Customer Support Software Featured Articles

Putting customers first is a natural impulse for most businesses; and in the era of social media, there are more avenues than ever before through which to engage those customers and make them feel they’re in the center of things. But as businesses scale, keeping up with customer interactions across multiple channels becomes a daunting task, especially for B2B companies that may have complex financial relationships in place with their customers.

There are several best practices however to help meet this challenge, starting with a basic philosophy: Treat customers like you know them personally.

Relationship-building is critical across verticals—and at scale, the key to doing that lies in having a consistent and complete view of the customer. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) comes into play.

TeamSupport’s B2B CRM for instance addresses duplications and collaboration bottlenecks. It’s common for a business to get the same question from different customers, but help desk agents and others may not realize it. With a way to track common questions and answers, customer service professionals feel less helpless and exasperated, wait times are reduced and customers are happier. TeamSupport software helps businesses provide more seamless, effective customer support by enhancing collaboration and breaking down internal barriers.

Also, keep in mind that it's not enough to have the customer data; the people working with it need to use that data to demonstrate that they care about the customer.

“Knowing customers is not about segmenting them correctly or matching upsells to their profiles, although those things are important,” said Chris Bucholtz, director, content marketing, for CallidusCloud, in a column. “It's really about demonstrating that, in a moment of truth for customers, you will work for their success because you understand them.”

Therefore, there should be a mandate to give employees the power to solve problems.

“In the past, it might have been tolerable to be shunted from person to person within the company to resolve an issue,” Bucholtz said. “Today, giving customers the runaround in this way would be almost quaint if it weren't so enormously frustrating. If I'm talking to you, and you can understand my problem as a customer, you should be able to fix it.”

This means having a process for escalating customer requests to the right person, and giving them enough actionable information to make smart decisions about serving the customer.

Meanwhile, internal processes need to be revamped to cater to customer needs. All too often, calling customer service means dealing with multiple tiers of interactive voice response questions, canned ads and service personnel who may be tasked with reducing average call times, rather than satisfying customers. 

And finally, it’s important too to maintain a conversation with customers after sales. That doesn’t mean aggressive marketing or loyalty programs, but rather a way to retain the customer’s information and engagement history so that agents have a full view the second, third, umpteenth time they contact a company, be it for sales or for customer service. Bucholtz also advocates examining internal buying processes on the B2B front, to discover where steps can be overhauled to make both buyer and seller faster and more productive.

“Is the quote process gumming up transactions? Look into configure price quote solutions,” he explained. “Is your online ordering process generating a glut of follow-up calls to clarify orders, or worse, abandoned shopping carts? Re-examine the structure of your website's ordering pages. Is your legal department overwhelmed in creating contracts for subscription customers? Research contract life cycle management solutions.”

Taken together, B2B businesses can reorient their personnel and processes using a god CRM basis to become more customer-centric, with big business payoffs.

“If you can identify the most pressing areas, devote some thought to them based on the customer's needs and expectations, and invest in technology, process redesign and training, you can take major steps toward becoming the company your customers want you to be while improving productivity and sales performance,” said Bucholtz.