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