A recent Analyst Insight December 2012 report from the Aberdeen Group entitled “” highlights the role of CRM in empowering global companies to achieve their customer service goals. Aberdeen notes that firms need to be more focused than ever before on anticipating and addressing the needs of their premier clients. As noted below, Aberdeen’s research finds that the highest priorities for firms in the area of customer service have to do with enhancing the state of the customer experience, improving business and financial performance, increasing worker productivity, and lowering operating expenses.
To accomplish these customer care goals, better understand customer purchasing preferences and decisions, and ultimately execute and grow client retention programs, firms need to not only strive to collect more data on customers and prospects, but to also share and utilize it more frequently across the enterprise. Over the years, firms have continued to invest in the latest and greatest systems in an effort to give more timely and relevant client information to customer service and sales reps. This has backfired in many cases, though, because firms’ technology systems often do not communicate well. The problem is that the service rep does not always know where to go to get the answer to a question since it can be found in multiple systems. If a customer service agent has to spend so much time perusing various internal and external systems to properly resolve just one phone call, he certainly is not going to be well positioned or motivated to collaborate with his colleagues after the fact, particularly with the ones in a completely different department or location. Unfortunately, the poor and slow customer service exhibited on the call is compounded by the fact that cross-sell opportunities are missed and even will continue to stay unknown.
As Aberdeen observes, lack of integration between systems is the primary driver for firms realizing they need to deploy CRM or consider an upgrade. Other pressures forcing firms to place a greater emphasis on customer care and attaining an instant, unified view of constantly evolving client data is the fact that their market is becoming increasingly competitive as seen in the following chart.
can help alleviate all of these pressures. The open architecture of Microsoft Dynamics CRM facilitates tight integration with numerous data feeds to bring in quality, real-time client info. With CRM available right from their Outlook, customer service agents and other key business stakeholders will find it much easier to access the right data on the right customer at the right time. As a result, service levels will increase and customers will be thrilled.
Customer Effective has been working on Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementations since the product’s inception. Over the past decade, we have completed thousands of CRM implementations and custom xRM projects that have helped firms thwart off budding competitors and exceed their customer care goals of improving metrics on first-contact resolution, client retention, staff utilization, average call handle time, and average revenue per customer.
To learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics CRM can convert your client insights into profitable action and accelerate your ROI, please .
Post by: Kevin Wessels,
