Best CRM for Customer Support

Table of Contents

Best CRM for Customer Support

I have read many blogs and articles related to which is the best CRM software for customer support or what are the characteristics of CRM software for customer service. But they have been concentrating mostly on the customer aspect side.

There is no doubt that a customer is the most important aspect but like everything, there are always two sides of the coin. The other side being the customer support staff or customer service people. One can be heads and other being the tales (does not matter who is which side ?), both sides need to be addressed else it will be very difficult to achieve that exceptional support experience.

My aim is to look at both sides of the story and how a good CRM system can make the difference.

Heads (Customer Side of the Story)

So, let’s start with the most important aspect “the customer”. The customer support landscape has changed rapidly and more so because of an increasingly connected digital world has changed the way customers engage with organizations. But one constant is that companies focusing on high-quality customer service and make the customer experience as a key competitive differentiator.

The ability to deliver a differentiated experience enables them to have a competitive edge in their market, revenue, and customer loyalty.

Key things that brands need to do to deliver and improve customer experience are:

Live Up to Customer Expectations: In today’s dynamic world with so much innovation and brands trying to engage with customers in so many ways, the customer expectations are also constantly sifting and increasing day-by-day.

Changing Customer Journey: It will not be wrong to say that children are born in a digital world. The generation X, Y and Z are very different from how traditional customers used to engage and their journeys are mostly around the digital marketplace. And hence the difference in their interactions & expectations to support them across the new touchpoints.

Provide Consistent Experience: While this has been spoken about since ages, but this becomes even more important and difficult with the new journeys of the new age customer. Brands are looking at ways to provide consistent support experience across multiple customer touchpoints.

Tales (Customer Service Staff Side of the Story)

The second side of the coin who are equally important are the staff or employees involved in servicing the customer. The idea is how do organization empower their staff to go to the next level and move from being just an employee to more committed employee. A committed employee will no doubt be more productive but yield better customer satisfaction level.

There are many things such as cultural changes, values, etc that comes into play for having a highly productive culture but one thing that can be done quickly is to empower the staff with the right tool i.e. best CRM for customer support.

Solution

We have worked with number of customers across industry segment and have seen Dynamics CRM (now called Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement) product that has continuously evolved itself to the changing market needs of today.

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is one of the key application modules within Dynamics 365 CE. Dynamics 365 for Customer Service delivers the below capabilities that can transform the customer support experience for both customers and employees:

Omni-channel Capabilities: This refers to enabling end-to-end connected support across multiple channels —such as email, live chat, phone, and text messaging on any device. Dynamics 365 provides a complete 360-degree view of customers, which includes an entire history of interactions, user preferences, and relevant customer information from third-party applications.

Agent Enablement Tools: Dynamics 365 for Customer Service empowers the agents with a unified single interface that is optimized to drive best actions, guided business processes, provides contextual information. This enables the agents to be more productive and with the right information, consistent & automated processes hence delivering more seamless experience to the customer. The easy to use, dynamic interface reduces the training time for agents.

Self Service Capabilities: This has been almost talked about like ages now but still remains one of the key sources to enable customers to be self-reliant who prefer to seek answers on their own. Dynamics 365 for Customer Service provides an easy to use self-service portal which can be customized (branding, navigation, responsive design, etc). The self-service portal has a searchable knowledgebase with federated search results from combination of relevant knowledgebase articles, social posts and blogs.

Artificial Intelligence: You cannot leave Artificial Intelligence (AI) out now and With Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights organization cab track and measure performance across multiple channels over time, identify areas for improvement & growth with innovative AI capabilities. It provides comprehensive visibility agent performance, customer engagement patters, case resolution insights, backlog trends and much more.

There are many more features and capabilities of Dynamics 365 for Customer Service that can enable organization to take their customer service experience to the next level such as:

Engage customers in real-time using Dynamics 365 chat built around Microsoft Teams communication platform.

Using SMS (text) communication agents and customer can engage on the go. This feature is currently in preview.

Incorporating social media into your customer service strategy to improve customer satisfaction.

Comprehensive and customization case (incident) management process with SLA, Entitlements, etc.

Microsoft Bot Framework, currently in preview will enable organizations to plugin already trained bots built on Microsoft Bot Framework to engage customer across channels and transfer complete context to a live agent when needed.

Whatever may be the maturity level of organizations Dynamics 365 for Customer Service provides a solution to manage every aspect of customer support operations, allows for continuous improvements and grow to meet the changing needs & expectations of customers.

Microsoft is continuously making a lot of investments on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and surrounding platform to align itself to changing market demands and conditions. Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is one of the industry leading & best CRM for Customer Support software enabling brands to deliver exceptional support experience. It addresses both sides of the story and not only assists customer service organizations to create highly engaged and satisfied clients but also engaged customer support staff.

Best CRM for Customer Support – Software That provide Exceptional Support