Best Practices for Customer Service to Prioritize Support Requests in CRM – Part 2

What type of customer should get the highest priority support?

All customers are important, but the loudest or highest touch doesn’t always equate to the most important customers to your business.

There are two main factors to be considered when prioritizing support interactions.

• The type of issue
• The type of customer

As I explained in the last post, the type of issue relates to defining a ranking system for different requests based on how much effort it will take for your team to resolve and who needs to be involved.

The second factor that needs to be considered is the type of customer making the request.

Ranking Customers Based on Data

While every customer is important to your business in some way, there can still be a ranking system.

For example, two customers call into the support line:

• Customer A is very loud and demands attention immediately.
• Customer B is calm and courteous.

They both want their issues resolved. However, their manner should not be the deciding factor on who is served first. Instead, your customer service team should be able to make that decision based on data.

• Customer A spends $5000 a year with your company.
• Customer B spends $200,000 a year with your company.

Using a CRM system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 really helps you understand who each customer is, so you can then make the right decisions around how to best support them and determine what queue to put them into.

Paint a Picture for Customer Service with Unified Data

It is essential to have a unified view of customer data from multiple systems.

The data in your ERP system can show stats such as:

• Total annual revenue for that customer.
• The number of support cases logged in the last 12 months, organized by a level of priority.

That starts to paint the picture for the customer service rep. It empowers them to improve customer service and overall engagement when you provide them with the tools, the training, and the capabilities to know who that customer is that they are serving on the other end of the line.

When you have an ERP and CRM system that speak to each other, such as the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, you can see all the data in one place.

Add Technology to Remove Subjectivity

Once you have the issue priority and the customer priority clearly defined, you can introduce technology.

For example, add a check box for customer service that says, “System is down” or “Customer is Level 1 VIP”. If one of those boxes is checked, the status is automatically set to high, and a workflow is triggered to alert the right people.

It takes subjectivity out of the equation. This is very important, especially when you have high volume of customer service requests.

The way you prioritize support requests could be based on the nature of the issue, who the customer is, or a combination of both. Your customer service team can truly discern who needs the most attention when you have the right communication readiness plan and the right tools in place.

Next Steps

The Crowe CRM team can help your organization do powerful things with Dynamics 365. While completing more than 100 successful CRM implementations around the world, the Crowe CRM team has gained the experience needed to design, deliver, and implement effective solutions to our clients’ real-life business challenges.

We can assist you with unifying information from different platforms, setting up workflows and using Microsoft Dynamics 365 to empower your customer service team.

Contact us to start the discussion at crminfo@crowe.com or 877-600-2253.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

Follow us on Twitter: @CroweCRM

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