Good customer service needs a CRM

I'm always astounded to hear that many scaling businesses don't have a CRM. This is a problem on both sides. For your team, customers require a high level of management via phone/email. Often, staff end up responding manually to the same queries across the customer base, which is a waste of time. For the customer, they get a poorer service too. They might be called multiple times about the same product or issue, leading to irritation and poor relationships.

As your services/products become more complex, you also grow your customer base and staff count. Your customer service requirement becomes exponentially more complicated. Providing high quality customer service will become more difficult over time without the capability to adapt to this.

Common issues are:

• An agent is not easily able to see a single source of truth on a customer, containing all of their information and history.
• An agent is manually calling/emailing a customer to provide updates, when these could be easily automated.
• Key parts of the customer journey are not automated, which creates a high manual time requirement for your business (e.g. customer submits information in a Word document, and one of your team manually transcribes that into some other software).
• Customers cannot address their difficulties through an online helpdesk.

?Solution

Investing in a CRM system is well worth the money. With everyone busy and under pressure, you need a system where you can quickly access your customer history and make informed decisions about your communications.

There are off-the-shelf solutions for this: customer service management software like ZenDesk or FreshDesk may mitigate this. However, your requirements may be more complex and require a very unique process. In such a situation, you’d approach a custom software provider like us to help.