How Can Microsoft Dynamics CRM Help You Implement Great Customer Service?

Mark Smith, 12 February 2011

As we all know, there are a lot of ways to provide excellent customer service. But in my experience, having a successfully implemented customer relationship management system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, there are a few things that you need to get right. Let me explain further why that is.

Providing excellent customer service starts with your customer service team. No one is closer to your customers than your frontline of support. When they can do their job well, they can cultivate relationships which can help your business flourish. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you'll not only build stronger relationships with your customers, but also reduce the inherent costs in providing excellent customer support. It provides a familiar, intuitive interface and advanced productivity that helps your people rapidly find customer service solutions.

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides access to up-to-date information within a familiar environment that you usually use – Microsoft Outlook. And lets you be more responsive to customers. It also provides you with the ability to accurately identify, learn about, and serve each customer more efficiently and profitably because of its integrated features that give you a smooth and streamlined customer service automation process.

One of the key aspects in providing excellent customer service is being able to resolve customer issues in the least amount of them. This can be achieved by giving your customer service people the proper training, tools and knowledge. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you are provided a searchable, shared knowledge base of information organized by product and service category that helps you resolve customer issues quickly and accurately.

Another benefit of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM is that it gives you use of advanced organizational case management to quickly create, manage, and resolve service issues with streamlined access to Service Level Agreements (SLA), case history as well as problem diagnosis and resolution information. You can also assign, manage, and resolve support incidents with automated routing, queuing, and escalation of service requests, along with case management, communications tracking and auto-response e-mail.

Delivering excellent customer service is not just a onetime deal. It is important to be able to maintain and improve your methods, procedures, and process in providing a high quality of service. Another advantage that you can get in using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for customer service automation is that you can proactively measure customer satisfaction during each service interaction to help ensure long-term customer loyalty. It lets you track customer interaction and key performance indicators. With access to real-time metrics data, you will be able to design, improve, and adapt a customer service strategy that would meet your customer’s needs.

So what do you think? What have you found that works in your business?

* Image from Microsoft Dynamics CRM Brochure