Understanding Your Customers to Differentiate & Grow Your Business

Strategy Solutions Series

Understanding Your Customers to Differentiate & Grow Your Business

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  November 10, 2014

Customer experience is a hot topic these days. But ensuring a positive customer experience that fuses with the goals of your organization is about more than just pledging to be more customer focused. It requires employing processes and systems that enable your customer support staff to actually understand the needs of customers rather than just addressing their needs in a one-off fashion, and to be able to respond to those requirements in the most effective way possible.

Having a complete view of customers leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction, which helps build customer loyalty and results in improved customer retention. It can also make help desk employees more engaged because it allows them to see and treat customers as complete entities rather than just processing what would otherwise be just a series of unrelated tickets.

                                                              

While most customer support software solutions focus on tickets, one has taken a different approach by focusing on the customer. TeamSupport is a fully hosted cloud-based help desk solution that helps businesses better understand their customers as a whole.

“TeamSupport is about getting the focus back to the customer, not just closing tickets,” explains Robert C. Johnson, president and CEO of TeamSupport. “For business-focused companies that work with other businesses, it is essential to understand and manage the customer at the company level. Our software allows you to better understand your customers and gain valuable insights into their relationship with you.”

To enable this, TeamSupport’s solution includes a comprehensive customer database which allows agents to view all tickets and support requests from the same company in one place, allowing them to better identify trends and issues on a company-by-company basis. Customer support reps have the ability to search by company and by contact. They can see which tickets are open or closed along with those that have notes or files requiring follow-up.

“TeamSupport is different thanks in part to our robust customer section, because it puts details about your customers and their interactions with you right at your fingertips and allows you to put their issues or requests in context,” says Johnson.

TeamSupport’s help desk software provides a unified system where help desk agents can see every request and issue that a client has made. It integrates with popular CRM systems like SalesForce and Oracle (News - Alert) Fusion. And it lets your organization assess which customers need the most attention in terms of support.

The most innovative feature to date though, is the Customer Distress Index (CDI) that TeamSupport recently introduced. This tool allows customer support teams to monitor customer satisfaction and take steps to resolve issues as they occur by summarizing important metrics to understand how much difficulty customers are having with your products or services.

The CDI assigns each customer a number based on five variables: total tickets created during the lifetime of the customer’s account, tickets created in the last 30 days, tickets currently open, the average time they are open, and the average time to close. A higher number indicates a greater potential for distress. The information is presented in an easy to understand graphic showing a gauge with green, yellow, and red bands. 

“With the Customer Distress Index, customer service teams will benefit from a sophisticated reporting system that can actually calculate when a customer may be getting frustrated and allow them to foresee potential issues before they become a bigger problem,” says Johnson.

The new feature also offers an indicator of whether things are moving in the right direction. The CDI Trend Indicator assesses whether the customer experience has improved or deteriorated in the past seven days – represented by a red arrow pointing up (not good) or a green arrow pointing down (good).

For companies that want to proactively gather customer feedback, TeamSupport also has an Agent Ratings feature. This lets organizations invite their customers to provide immediate feedback at the conclusion of their interaction with the support team. That means faster and more accurate feedback, the ability to more effectively track trends and service issues, and easier identification as to where more training or product development may be needed.

“Customer support is not just about reactively dealing with tickets, but proactively working with your customers to meet their needs,” says Johnson. “TeamSupport gives you the intelligence to be able to do this so you can differentiate and grow your business.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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