Oberyn’s Classic Guide to Defeat ‘Mountain’ Clegane

When Tyrion asked for ‘Trial by Combat’, who knew we are in for a delight of a battle of the Viper and the Bull?! What that finale revealed was the agile swiftness and light foot of the Viper against the ruthless strength of the Elder Clegane. Something every business faces on daily basis is a similar tussle while handling the customers.

It is not a post about Game of Thrones. Although, it sure is about bringing that agility while managing your issues. Customer satisfaction is no more in play. It is an old parameter to judge the efficacy of your operations. Customer delight is the demand for today’s businesses. One of the very popular phrases that come to my mind is ‘Every support ticket is an opportunity for customer delight.’

Easier said than done! When a customer is virtually charging at you and swinging a 5’5” steel, you can’t think much about producing a delight. You need a guard to defend yourself. You need an early response to shy away from the arc of the swing. And, you must be swift to dodge the next swing. To win a battle, defense alone isn’t enough. You need to find that weak spot and that gap to pounce back!

Your Spear Against the Sword

The best way to defend against the daunting challenge is the preemptive action instead of the reflex. The Delight Stage of the Inbound Marketing process focuses on converting your customers into promoters. While you define the strategy to achieve this feat, it is imperative that you focus on a number of activities that lead to the prevention of the cause than fixing one(s).

The shield of Oberyn is the reflexive action(s) you take while handling customer complaints. Finding the root cause of those issues is also a defense mechanism to avoid the wrath of Sir Gregor Clegane. The preventive action is to create a practice of engaging with the customer soon after they have made the purchase. Entering a conversation that starts with “How can we help?” often leads to mellow the customer’s agitation.

Service Standards Matter

Of Course, they do! But that remains relevant even though you are selling Products. Amazon went ahead and built its own warehouse and logistics. Why? To increase profits? Rubbish! Over a period of time, they realized the importance of service standards. And, they could not fetch results simply by relying upon their partners managing the inventory or delivering couriers.

Flipkart, on the other hand, uses 5 logistics partners to manage one network of eKart. Is saving taxes their goal here? Could be! However, to manage a large diaspora such as the Indian subcontinent, they must channel their resources in the best manner possible to have complete control to deliver the service standards that can compete with Amazon’s.

CRM: Oberyn’s Spear

Let’s put the first thought out of equation - that CRM is a luxury only large businesses can afford or need. Everyone needs it. And, everyone can have it. Based on the size of your business, you can find the right match for you. E.g. SuiteCRM is one of the Open Source CRMs which is an ideal fit for growing businesses. And, if you can afford to spend some moolah, you can look at its enterprise counterpart: SugarCRM.

However, owning a spear won’t bring you in any closer vicinity of being a warrior to Oberyn. You need to sharpen your spear and learn how to handle it. You need to bring yourself to the level where a preemptive action is a reflex. You need to be able to form a strategy to tackle a set of variables and dance like a Viper.

You need to learn the art of Spear handling and be mentally battle-ready. In the real world, you can achieve a similar feat using CRM extensions. The likely tools you must have are Survey Automation and Ticket Management System. Amongst these two, Survey Automation is a preemptive tool.

Survey Automation via CRM

Sugar has recently introduced a Survey Module soon after the GDPR saga. It is very much basic and good enough for a stick fight in your backyard with a 5-year-old. For a real-world CRM application, a certain degree of automation is not an extravagant feature you may or may not have. It is what you need. If you are expecting your customers to respond to your survey forms or survey feedback forms, you must be able to trigger targeted communications based on real-time events.

There are a number of web-based (CRM Independent) survey tools with the names of mammals in them. These web apps do offer APIs and enterprise versions for CRM integration. There is cost and there are limitations as these apps are still not part of the CRM. Although we do not indulge in these ideas, data security is certainly of concern in this kind of setup.

Think Different to be Different

The reason why Oberyn’s skill is unique than the others lies in his adventurous life. The man traveled the world, studied poisons and served with the mercenaries called ‘The Second Sons.’ Virtually, the Westeros and the Essos together would form the current shape of Europe. The general belief is that the British believe in sophistication (even in their ways to fight battles). And, French and Spanish have it their own way.

Although Oberyn lived in the Westeros, he traveled the world and adopted some critical ingredients to make him a better warrior. Like in Braavos, they refer the art of using the sword as - dancing. Bringing our conversation to the point – there are SugarCRM survey modules available which enable your CRM to have Survey & Polls Creation, Survey Automation, Survey Controllers, and Reporting features.

Our Sugar and SuiteCRM Survey plugin – the Survey Rocket is just the tool you can use to enhance the capabilities of your CRM. Using our SugarCRM Survey Plugin, you can create surveys, configure automation logic, integrate skip logic, set up triggers, and more. The beauty of it is, that you would be doing so from your CRM. Your data remains on your servers. You can pipe the data from & out of your CRM into your survey forms.

Preemptive Reflexes

Training and Training alone is the way to achieve that. However, when you remove the human intervention from the process, you get a task-master at work. Once integrated, our Sugar and SuiteCRM Survey Module will take care of a lot of background processes of creation and triggering. However, for the software to do its job, you need to configure the logic.

Therefore, you need to identify the best strategy that will work for your business. You can’t fight the Mountain and Lord Snow in the same way, can you? In a similar way, there would be a list of use cases where you need a survey mechanism. Based on each of these use cases, you need to figure out feedback emails and response emails based on specific events. An ideal scenario here is, that you need not worry about how to fetch CRM details into a web-based survey tool. If the data string is available in your CRM database, using our SugarCRM Survey Plugin, you would be able to put that data to use.

A lot of times, we get new customers, who tried some other product and they failed. Oftentimes, the software isn’t the only issue. Every software, you choose to install, comes with Pros & Cons. The humans manage the software that automates various activities. Before deploying any automation software into your operations, you need a clear strategy. Why you need it, what you aim to achieve using that, and how will you track its efficacy?

This human factor is equally important for the software to work. E.g. You choose to install SAP or Salesforce without a clear strategy and the software will fail. As you are aware that it has worked for hundreds and thousands of others, you would view the situation differently. However, while running back & forth, the ROI period gets smaller as you lost time just to make the software work. Oberyn evaluated every strategy and every move the Mountain had. But not thoroughly! He would not be that careless around that beast otherwise. Eventually, it cost him his life.

AppJetty - Survey Rocket

Our SugarCRM Survey Plugin offers comprehensive features to manage every facet of survey creation and survey automation. It is a CRM extension, and therefore; you do not have the hassles of integration and worries of data security. With some of the killer USPs such as Data Piping and Skip Logic, you can build intelligent surveys based on the customer data you already have and prompt questions as per the predefined responses your customers pick.

That is what classifies as to be battle-ready. If you have the strategy, our SugarCRM survey plugin can deliver the results for you. Moreover, Survey Rocket is going rounds for continuous development sprints. In the last 6 months, we have upgraded our extension to be better, meaner, and more effective. Going forward, we will be introducing interactive reporting mechanisms than what we already have. You would be able to trigger surveys based on the NPS (Net Promoter Score) besides the current scoring system that we have.

We do not judge the business by the type of CRM you are using. Hence, we offer similar features for Suite and Sugar. Additionally, Survey Rocket offers 3 plans that target small to large enterprise users. So, you can choose the plan as per the needs of your business. Not always you would find one of top selling product on Sugar Outfitter and Suite Store to be available at such cost-effective pricing. Opt for a trial today!

Red Viper vs. the Mountain

The finale of the duel between the raw strength of the Mountain and the wits of Red Viper was lose-lose. What if the Viper had a counsel? What would have happened if had listened to Tyrion and took the fight more seriously? AppJetty is that counsel you might need while managing your CRM. Our developers have built the Survey Automation platform from scratch. You would always be able to rely upon our expertise to manage your customization requirements – be it for the Survey functionalities or any other you may seek for the CRM.

You can opt for Survey Rocket trial from AppJetty as well as the Sugar Outfitter and Suite Store. We look forward to seeing you on the horizon.