Some things are just better together. Customer relationship management (CRM) and customer support software make a great couple. They complement each other, make the other’s job easier and work together toward a common goal. A powerful CRM platform coupled with intuitive customer support software will take your customer service and your customer satisfaction to the next level.
A good CRM compiles all of your data in one place so that you can keep track of your existing and prospective customers while customer support software keeps track of customer issues, complaints and tickets. To make the most of this combination there are a few strategies you can implement to make things work more smoothly.
Here are a few CRM hacks that can make customer support software more efficient:
The first thing you should do is to make sure that both platforms have access to the other's data. Set up a bi-directional link between the two so that each platform can pull data from the other. Better yet, integrate the two platforms so that everything is in one place and the entire company is working from one platform.
By combining them, customer support can use the customer profiles and data from your CRM to make their service better and sales can see each customer’s history of issues and service tickets to adjust their sales strategy accordingly.
Make things easier for yourself by emphasizing clean data entry to all of your employees. This will ensure that your data is error-free and duplicate free. It then makes the cross-sharing of data between departments more accurate and efficient.
Make sure that every single team member is responsible for keeping their data clean instead of just handing it off to a lower level employee like an intern. This will help you to keep your data consistent and to reduce the probability of duplication.
For instance, if you have the same company entered in your database three different ways i.e. MasterSolve, MasterSolve Company and MasterSolve Inc, it will confuse. Imagine if your support team is then trying to help a MasterSolve customer and can’t figure out which company name is the correct one. No Bueno! Conversely, if you have the salesperson who has MasterSolve as a customer do all of their data entry, they will consistently enter the company’s name the same way, therefore reducing the possibility of duplicates.
When making customer fields in your CRM keep your customer support team in mind. Make sure that they are properly labelled so that there is no confusion when helping customers. For example, a label named “Customer Size” may only have the field variables of “National” vs “International.” Then you may have a completely different label named “Employee Count” where you identify the number of employees at the company. You can see how this may become confusing, especially when dealing with customers who want a quick resolution.
Never stop training! Training is essential to keep your team on board with any of your software platforms. It is especially essential if there are always new features being added and new updates to your software. However, when it comes to your CRM make sure that there is always a customer support voice in the room. They will able to vocalize what the support team needs and how each new feature and update will affect the support team to make them more or less efficient. They can advocate for a new feature or raise a red flag when they think it will cause problems for their team.
So, bring your CRM and customer support together today to form a strong partnership. Your CRM can not only ensure that your sales and marketing teams are on track but it will benefit your customer support team as well.
