This article was originally published on ThinkHDI.com in September 2020.
One of the most critical relationships in any business is the one with customers. Without customers, there is no business. From an asset perspective, customers are one of the most important, right there behind employees, for many companies. The goal is to keep customers happy. Retaining customers and keeping them happy only happens when support teams demonstrate that they understand their customers’ needs. How should organizations better understand what their customers care about? The answer is easy: leveraging feedback.
Leveraging CRM
Every interaction that a support agent has with a customer is a touchpoint that provides tremendous insight. A CRM system used well can be a competitive advantage for any technical support or service management team. Customer-centric support teams recognize the importance of documenting all relevant interaction details as part of each case. Armed with the right CRM strategy, organizations can establish continuous improvement cultures that leverage data and customer feedback.
Your CRM Strategy and Customer Value
As part of your team’s CRM strategy, feedback has to be viewed as essential to providing customers with more value. The reality is that most people don’t want to have to ask for support. Taking interactions, especially repeat interactions, isn’t something most support professionals want to do regularly either. When leveraged effectively, case information can provide value, eventually freeing up the team’s capacity to tackle more value-added initiatives. Ensure that there is a plan to include the following items as part of your CRM strategy.
Be mindful of what you are collecting.
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on customer privacy. People care about their data. What are the must-haves to identify who a customer is? Don’t ask for more than you need. While we all want to gain insights into the customer profile, we often ask more questions than required. Tech support professionals ask lots of questions to check a box as part of quality scorecards. If you are not going to use a data point, remove the agents’ requirement to ask that question to customers. Doing so improves the experience for everyone while ensuring only relevant details are captured in CRM.
Eliminate waste.
Eliminating waste ensures that the only things that remain provide value are the essence of Lean continuous improvement. Keep case or ticketing requirements to a minimum. Align with agents and the business on what the essentials are for capturing what happened during an interaction. Anything more than that is over-production, and ultimately, a waste of effort.
Understand trends.
What do your customers care about? What are their wants, needs, and pain points? Are there common issues being experienced with particular products, software, or hardware configurations that require a more in-depth investigation? Someone on the team should regularly be reviewing what’s documented throughout interactions beyond just assessing the quality of the agent. Understanding trends can provide insights into more improvement opportunities and potential self-service prospects.
Address the issues.
If customers need support, leaning heavily on tech support or service management teams for troubleshooting, something must be wrong. Could there be fundamental product quality issues? What about improvement opportunities with manuals, website content, or generalized product information? Customers who need support do so because they have hit a wall with the resources available to them. Something is missing. If there is a gap, address the issues by figuring out the root cause, and raising those improvement opportunities. Doing so might uncover process opportunities to help the broader business enhance their deliverables as well. Use the data in CRM to drive continuous improvement. Take all customer data and feed it back into the business to help drive improvements to products and services.
Provide self-service content.
Armed with trends and insights, prioritizing developing self-service content should be a regular task within the team. Providing customers with access to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), decision-trees, or support videos on YouTube can be incredibly valuable. Most people would prefer to avoid contacting support. The more curated self-service content can be made accessible to customers, the more time can be freed up. Dedicated headcount is often at a premium. Provide project work opportunities for agents to work on these directly can be a tremendous source of engagement, too. Leverage the trends found, and it’s possible to produce a customer experience that makes it easier for everyone.
Final Thoughts
There’s an abundance of CRM systems used across tech support and service management teams. Whether an organization is using one of the big CRM players, or a company has an older unsupported offering, it’s what the company does with customer feedback that makes the difference. Using customer feedback to improve processes, products, and services is essential to creating greater value for everyone, both customers and employees.
