The situation
At the start of 2015, one of our goals was to improve the way we were engaging with our customers. We knew there were several things we could do better and so 2015 became the year that we started our programme to improve customer experience.
From the customer surveys we had undertaken, it was clear that Support was an area of concern for our customers. Customers wanted us to be more responsive and they also wanted a system that enabled them to keep in touch with their support calls and the status of those calls.
We realised that our current Support system did not support our customers the way we wanted it to. However, there were several small hurdles that we needed to overcome. The first being that many of our staff were reluctant to change to a different system, because the incumbent system was simple for them to use and it allowed a lot of flexibility. For example, staff did not have to associate an incoming email request for support with a case so many requests stayed in the system detached from case records. This may have kept it straight forward for consultants but for reporting and administration, it was not effective.
Another issue was that although we provided a web portal for customers to log in to and check on their support cases, most customers chose to keep track of their cases via email. Although email is a very convenient tool, it has its disadvantages. If you want to expose information in emails to a wider audience than just those in the To or CC fields, and keep track of all the conversations related to a case, then email does not work well.
A further weakness with our incumbent system was the lack of reporting. It was difficult for us to get any insight into how long cases had been open, how many cases there were for each consultant, for each solution, for each priority level.
Customers were telling us that we weren’t responsive enough but we had no way of seeing if this was in fact the case.
The solution
Dynamics CRM was a solution that we already used as our Customer Relationship Management system, so we were familiar with its functionality. It was used by a few staff in the business, mostly the admin team to track client details, marketing for marketing lists and emails, and the business development team to record leads and opportunities. We could see the benefits of extending CRMs use to the management of our support cases.
After analysis of comparative support systems, a project was commenced to implement the Service component of Dynamics CRM and a project team was put in place.
Our CRM Consultant, Donka Tzolova, is very experienced in the design and implementation of the Case functionality in CRM having implemented it many times in the past for a variety of customers. We felt we were in good hands to receive the best advice on what would work best for our situation.
The brief was to create an efficient CRM solution that would still be simple for Consultants to manage their support cases. We also required a Client web portal where customers could log on to create, edit and view their support cases. This web portal needed to integrate with CRM in order to pull the information across and expose it on the web.
The results
The new system began showing benefits immediately. The out-of-the-box reporting and dashboards in CRM have enabled us to see how many cases are logged each day, how they are being logged, how many are resolved, and how many are outstanding. We can also see how many cases there are by consultant, by solution and what the status of each case is.
The whole staff can now view all the Support Cases for clients. This includes Business Development Managers who are now able to check active cases for each client prior to meeting with them.
Customers are able to log on to their OlympicCare Web Portal and view all of the cases that have been logged by all staff across their organisation. They can view the current status, and add notes and files via the web portal.
Other benefits are still being realised. We included a ‘Your Details and Solutions’ section on the customer portal that allowed customers to check the details that we have for them in our CRM and let us know when it is incorrect. This one little piece of functionality that we hoped would work has proven itself to be so valuable in helping us to keep our client information up to date in CRM.
The value of having one system that serves multiple functions has improved productivity of staff, it has improved the integrity of the data, and it has improved our reporting ability. It has helped us to further digitize our processes and create an end-to-end process using one system.
So far, we’ve had really positive feedback from our clients also. While some are slow on the uptake in terms of logging their cases via the portal, others have found this functionality helps to improve their own systems.
While there are still improvements to make, so far we’re impressed with what Dynamics CRM Service has allowed us to do.
Now we can clearly see when we are having issues with responsiveness and we can do something about it.