CRM for Support

What an amazing experience it is to be offered the best deals at the most pin point time. Use of CRM for Customer Support provides a competitive edge to over your competitors. Who is best player in the market? It is but obvious the one who wins the customer votes. Today’s market is dynamic and so is the customer’s expectation and demand. A well customized and streamlined experience for a complete customer interaction cycle is the benchmark to rule the market. 

A very simple algorithm of customer service if designed precisely will make a way for booming business and market place. Major factors that give you this winning game is, what you know? Who they are? And what they need? A well-managed interactive session without being toggled between many departments and zero waiting time results in a happy customer. Yes, of course a satisfactorily executable system consumes time and efforts, but never the less worth investing.

How will a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system help you?

A customer relationship management system enables you to strategize your forecast, build a better customer profile, identify and categorize your customers, address your customer needs more precisely and subsequently recommend additional products and streamline the processes to yield faster results and better reporting. It also enables your staff to recognize who they’re dealing with from the initial stage itself and thus providing them more efficiency and more productivity. As per the research performed by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to an increase in profits of 25% – 95%, and probability of converting an existing customer into a repeat customer is 60% – 70%, whereas the probability of converting a new lead is only 5% – 20%.

Few of the best players in CRM market are listed below:

1. Salesforce

2. Zoho CRM

3. Infusionsoft

4. SugarCRM

5. Microsoft Dynamics

6. Nutshell

7. NetSuite

8. SAP CRM

Key Benefits of CRM for Customer Service Support are as below:

• Forecast customer needs
• Automated reporting
• Channelized processing
• Competitive administrative support

Forecast customer needs:

CRM solution provides you with a 360 ° view of your customer, which enables you to forecast your sales pipeline, for the existing customers. It provides a better visibility identifying and categorizing the target customers with the greatest potential for future sales. It is more influential for than mass marketing approach as it allows you to focus and fine-tune your marketing efforts to make those efforts more productive. A better analyzed customer provides better sales opportunity and build stronger customer relationship that further leads to niche market space. This indeed helps in cross sell and upsell during a customer support interaction session.

Automated Reporting: 

Even in the most progressing era’s, few organizations still follow the manual tracking methodology. This leads to more productive resource time being utilized for nonproductive tasks, loss of important data in many scenarios, misses follow-ups with customers and last but not the least at the end of the day a well-structured report to determine the progress. With the help of a customer relationship management application, it makes all these key concerns in a more strategized, channelized and presentable way just a click away. This is possible as all your crucial data is stored on a single platform and your visibility walls are well placed. Data automation is well projected, managed and monitored. These customized reports facilitate you to gain a clearer picture of the sales pipeline, service quality and thus further leading to a powerful and centralized analytic and reporting tools that would have been hard to replicate in stand-alone systems.

Channelized Processing:

Single platform provides a common channel for various departments such as sales, marketing, and customer service to speak the same language with one another. It emphasizes on cohesive work culture for multiple departments rather than being separated by systems functionality or convenience in accessing key information under single roof that usually departments across the organization require. It promotes the organizations to make their staff visualize and believe their goals under a single umbrella. A customer relationship management system can process your day-to-day administrative tasks and provide a molding hand to traverse through the various service process that needs to be followed for a delighted customer.

Competitive Administrative Support:

Just imagine a world where you had to keep tracking your customer records for daily alerts for service follow-ups, renewals, new product launch, etc. With the CRM system, complete alert cycle can be managed on an automated basis. It has always been a delight to a customer if the periodical wishes and reminders are received on time. Also, your staff members are well equipped with tools for scheduling appointments, keeping records up-to-date, tracking follow –ups, keeping escalation tracks, customer categorization, customer communication call scripts and templates, etc. It works like your complete organizer.

Conclusion:

A CRM application provides a cutting edge over and above the commonly practiced processes and helps one to build a single accessible and well managed platform. It provides a 360° visibility to the customer needs and helps in building the future market forecast.

About Author:

Mrudula Palyekar

 is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: mrudula.palyekar@spluspl.com

Using Data and Analytics for Indispensable Planning!!!

With any good planning there exist multiple scenarios and it is necessary to avoid the one point solutions. So analytics can create rigidity and right data helps in executing the right task. Now a day’s agile is the requisite for many companies to attain Profits, Goals, task or completing task. But still many companies fail to use data and analytics for making good decision, better planning and actions.

There are three constraints for Indispensable Planning:

• Ability to implement
• Funding or Investment capacity
• Administrator or Stakeholder agreement 

The above mention constraint leads to the following results:

• It helps in developing and launching a new product
• It helps in expanding the Services
• It helps in entering in the new market
• It helps in investing in IT firms

Methods for Using Data and Analytics for better planning include breaking the constraint and thinking out of box. The given below scenario will help in taking important decisions if your company is planning to enter a new market. These points helps in planning a strengthen and restructuring the corporate scenarios, understanding the specific execution and operational limitations related to actions and provide solution to tackle them. 

• Taking new decisions
• Flexible Planning 
• Start with Purposeful scenario
• A well considered Strategy

For example, Lack of expertise can be overcome by new hires or complementing the team with other parties etc. While many senior executives expect that their important decisions will increase the investment value. These are the long term goals and can be can be taken care by 

• Using Multimedia methods 
• Social media can provide instant market feedback
• Adjusting with new features and releases

Once a plan get ready then a company, team or organization should be clear what will be the drawbacks for every decision or behind very plans. Try to involve the necessary supportive systems and resources that will help in taking better plans such as

• Avoiding the silos mentality
• Decision should be made only after considering the expected output
• Team should consult with other functional leaders

Hence Data and Analytics can make decision making faster and helps in building the execution approach strategy. It helps in translating decisions into competitive advantage avoiding the cost delays. If you are planning good or if you are a good planner –

1. You will be able to complete to complete your tasks, projects on the time and on budget. As managing project is a skill which is utilized by everyone every day.

2. You will understand that planning is a part of career and if you are using right data and analytics you will definitely add values to your organization and team.

3. You will understand the concept of billable and relationship with the colleagues.

Conclusion:

Data and Analytics help in interpreting the different challenges which will be face by your company in making a better decision and easily you can tackle them.

About Author:
Ekta Sachan is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: ekta.sachan@spluspl.com 

Incident Management in Application support

Incident management is the back bone of Application support. An application support team that cannot manage incident Management efficiently is of no use. 

Incident management is done by all Application support teams but is it done efficiently? is the main question to ask. It is been observed that often the requesters / Business users are not satisfied with the response time or the solution provided by the Application support team. This results in dis-satisfied business users indirectly affecting the Business and the respective Organization. 

In order to perform Incident management efficiently following points should be followed consistently:

1. Understanding the Application thoroughly

2. Understanding the SOW (Scope of work)

3. Analyzing the issue correctly

4. Oral and written communication

5. Knowledge Base 

6. Kaizen approach

Let us understand the above steps in depth so that Incident Management can be done efficiently with happy and satisfied Business Users resulting in growth and less obstructions:

1.Understanding the Application thoroughly: 

This is the base step and very important aspect of Incident Management. Irrespective of any support process, it is very important to know and understand the Application thoroughly for which you are providing support. This can be done by having regular training sessions on the various modules and functionalities of the application. If there are any enhancements or new functionalities being implemented make sure a thorough training is provided to the application support team. Post training sessions it is the responsibility of individual executives to explore the application so that they understand the application completely and have no doubts with respect to functionalities.

2.Understanding the SOW (Scope of work): 

This is another important aspect of Incident management in Application support which the team normally tends to forget. The Team leader or the Project Manager should make the Team aware of the Scope of Work (In-scope and out of scope). The escalation Matrix, the Incident criticality and priority table and the SLAs to be followed with respect to response time and resolution time should be thoroughly explained and understood by the team before handing support for the respective application and client. This really helps the application support team in handling, analyzing incidents efficiently. This also helps in providing responses and resolutions on time depending on the priority and criticality of the incident. 

3.Analyzing the issue correctly: 

Once the team is done with the ground work (Understanding the application and the SOW thoroughly), they are ready to handle Incidents related to that particular application. However, you should have good analytical skills to understand the issue / incident. Once, an issue is registered and assigned to an executive, he/she should carefully go through the issue if it is an email or a ticket or patiently listen to the requestor to understand the issue correctly. If you have any doubts related to it, draft an email with your doubts or ideally have a call with the Requestor to understand the issue correctly clearing all doubts. This phase of understanding the issue is very important as based on it the respective executive can understand whether it is an issue, a change request, its criticality and complexity etc. and accordingly decide the best approach to resolve it.

4.Oral and written communication:

Apart from knowing the Application and SOW, it is very important to have good written and oral communication. This helps the executive in the team to effectively communicate his /her doubts or resolution of the incident to the Business user (Requestor). In order to achieve this the executive has to keep one important thing in mind which is to make sure that the person at the receiving end has understood what the executive is trying to say (communicate). Apart from this the executive has to work on his Written and oral communication depending on the client and application he is providing support. This can be achieved by making an effort of continuously using the required language in his / her oral and written communication in official as well as personal tasks and activities (talking to friends / collogues, writing blogs, posts etc.). Also, developing an attitude of learning from mistakes will help a lot.

5.Knowledge Base:

Knowledge base is a repository of solutions for frequently raised queries and incidents. Maintaining this knowledge base helps in quickly providing solutions and resolutions to incidents and issues which were raised earlier during the course of support span. Maintaining a Knowledge base reduces dependability on the experienced team members as even a new executive can go to the knowledge base and find out the resolution provided to a similar issue raised earlier. However, to achieve this it is very important to maintain Knowledge base in an efficient way. This can be achieved by making someone in-charge of the Knowledge base. He/ she will make sure that Knowledge repository is updated on a regular basis, right information is going in it and is user friendly for any user to log-in and identify a solution.

6.Kaizen approach:

This is an approach which was invented by Japanese which means ‘Continuous Improvement’. Implementing this approach means always keep looking for improvement in the existing process (Incident management). This can be achieved by grooming the team in such a way that they will look out for gaps in the current process and ways to fill those gaps and coming up with ideas to improve the existing process. Weekly or monthly sessions should be conducted where the team can share their observations and ideas. Rewards can be given to executives for identifying gaps and suggesting practical and effective ideas which can implemented easily. 

Conclusion: 

Thus, it can be concluded that though incident management appears to be simple and streamlined process, the Business users are not completely satisfied with the response / resolutions that they get. Hence, it is important to follow above mentioned points to achieve the final goal of permanent and sustainable solution for the application making the Business users Happy. Thus, achieving Organizational growth.

About Author:
Amol Bhembre is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: amol.b@spluspl.com

CHANGE REQUEST IN APPLICATIONS

Change requests are raised so that the business works in a well-mannered way. Change request in application should be managed in such a way that everyone involved understands the changes to be made their importance and impact on other Business Users and applications. If these change requests are not handled properly then it may significantly affect the business.

Steps for executing a Change Request in Application:

It includes initiation, review, plan, implementation and close. This steps can be explained in detail as follows:

STEP 1: Determining the Scope of the Change

• This step includes understanding the requirement of the Change request and how it can be helpful to the business.
• The requirements should be analysed. Also the benefit for making a change should be known.

STEP 2: Reviewing a Change Request

• Understanding the Change request and respective change is very important
• Change requests are generally of two types viz: Standard Changes and Non-Standard changes
• Standard changes are pre-approved changes which are raised on a regular basis and can be executed with any further approvals. Normally, these are small changes and require less effort
• Non-Standard changes are generally enhancements which can impact other applications and Processes. Hence, these changes are discussed in forums (CAB Calls) for approval from the impacting Business users and Decision makers of the Organization
• Hence, Application support team should be able to review the changes correctly and follow the correct process based on the type of the change.

STEP 3: Approval or Rejection

• The Non-standard changes request has to be presented to the change advisory board team.
• The change request may be a low level or minor change request or it can be a high level or major change request
• The change request gets approved by the higher authorities
• The time for approval depends on whether the change request is major or minor
• Ideally the approving team understands the Business benefit of the change from the Requester (Business User), its impact on other applications and the cost and time that will be incurred to develop and implement the respective change request

STEP 4: Communication and Implementation

• The below shown flowchart explains the step 4 in detail:

 Team members should communicate with the higher authorities

Change request should be approved by the higher authorities

Project team needs to be identified and notified

 The project deliverables should be updated

Change request should be implemented and closed

 Conclusion:

• A ticket should be raised for the change request in Application.
• The change request in applications should be proposed only if required.
• Change request should be made considering the time requirement, efforts, process etc.
• After the implementation, the change request should be closed.

About Author:
Mikhil Chauhan is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: mikhil.chauhan@spluspl.com