When I took on the responsibility of managing the Customer Support office, I did not fully realize the impact of the challenges I would face. This office was primarily set up to implement systems to replace manual processes. I had the initial challenge of shortening the turn around time and the length of the queue of pending mail. As the existing process was manual, the CRM system that was being used was not being used efficiently, which in turn did not allow any benefit to be derived from it. My challenge was to take this system and improve the customer support reps’ efficiency by ensuring that processes were streamlined so that they could work more efficiently and achieve significant benefits from the system and thereby increase customer satisfaction levels.
I was able to do this, hence the test of design turned out ok. But as a test of effectiveness, it was found wanting. That was primarily because these things require people to do their operational bit to succeed. So this was probably one of those early opportunities I had of experiencing the concept of deficiency versus efficiency, something which I would encounter more often as the years went by. Where earlier there had been no process, no systems, and no ownership – clearly a deficiency, we now had all of these, but maybe not working as efficiently as was desirable. This led to disappointment and a fall in credibility initially but with some amount of effort and rallying, an improvement was seen in the approach towards handling the vast amounts of incoming communications regarding inquiries and grievances. We soon realized that this was a function not only of the existence of processes and systems, but also one of operational efficiencies involving the timely availability of all customer information to the customer support reps.
We had a CRM system that handled mail and chat very well. It helped track the emails received, answered, pending and gave us reports on the customer support reps’ productivity. Analyzing these reports helped us plan to make changes to the way we assigned the reps and team compositions to allow efficient handling and quicker turn around of customer communications. What we had going was a CRM platform that allowed for organized management of email communication with our consumers and customers. What we needed was a system that would also provide timely and complete customer information to the customer support reps instantly.
The first thing we did was go in for an upgrade of the system which allowed greater flexibility in configuring business rules and in generating analytical reports. We now had an upgraded system that allowed us the flexibility of configuring business rules in the system to help route consumer and customer questions, complaints and suggestions in an efficient and automated way to the right customer support reps assigned for this purpose. The next thing to do was to integrate our Order Processing System and the in-house customer database with the CRM system to allow the customer support reps to have instant access to order details and customer profiles to help with resolving their queries and problems in a quick and efficient manner. The integration of the order tracking system, the online services customer databases and the orders databases with the CRM platform was taken on as a full fledged project which was implemented successfully. Once this had been achieved, the customer support reps had instant access to all customer information as required. This went a long way in responding and resolving customer queries and problems.
Once this had been achieved the next target was to try and reduce the turnaround time even further by ensuring that the pending queues were as short as possible at any given time. An analysis of the incoming customer complaints, queries and suggestions showed that a lot of it was standard questions/queries/complaints that could be addressed online by providing the customers and consumers with an online help portal. This led to the design and development of the Customer Support Portal and its integration with the CRM platform.
The Customer Support Portal that was built was an extension of the platform. It allowed the consumers and customers avail of extensive online help across a variety of topics in all the online services and products on offer. If their questions could not be answered, then they had the opportunity of using structured online forms to submit their specific queries. As these forms were structured, it allowed us to control how these forms were processed in the CRM system in an efficient way. The business rules in the CRM system being configurable, we were able to make changes to the rules as the situation demanded and accordingly modify the forms and questions on the customer support portal.
The complete implementation of the CRM System and the Customer Support Portal integrated with it was a success and helped improve customer service to a great extent and achieve higher levels of Customer Satisfaction.
