Improving Customer Experience with CRM

Customer Experience is the key to good business. Without good references from the existing customers, a business can struggle to grow and get more business. A bad reference due to a bad customer experience can cause the business to deteriorate drastically.

Customer experience also means providing the best customer service post-sales. An existing customer facing a problem with any product or service should be able to contact the company and get ready support to solve the problem.

A CRM should be able to manage customers in order to keep them happy and generate positive references from them. This is possible only if the system allows proper capturing of customer problems and complaints and then proper tracking of the complaints to successful resolution in as less time as possible.

To enable good customer experience, the system should provide the customer with a system and easy access to file complaints within the system; and also provide an interface to find out and track the status of the complaint and what is being done to solve the problem. This is enabled by a Ticket management system. On filing an issue or complaint, the system gives a ticket or reference number to the customer. The customer uses this ticket to track his issue and get the resolution in a timely manner. Some good CRM systems can also provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with pre-defined response and resolution time. These are time periods which act as thresholds beyond which if the response or resolution is not provided to the customer, then the issue is highlighted or escalated to the customer as well as the company management. This serves as a guarantee for timely resolution in cases where customer engagements involve legally binding service level agreements.

A good CRM also provides the sales manager ability to revert to his customers in a timely manner with all information sought by the customer. The customer can ask for a variety of documents like quotations, proposals, feature-lists, and request meetings, product demos, client referrals. All of this should be available and manageable within the CRM for the sales manager to revert back to the customer.

The CRM should provide good Calendaring and Scheduling features to the sales manager to respond to the customer in a timely manner. This includes responses both before and after sales.

Therefore the key tools in a CRM that help provide good customer experience are Case Management, SLA management, Document Management, Quotation and Invoicing, and Calendar/Activity management.