Addressing Your Biggest Customer Service Challenges with SugarCRM
What do companies like Trader Joe’s, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos have in common? They’re all known for delivering excellent customer service. No matter how good a company is at controlling costs, hiring talented employees, and developing innovative products, few brands succeed without putting customers first. With major brands extending their service hours and assisting customers via telephone, email, online chat, and other methods, customer expectations are higher than ever.
Many companies struggle to deliver excellent customer service because they don’t take a systematic approach to identify customers’ needs, missing the opportunity to solicit feedback, and find out how their products or services perform after the sale. In some companies, customer service representatives lack the tools they need to make a real difference.
SugarCRM makes it easy to address these challenges, ensuring that every company has the opportunity to develop a systematic approach to customer service that keeps customers coming back for more. Here’s how Sugar can help overcome some of the most common challenges associated with customer service.
Reduce Response Times
Average response time is one of the most important customer service metrics in any industry. It’s especially important for technology companies that must abide by service-level agreements which focus on response and resolution times.
Sugar Serve has several features that are designed to reduce response times and ensure users are abiding by any service-level agreements in place. First, the software utilizes case distribution tools to help managers assign each ticket to the appropriate team, eliminating time wasted while tickets shuffles through multiple customer support representatives who lack the knowledge or authority to resolve them. These tools also make it easy for managers to sort tickets according to their urgency, enabling representatives to respond to the most pressing requests right away.
Second, Serve can pull information from Sugar Sell, customer contracts, and other documents, making it easier to prioritize tickets based on the terms of each service-level agreement. Finally, Serve offers dynamic alerts and reporting tools, giving managers the information they need to identify bottlenecks and make sure team members are meeting scheduled milestones.
Empower Customer Service Professionals
Businesses known for providing excellent service have something important in common: They give customer service representatives the tools and autonomy they need to solve problems and address each customer’s needs. Without the right tools, it’s difficult for CSRs to determine the best way to handle a customer complaint. The Sugar platform is a three-in-one sales, marketing, and customer service solution that empowers representatives to make every interaction a positive one. Tools like SugarLive allow customer service professionals to continually be in tune with customers and easily surface the information they need with historical context.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
If you’re paying attention, customers will tell you when they aren’t satisfied with your products or services, giving you a chance to make things right. Unfortunately, many customers never give you an opportunity to resolve service issues and. they move on to a competitor and usually share thier disatisfaction with your organization.
Sugar Serve’s Service Console helps companies increase customer satisfaction, preventing customers from switching to competing firms. The dashboard displays customer satisfaction scores, average response times, and other important metrics, giving customer service representatives the information they need in order to deliver a better experience. These metrics also help managers identify problem areas and prioritize service issues. SugarCRM even makes it possible to create customer loyalty programs and develop detailed plans for account success.
Predict Upcoming Trends
Now that artificial intelligence is integrated with key business technology like CRM, there’s no need for managers to be surprised by changing trends. With the launch of SugarPredict, creating the first artificial intelligence-powered CRM, customer service leaders can understand and step in before customers may churn.
Reduce Inbound Call Volume
Inbound calls take up time that could be spent reaching out to prospects or handling service tickets. Reducing inbound call volume allows representatives more time to work on revenue-generating activities, making it essential for firms in every industry to find better ways to serve customers.
SugarCRM has a mobile-friendly portal that allows customers to create tickets, check the status of open cases, and review their account histories, eliminating the need for them to call and speak with a live agent. The platform also makes it possible for businesses to create online knowledge bases, reducing the workload for live agents and leaving them with more time to focus on other activities.
Balance the Workload
It’s difficult to maintain a balanced workload when a manager is assigning cases manually, and an unbalanced approach tends to lead to reduced morale and increased turnover. SugarCRM has several tools to help managers distribute cases evenly, ensuring that no single agent is overloaded with work while other agents don’t have enough work to fill their days.
With dynamic workflows, managers can route cases based on capacity, team expertise, and urgency, ensuring that every case is closed as quickly as possible. SugarCRM also makes it possible to create multiple support queues, ensuring that each ticket is assigned to an agent with the expertise needed to resolve the issue and satisfy the customer.
Extend Each Department’s Capabilities
When businesses rely on multiple systems to enter, store and retrieve data, employees spend a lot of time searching for the information they need to meet each customer’s needs. SugarCRM eliminates this problem by combining marketing, sales and customer service tools in one platform. The platform also integrates seamlessly with other software packages, giving businesses an opportunity to extend their capabilities without incurring additional costs.
SugarCRM integrates with email and calendaring tools, eliminating the need to copy and paste text across multiple applications. Email integration also makes it easier for customer service representatives to personalize their email messages and get the contextual information they need to ensure customers are satisfied. Built-in scheduling tools make it easy for representatives to set up sales calls, schedule internal meetings and create reminders, all without having to purchase separate scheduling software.
Now that we’re living in the digital age, customers expect top-notch service every time they interact with one of your employees. Expectations are higher than ever, so it’s important to use tools that help representatives deliver better service every time they interact with customers. Take a look at our product page to find out how SugarCRM can help.