You may have seen reports and surveys conducted among customers claiming that quality and pricing aren’t the only factors modern customers consider when deciding whether they want to buy your product or service. Nowadays, customer experience plays a determining role in consumers’ purchasing decisions. Speaking by numbers, 73% of respondents of a survey conducted by PwC say that customer experience is the key factor that helps them make the final choice when considering companies and brands. Moreover, despite being loyal, 32% of consumers say that they will walk away from their favorite brand after just one bad experience. But don’t be naive to think that you’ll lose only one or two customers. One viral post on Facebook by a dissatisfied customer is enough to ruin your reputation built for years with hard work.
Now, when you know how important customer experience is, you should find ways to elevate your customer service. And even if it’s good enough, you should polish it until it shines because there is always room for improvement.
Sure, there are various methods of improving the service quality, but we'll concentrate on one specific means - CRM system in this blog post. Let’s see how CRM improves customer service and support.
#1 Have a 360-Degree Holistic View of Each Customer Data and Interaction History
For you to understand well how exactly CRM systems can improve customer service by providing a comprehensive view of customer data and the history of their interaction with your brand, let me tell you a real-life situation.
Recently I was having an issue with my internet connection and had to contact my Internet provider for support. When I called the operator, I was asked to provide my personal details like name, phone number, contract ID, etc., and describe the problem I was facing. When he redirected my call to the customer support department, I had to repeat my personal information and my story. I am sure you guess what would happen if he referred me to a third person - a technical specialist, for example; I would have to repeat everything for the third time.
CRM systems eliminate this issue. The moment customers contact your company, you see their personal information, active, expired, or terminated contracts, recent purchases, previous support cases, and the history of customers’ interaction with your company besides their phone numbers. Armed with this information, you can cut down the time spent on asking for personal details, thus reducing the problem resolution time. Moreover, you understand the nature of the issue better due to having reference to previous similar cases since every interaction is recorded and saved in your CRM system. More importantly, your customers don't have to repeat everything over and over, which is really frustrating. As a result, they will be happy and satisfied with the quality of your customer service.
#2 Reduce Response and Problem Resolution Time with Email Templates
Modern customers expect companies to respond to their support requests immediately. However, a recent study conducted among 1 000 companies shows that 62% of surveyed companies never respond to customer support emails. Even if they do, the average response time of handling customer support requests is 12 hours. This is way too long!
By introducing a CRM system to your customer service, your company will reduce the response time to minutes and handle customer support inquiries faster. If you have international clients and there is a big time difference between your countries, the CRM software helps you send automatic emails and inform your client that his email is successfully received and will be handled ASAP. Usually, these emails include a tracking code like Case-6548 or Ticket-04044 and helpful links to the FAQ section where customers may find the answer to their question.
Another option of automating your customer support team’s work, which directly leads to response time reduction, is the use of premade email templates. They allow answering the most popular questions within seconds by selecting the corresponding template from the system. But Salesforce has gone even further by creating a Knowledge Base that is a part of Service Cloud. It’s a collection of articles and relevant information about your services and products that service agents can use to answer customer queries almost immediately.
#3 Improve Cooperation Across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Teams
As mentioned in our blog posts on how CRM systems support the sales process and marketing activities, the improvement of cooperation across your teams is one of the most beneficial aspects of CRM software.
By analyzing customer support inquiries, your marketing department can identify customers’ needs and create educational content - brochures, video tutorials, or blog posts aimed to educate your audience about your products and services.
By studying support cases received from clients, your sales team can identify the frequently requested information and use it as a “hook” for their sales activities.
To sum up, today’s businesses should remember that customer experience plays a significant role in modern consumers’ purchasing decisions. So, companies should invest lots of time, effort, and money to improve their customer service; otherwise, they risk losing their customers. And as you could see, CRM software for customer service purposes is one of the options for improving service quality.