If you’ve got a customer relationship management (CRM) system you’re probably using it mostly for sales and marketing. And that’s understandable because CRM systems have generally been sold as a sales and marketing tool. But you’re missing out. You’re missing out on maybe 50% of what a great CRM does. Because most CRM systems today have the capacity to track service activities. And the smart business owners I know are using their CRM systems as much for service as they are for sales. Why? Because keeping customers happy is the best way to grow sales. And to do this, they rely on these four customer service metrics.
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- Open Issues
What are the issues? Where are the problems? No one likes to hear of these. But they’re critically important. You can’t ignore them. The smart managers I know seek out problems instead of pretending they don’t exist. To do this, they demand a report (sometimes daily, or at least a few times a week) of open issues. It’s easy to track problems in your CRM system. You can schedule and code a service issue as a simple open task. Or, depending on your system, you can create tickets, calls, incidents or issues as a separate thing to track. It doesn’t have to be complicated. But you do want to make sure you’re tracking a few key things: the customer (of course), the issue, who’s working on the issue, when it was opened, when it’s expected to be resolved, what tasks have been done and what tasks are scheduled. Maybe a customer is so significant that it requires the owner’s call. At the very least you won’t be embarrassed if you hear from a customer and you’re not even aware they’re having a problem. A problem could be an opportunity to sell them more services or products, or at the very least show them how important they are to you by giving them extra attention. You’ll never know this without an open issues report.
- Closed Issues
Sometimes issues are opened and closed and you might never hear about it. In many cases that’s a good thing because it’s important to get problems fixed as quickly as possible. But you still want to know. You want to understand what problems are occurring. And, every month or so, you want to ask for a Closed Issues report and look at the metrics there. Who was having the most issues? What type of product was generating the most problems? Is there a pattern? Could this lead to more problems at other customers? Knowing the problems you’ve had each month and the customers who had them will significantly help you improve your company’s quality and responsiveness.
- Time To Resolve
Some of my clients include this metric on the Closed Issues report mentioned above, while others like a separate report showing each issue and how long it took to resolve it. This is critical too, because no one likes to wait around for a problem to be fixed. This report is sometimes combined with an alert or workflow because although it’s important to know that a particular issue took a longer time than average to fix, it’s more important to get alerted while this is occurring in case you need to expedite or get involved. You may decide to have service level agreements for your customers, where those who desire can pay extra to be classified as “Gold” customers, entitled to additional and quicker support. If this is the case, it’s even more important to understand the time it takes to resolve product issues and to get alerted if these customers are involved.
- Customers Without Contact
This is a metric that I learned the hard way. I learned this when a good client of mine left us and went to another firm because he felt he was being ignored. It’s not enough today to just wait for a customer to call. Good companies stay proactively involved with their customers throughout the year. Customers that get ignored will tend to feel ignored and seek TLC from someone else. So configure your CRM system to either generate a report or send you an alert when a customer hasn’t had contact from your staff, either in the form of a phone call or appointment, after a certain period of time (I use 6 months). That way you can be certain that these customers without contact don’t fall through the cracks and potential revenue goes walking away.
See? Your CRM system isn’t just for sales and marketing. It’s for customer service too. And having a few key customer service metrics will enormously help you keep your customers happy. And, wait… isn’t that what sales and marketing is all about too?
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About the Author: Gene Marks is a small business owner, technology expert, author and columnist. He writes regularly for leading US media outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur. He has authored five books on business management and appears regularly on Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNBC. Gene runs a ten-person CRM and technology consulting firm outside of Philadelphia. Learn more at genemarks.com
