9 Important Points to Consider When Implementing a Service CRM System

How often have you been told that a successful business needs a Helpdesk CRM?

I am sure, quite often because it is true. 

It is crucial to have a customer relationship management system to ensure your process is error-proof. This is what a CRM will do for you.

Content:

 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are software that tracks and manages the entire sales and retention journey of your customers. It stores lead information, tracks the stage of the sales funnel, offers notifications for nurturing opportunities and even automates some mundane processes involved. From a retention standpoint, it tracks all the interactions, incidence reported, and resolution. CRM Services are essential to stay connected with your customers. It makes you aware of your customers and their next steps. This allows you to maintain a positive relationship with your customers. Some CRMs are even capable of managing employee information, and productivity score and even keeps tracking the leads. It pretty much holds your contact center together. 

The CRM Solution can be beneficial to everyone in your organization including sales personnel, customer support agents, human resource, and even marketing teams. It is this centralized platform where all crucial business information is stored with prompts on what to do next. Fundamentally, businesses are dependent on customers. CRMs help you manage your customers, and by default manage your entire business. 

CRMs are classified for different stages of business:

1. Marketing CRM – for content and sales enablement
2. Sales CRM or Lead Management System – for lead scoring to creating opportunity and customer account
3. Service CRM – for customer retention and incident (ticket) management

Service CRM work by leveraging information for identifying and resolving customer concerns. It collects customer details like mobile numbers, email IDs, social media links, and even addresses if the customer permits. It can go above and beyond to automatically collect information if the customer has their data publicly shared. It can save details like which channel they use most and their preference. Such details help your business to identify moments to assist your customer by following up, supporting, and nurturing. Here are some core features of a CRM solution.

1. Email Ticket Generation:

One standard way to reach the helpdesk is by sending an email to the customer care or the helpdesk team. The service CRM should be able to automatically create the ticket and share the docket number with the customer and assign the ticket to support agents.

2. Omnichannel Integration:

Customer conversations can happen on any channel. To ensure you never miss any query or ticket, integrate all your channels into a single platform. This includes all your touchpoints such as telephony, email, SMS, chat, and even social media. 

3. Define Escalation Matrix:

Not every issue needs the CEO’s attention. Team managers need to set up an escalation hierarchy and define it in the system. That way in case of any escalation the ticket will get raised to the next person concerned, automatically. These predefined rules maintain order in the operation, making sure no ticket is overlooked.

4. Service Level Agreement (SLA):

Every complaint raised by the customer should be served within in pre-determined time frame. This is binding and part of SLA. The ticketing CRM should be able to monitor the turnaround time (TAT) and any ticket that breaches the SLA should be notified as per the escalation matrix.

5. Third-Party Integrations:

CRM Helpdesk when integrated with third-party applications, become helpful for your businesses. It reduces redundant friction like switching through apps, manually entering data, and losing precious time. When integrated, the CRM becomes the central hub for all information pertaining to your process. It will automatically redirect emails, fill in disposition data into notes, and integrate with other touchpoints so that the ticket can be created automatically post a live chat or a phone call. Integration with SMS or WhatsApp enables automated notification as designed by the workflow.

6. Automating Workflow:

The biggest friend of mankind is automation and your Helpdesk CRM Software will offer you the same. Logic-based conditions can be set up to create smooth operational flow. For example, if a ticket is marked incomplete, it should raise a follow-up reminder to the concerned agent. Such event or reaction-based actions can be triggered by predefining the conditions for the events. This is how most companies leverage  CRM to automate their day-to-day functionality. Not only does it save time, but it also allows agents to focus more on customers than manual labor. Most of the automation of workflow is rule-based and the admin can set the rules so that the event is triggered when the rule is met or a combination of rules are met.

7. Splitting of Tickets:

Splitting a ticket is required if it has to be distributed to different team members, maybe in a different department. For instance, a customer has sent a mail related to the non-delivery of one of the items and the malfunction of another item in the consignment. The customer service agent needs to create a separate task and assign the first to the logistics department and the second one to the production team. Splitting tickets into different tasks help to manage the different tasks, report the corresponding SLA and merge the ticket back while responding to the customer.

8. Analytics and Reports:

As the Helpdesk CRM has the capacity to retrieve and extract data from every touchpoint, it can be used to generate essential insights as well. To meet standard KPIs like turnaround time (TAT) score or average handling time, you can rely on the CRM to showcase how many tickets were successfully closed within the TAT or how much time agents take up during calls. This information is automatically stored in the CRM database and can be retrieved to generate reports. Based on these you can plan your agent training, or guide your operations better. Some primary reports that you can view are ticket status (open/in-progress/closed), overdue tickets, CSAT reports, ticket aging reports, escalated ticket reports, tickets created from source, and tickets created for department or products on a daily weekly, or monthly basis. 

9. Collaborative Access:

Contact Center Software can easily become chaotic when everyone is dealing with too many tickets. It becomes a hard job to bring everything together and streamline it. One fine way to do it is through collaboration on the CRM dashboard. It is called document management where any employee can share essential documents and store them for universal access. This can be sales relevant battle cards, product presentations or company policy details for support people. Any piece of relevant information can easily be shared, accessed or worked upon by employees together. 

It seems that a CRM Helpdesk system is the central engine that runs your contact center. Without it, your contact center becomes invalid or directionless. Your processes can only be streamlined through a customer relationship management system, where you can view end-to-end processes. Ultimately, the agenda for any contact center investment is to improve customer service. That is exactly what your CRM solution will do. It will offer you a holistic overview of every campaign and how your customers are reacting to it. It will showcase how many issues are reported and how quickly they are getting resolved. Hence, there is enough evidence to claim that a CRM solution is imperative for every contact center. To get a comprehensive understanding, contact our experts today.