improving lead generation. Leads generated by your marketing team will become new opportunities for your sales team. Once you have entered these opportunities into Dynamics CRM, you can now properly usher them through your company’s defined sales process, increasing your probability for a win. If the opportunity is lost, you now have the ability to analyze why it was lost as to make corrections for other future opportunities. If you are looking for a way to increase the value of an opportunity, Dynamics CRM makes it simple to set up upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Possibly the most important aspect of opportunity tracking is forecasting. Proper forecasting plays a huge role in scheduling and allocating the proper resources on the operations side of the house. From a management prospective, it may be used to dictate whether to hire more people and if so for which role or roles.
Something that may seem so basic but is often overlooked is the handoff from marketing to sales. The reason the lead, from marketing, became an opportunity, for sales, is because they followed a certain path or journey that qualified them. Understanding how and why they arrived is imperative to understanding how your business can solve their challenge and gauging the timing for a decision to be made. When you leverage a tool such as Dynamics CRM, you are able to align your sales and marketing departments, in turn making each much more effective.
From a sales aspect, contact management has been the most fundamental use of a CRM system over the past 20-30 years. It gives you a searchable, centralized location to keep information about an organization, contact information for its people, as well as a place to log notes from phone calls, emails, appointments, and other interactions. Most systems will also provide you a follow-up component that alerts you of when to reach out to a particular contact. These functions are highly valuable when prospecting and/or managing multiple accounts. With Dynamics CRM you can add more meaning to the way you follow up with prospects and clients through social selling. The Microsoft Insights and Social Engagements components of Dynamics CRM gives sellers this ability in two different ways. Microsoft Insights pulls information about an organization (size, annual revenue, industry, etc.), its people (phone number, email address, role, etc.), and recent news (mergers, acquisitions, expansions, etc.) from multiple social media platforms. By leveraging Social Engagements, you can captures information about what is trending on social media. This is helpful for learning about a change occurring in your prospect or client’s business without them having to tell you.
Most sales professionals are always on the go so most of what we have discussed would not be as useful unless it was easily accessible “out in the wild”. Dynamics CRM can be used on a variety of mobile devices such as tablets and cell phones. This allows you to access information already entered into the system as well as the ability to input additional information. I’m really excited about the next iteration, Microsoft Dynamics 2016, which will take advantage of Cortana’s search by voice capabilities.
We covered quite a bit today regarding the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales automation and there is still so much more such as the ability to instantly generate proposals through the system and save documents pertaining to accounts. I can go on forever about how you can empower your sales team with this platform but I digress. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
Microsoft today announced that they have reached an agreement to acquire FieldOne, a world-class provider of field service management solutions that allow organizations to better manage and deliver service to their customers in the field.
FieldOne is a great fit for Dynamics CRM adding to our extensive customer service capabilities – which includes chat, knowledge management and self-service functionality from Parature which we acquired in January of 2014. Like Parature, FieldOne is offered to customers as a cloud service. It’s built on Microsoft technology for fast integration, it already works great with other Microsoft productivity offerings like Office 365 and SharePoint, and has cross-platform capabilities meaning it can work on different devices enhancing the mobile experience which is so critically important in field service management. FieldOne was built from the ground up to leverage Dynamics CRM, and this means that our customers can take advantage of its capabilities right away.
