Recently, we released a refresh for the email campaign app in our Small Business CRM. Here’s a video showing off the new features.

We are recognized for delivering measurable business improvements to Imagetek Inc., a national leader in the enterprise content management (ECM) and business process automation industry.  Using Soffront’s Enterprise CRM, Imagetek was able to integrate all departments and attain automated 360-degree view of clients.

Accomplish increased productivity. While responding to customer requests in CRM, your employees can have access to commonly asked answers and company information directly from your knowledge management system. This eliminates research time, conferencing with other employees and switching between applications while customers wait.

Reduce redundant tasks. In your CRM system, your cases can be updated with information learned during each resolution, and solutions to repetitive issues can be converted into articles in your company’s knowledge base.

Improve customer satisfaction. Customers visiting your company’s web site can find self-service capabilities through a search of your knowledge management system or through interacting with online FAQs that narrow down their problems to an appropriate response. Customers who can’t find resolutions or answers this way can be quickly routed to a live agent. New cases can be automatically generated by the system to alert your agents.

Increase effectiveness. With reports that provide a clear measurement of effectiveness, you will be able to keep complete track of how many calls, emails and questions have been resolved with solutions from the knowledge base and which issues are most active and repetitive. This form of real-time accountability gives you the power to respond to customer needs, build knowledge where it is appropriate, and track the effectiveness and  productivity of customer facing employees.

Engage and include your customers
In a recovering economy, it usually takes more time, money, and hard work to get new customers, and it’s important to hold on to the customers you already have. An easy-to-use and well maintained self service portal will offer convenience, timely and relevant information, and overall a better experience for your customers. Use analytics and reports to measure customer loyalty and behavior and gather feedback from integrated surveys. A self-service solution can increase your transparency and maintain your customer’s trust.

Generate more revenues
An often overlooked benefit of self-service is its ability to generate revenues. A self-service solution with analytics and reporting capabilities can give you crucial insights into your customer behavior resulting in up-sell or cross-sell opportunities. By reducing incoming calls and emails, it frees your support staff to take on revenue generating activities or more complex tasks.

Provide a multi-channel experience
Today’s self-service solutions have evolved from being simple knowledge base searches and online FAQs. Customers expect fast resolutions and expect it from different sources and multiple service channels. Effective self-service includes knowledge base with intelligent searches, interactive answers, social media support,  feedbacks, live chat, targeted downloads, email escalation, diagnostic tools, etc.  A flexible set of access methods helps your customers find information based on their preference. In a successful self-service offering, different channels work seamlessly with each other and yet provide quality and relevant information which can be easily accessed.

You may be solving customer problems with known or researched solutions. Some problems, though, cannot be resolved in this way. These problems involve the design of your product or software. Many companies today use defect track applications to help them track and manage these issues. These same systems can also help them manage feature and enhancement requests, and help plan and document product releases.

Frequently the customer service and the defect tracking applications are separate pieces of software. Usually they do not talk to one another. So when a support problem needs to be reported to engineering, first the support agent needs to document the problem, and then the engineer has to duplicate this data into the defect tracking system. And the engineer may not have access to all the information collected by customer service, and may have to retrace steps already taken by the support agent. Companies who get the best results from their customer service and defect tracking applications are those who use integrated systems. Maintaining two different applications has many costs and issues.

Here are seven reasons to integrate customer service and defect tracking:

• Customer defects are identified and resolved faster.
  
• The cost of collecting defect data is greatly reduced.
• Development and QA engineers spend more time working on issues and less time collecting information about bugs and defects.
• When the defect is resolved, customers are notified more rapidly.
• Customer support agents’ time is better used leading to better productivity.
• Customer support and development use a common language and terminology, which makes their communication more effective.
• Comprehensive reporting and analysis of customer-related defects is now possible.

Small to medium sized (SMB) companies have many choices of CRM software options, yet choosing a solution that actually meets their needs is a tremendous challenge. SMB have needs that are as great as any large company but often do not possess the financial resources. Enterprise CRM solutions are far too expensive and complex for SMB companies. If you are looking for a SMB CRM software, here are three tips to short-list vendors.

Demand stability and experience in the SMB Market

Make certain the CRM you are considering is from a vendor experienced in the SMB market. Select a vendor who understands SMB challenges and has done measurably successful implementations for companies in this market. That experience can make a difference between success and failure of your CRM initiative. Be sure to ask for references and talk to their customers.

Watch pricing and scalability

Many large enterprise vendors are entering the SMB market with a watered down version of their product in an attempt to match pricing points. Users have discovered too late that to get all the functionality they need, the cost per user skyrockets well beyond the initial budget considerations.

On the other hand, vendors that have focused on the smaller businesses are trying to serve the SMB with a less scalable version. They primarily offers ‘contact management systems’ which are too small for company-wide implementations and can’t offer robust system insights into a 360-view of the customer. They cannot match the needs of selling into larger accounts either.

Look for a CRM solution that is built specifically for the SMB market, and yet offers the rich capabilities that are typically found in enterprise CRM solutions.

Look for ease of integration

Some CRM systems are good for one business unit but have little capability for another. As a result, some companies have two systems – one for business units like marketing and sales and another for customer support – which aren’t well integrated.

Look for systems that can provide a solution that is well integrated and equally strong across a company wide initiative. Avoid the need to purchase expensive add‐on modules or applications as use of CRM grows. Plus built‐in integration with back office applications such as Intuit QuickBooks may be useful. Compatibility with Outlook or Google Apps is another feature to consider.

To find out how we can help you similarly in your organization, call us at 1-800-SOFFRONT or email us at marketing@soffront.com.

Part II – After you rollout CRM: Measure and Fine-Tune

Measure user adoption regularly:  Measure your adoption KPIs (key performance indicators) regularly (at least once every month) and realign your business goals accordingly. The KPIs for user adoption vary from CRM usage (number of sign-ins, number of records entered, time spent in CRM, old and obsolete data, etc) to departmental goals of sales, marketing, and customer support.

Provide only one version of data to everyone: The quality of your CRM data is absolutely critical for user adoption. If your users lose their trust in the data from your CRM, they will reject the system. Review, scrub, and de-dupe your data before you import into CRM. Review the data weekly for correctness and relevancy. Provide all your departments with only one version of data to keep everyone on the same page.

Tie adoption to compensation: Identify and reward your strongest adopters. Review how your employees have used CRM during performance reviews. Announce and acknowledge the strongest adopters within the company and promote how they follow best practices.

Provide training including “training the trainers”: If your CRM is intuitive, you probably won’t need to provide excessive training for your users. However, make sure your users are familiar with the best practices of using the system to be productive. Conduct user trainings specifically targeted for different user roles. Ensure that all the users in that role follow the same procedures. Train the administrators extensively so that they are prepared to provide the first line of support and answer user questions.

In this three part series, we will explore the key factors behind user adoption.

Part I – Before you get ready to rollout CRM – plan, plan, and plan some more

Define what CRM means for your company:  Every organization’s definition of CRM is different. Before you begin to look at technologies and CRM vendors, define your CRM goals and review your existing customer facing processes. Involve all your key departments – IT, sales, marketing, support, and finance – to standardize and streamline your processes.

You should also define the success criteria and metrics in terms of user adoption, expected business results, and ROI (Return on Investment).  At the end of this exercise, you should have a clear idea on how CRM will support your business strategy.

Plan your rollouts in phases: Plan your CRM rollouts in phases so that your users get to experience CRM in bite-sized pieces. Start with your sales or support department. Make sure your super users and users are on board and their expectations are clearly defined and measurable. Plan to start with a pilot rollout containing a minimum feature set.

Decide who will own CRM: Specify a department that will “own” CRM. Do this in collaboration with your key departments. In many organizations, the process of selecting a CRM is owned by IT.  However, many successful CRM rollouts show us that end user groups like sales or marketing is more adept in owning this process.

Elect a CRM champion: Elect a “champion” from the department that will own CRM. Give the champion overall accountability to drive user adoption and evangelize CRM within the organization.

Identify administrators and super users: Select administrators and “super users” from key departments who will represent their departments during the rollout and build a consensus around CRM within the department. Make sure the super users have sufficient influence to represent their departments.

Involve your executives: Get your executives to commit to CRM around a common set of goals and objectives and a mutually agreed upon timeline.

Consolidate your customer service systems and processes 

Like most companies, you probably have multiple systems to manage your customer service processes. Often, these systems are based on different technologies and remain in silos. If you haven’t done it already, invest in a CRM system that would combine all these systems together.

Review your existing customer service process and find out the weak links. Where are the bottlenecks? Are your customers dropping off at a certain point in your process? Which steps in the process are taking the most time and manual interventions? Use your CRM system to streamline and implement an efficient customer service process that is followed by all your of departments.

Utilize multiple customer service channels

Today’s customers expect a fast response and expect it from multiple service channels. Effective service channels include customer portals, mobile apps, knowledge bases, interactive FAQs, social media, web chat, and email. Social and mobile channels are increasingly becoming the preferred channel of choice for customers to interact with businesses.

A flexible set of access methods helps your customers find information based on their preference. In a successful customer centric strategy, different service channels work seamlessly with each other and yet provide quality and relevant information that can be easily accessed.

Provide a self-service experience

It usually takes more time, money, and hard work to get new customers, and it’s important to hold on to the customers you already have. An easy-to-use, 24×7 self-service portal will offer convenience, timely and relevant information, and overall a better experience for your customers. Customers can view what they need at their own pace including order history, tickets, payments, answers to questions, etc.

Use analytics to measure customer loyalty and behavior and gather feedback from integrated surveys. A self-service solution can increase your transparency and maintain your customer’s trust.

Empower all your departments

Make sure all of your departments see the same customer information and history. For example, if your customer calls your support number to ask about an open order, do not transfer the line to your billing department. Make sure all customer information – address, contacts, notes, emails, support tickets, quotes, purchase orders, and invoices are available in one place for easy reference.

Use an up-to-date knowledge base to provide your support staff easy access to answers, which are consistent for everyone.

Allow easy escalations within your company

Provide a clear line of escalation within your service departments that goes all the way to a senior executive. Make the escalation path and contact information readily available to your customers.

Set up automatic escalations and red flags in your CRM system. For example, set up an escalation to automatically notify your support manager if a critical issue remains unresolved over a certain amount of time.

Make it easy for customers to provide feedback

Make it easy for your customers to provide feedback. Invest in a Voice of Customer (VoC) program and make rating and feedback collection a part of all your support channels. Setup a closed loop feedback process that ensures that every feedback receives your attention.