Customer Service Software may be your company’s key to coming out of this recession ready to grow. Customer relationships today are far more complex than those of just a few years ago, or even a few months ago. Customer service software is now expected to encompass traditional local and long-distance telephone service, a variety of wireless communications, high-speed internet access and entertainment.
Customer service software must capture customer data. Customer data, and the quality of that data, is a company’s most important asset. With every interaction, customers are providing critical information. With rising costs, it’s more important than ever to capture this data accurately, completely, in a timely manner and in a consistent format.
Customer service software must capture a large variety of data such as address, age range, demographics and behavioral data. These pieces of information enable companies to plan and evaluate their business, to target specific slices of the population, and to plan for sales and store openings and closings.
Customer service software in the B2B realm captures information about product penetration, productivity, and share of market. Sales territories and the efficiency of sales reps are evaluated on this data.
If customer data is your company’s most important asset, how do you know that the data is correct and up-to-date? According to PriceWaterhouseCooper’s, customer data degrades at a rate of about 2% per month – nearly 30% a year! That makes a well-enforced data maintenance program a “must have” for every company.
Customer service software can help in this process. It can search for false data such as phony e-mail addresses (royrogers@horse.com) or sequential social security numbers. It can keep fields from being filled with wrong sets of information like having a person put their city and state into a field labeled “address 2.” Data profiling is usually built into your customer service software, but most companies do not know how to use it or how often they need to use it.
Your company should have someone or a team that defines guidelines for completeness and for formatting of information. For example, they need to establish how dates and times are expressed. Not as easy, but possibly more important, would be a definition of “household.”
Good back-end data is essential to front-end data quality. This becomes apparent when a new customer has the same name as an existing customer and the customer service software must differentiate between the two.
Customer service software is useful for far more than simple data entry and tracking a customer and his issues. It is the tool for up-selling and cross-selling to him and his household. It is the basis of the company’s decisions about its future. Therefore, it is critical for the data being used by the customer service software to be as accurate and up-to-date as possible.
Sally
on Jun 22nd, 2009
@ 12:05 pm:
All information on this web site and its blog is relative to understanding CRM software in general and Cynergy Software in particular.