A while back I walked into the President's office of a $350-million dollar manufacturer who had just returned from lunch with a key distributor customer. The long look on his face suggested that lunch had not gone well. He explained that what was meant to be a gracious lunch of appreciation with a top-tier client turned into him getting his tail chewed out for 90 minutes.
Apparently, sitting somewhere as a post-it note on a customer service rep's workstation, was a 45-day old service problem with one of his guest's major clients. My prospect was repeatedly pumped over lunch with questions like the following:
- Why didn't he have insight into this issue?
- Why had he not brought a solution to the lunch?
- Why didn't his customer service rep know that the guest was a major customer?
- Isn't the lifetime value of the distributor’s business worth attention at the highest level?
To avoid a scenario such as this from unfolding, there needs to be an effective business process in place for sharing information. provides a shared database and has an extensive case tracking system. The beauty of using cases is that not only is a structure provided to the customer service rep, but cases provide the ability to share the issue and related activity with the account rep and managers. All they need to do is view the account record. In addition, classifying cases provides insight into the bottlenecks and prompts discussion on ways to correct.
Having one view of the customer relationship provides everyone in the organization with the same insight -- customer service, sales, and management. , dashboards, and record coding can keep everyone on the same page regarding the open issues and the lifetime value of the client relationship.
How, with Dynamics CRM in place, a president before leaving the office for a lunch or any meeting can review all past and open issues of a key customer. He/she will have the confidence that issues are being recorded, date-and time-stamped upon creation, and processes/workflows have been established to escalate an issue if necessary. No more heartburn over lunch.
If you would like further insight on how your CRM can provide you with this information or other ways your CRM can improve your day-to-day operations -- please call me 800-897-9807 X224 or .
by InfoGrow
