There may be no department in a company with more impact on the customer experience than the customer support team. In many ways, customer support agents are the face of the company as they are the ones who address customer needs, resolve customer issues, and interact with customers during the most challenging and frustrating times.
That said, many organizations underestimate the importance of customer support and fail to recognize its strategic value in driving customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. This can lead to underinvestment in the tools and resources needed to overcome the challenges of customer support.
Fortunately, many companies already invest in a software tool that can improve customer support processes across the board and turn the challenges of customer support into areas of differentiation — CRM (customer relationship management software).
Knowing how to turn CRM towards the needs of your customer support team can help you provide a higher level of customer service while getting even more ROI out of your CRM.
What is CRM?
A CRM platform is a software toolset that assists businesses with managing their people (customers and employees), work processes, products, and projects on a day-to-day basis.
Once thought of primarily as a customer engagement tool for the sales team, modern CRM software has evolved to address the needs of many different business aspects, including marketing, customer support, customer success, and HR.
Through the use of advanced automations tools and data centralization, a CRM system can help businesses improve communication (both internal and external), work more efficiently, and track performance.
The challenges of customer support
The following challenges are commonly faced by customer support teams regardless of size or industry.
- Poor ticket management- The foundation of your customer support processes is your ticket management strategy. Unfortunately, for many customer support teams, this is a weakness not a strength.
- Insufficient customer communication channels- Customer communication preferences vary, requiring customer support teams to be able to address issues across a variety of channels. This can increase the complexity of your customer engagement and operational processes significantly.
- Lack of coordination across teams- Many customer support issues require a coordinated effort to resolve. This can be challenging for companies whose sales people, marketing department, and product/development teams operate independently of each other.
- Limited visibility into trends and emerging issues- For customer service teams, the ability to identify emerging issues is often hampered by lack of visibility. This means customer support teams are forced to take a reactionary approach to issue resolution which causes frustrations for customers and support agents alike.
- Lack of context- In customer support, context matters. Without it, support agents may struggle to fully understand the nature of the customer’s issue or ask redundant questions and provide duplicate solutions, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction on the customer’s end.
- Lack of integration with other tools- For many companies, customer support operates independently of their other departments, using their own tools and following their own processes. This disconnect forces customer support reps to switch between tools for contact management, to access and update customer data, and to complete tasks. This leads to disjointed workflows that limit efficiency and add complexity.
The top 10 CRM benefits for customer support
Modern CRM software can transform customer support challenges into areas of strength.
- Streamlined ticket management- The top CRM benefit for helping to resolve customer issues is streamlined ticket management. Ticket creation and routing can be automated, ensuring that support tickets are assigned to the right customer support rep quickly, reducing response times and improving resolution rates.
Tickets can also be viewed in detailed visualizations that organize tickets by stage, type or rep. This allows you to track progress, identify trends, and assess overall performance at a glance.
- Enhanced communication across multiple channels- A CRM platform can integrate with all your communication tools including phone, email, text/SMS, and chat.
This helps your customer service agents communicate with your customers on their terms. This can improve response rates and cut resolution times while improving the customer experience overall.
- Deeper insights into customer preferences and behavior- The analytics and reporting capabilities a CRM system provides offer insights into customer behavior, customer preferences, and customer needs.
For example, you can see what communication channels are used most by your customers. You could even break that data down by customer segment or demographic. This can help you to determine how best to reach your customers with service updates about emerging issues or what channels to invest more resources into.
- Comprehensive data centralization and accessibility- A CRM platform serves a centralized database for all your customer information, including:
- Purchase history
- Interaction history
- Past support tickets
- Contact information
- Demographic information
- Communication preferences
This type of contact management helps customer support reps to address a customer’s issues more effectively and efficiently while at the same time providing a personalized customer interaction that increases customer retention and builds customer loyalty and trust.
- Improved collaboration across teams- CRM fosters better collaboration and knowledge sharing between your support agents, sales people, and product teams.
Team members can send notifications, assign tasks, discuss solutions and coordinate efforts more effectively, leading to faster problem resolution and improved teamwork.
- Better process alignment- With CRM automation, you can create workflows that ensure consistency and alignment across your whole customer support team.
Duties such as ticket routing and assignment, first response emails, and post resolution follow-ups can all be automated. Additionally, CRM notification features can help you ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
- Faster identification of emerging issues- CRM’s customizable dashboards and data visualization tools enable customer support leaders to monitor trends in real-time. This can help them get ahead of emerging issues and create proactive strategies that improve customer and employee satisfaction.
- Greater scalability- An underrated CRM benefit is the greater scalability CRM provides. You can easily adapt your usage as the needs of your business grow or change and add new users, upgrade features, and expand storage capabilities easily.
Additionally, the process centralization and software integration capabilities of CRM enables faster employee onboarding and better cross-training allowing you to grow your team more efficiently.
- Increased employee productivity- The combination of improved ticket management, enhanced communication, better collaboration, and more streamlined operational processes enables your customer support reps to work more efficiently and effectively.
That means faster response times, higher resolution rates, and more time for training and development.
- Higher customer satisfaction rates- The impacts of customer support on the customer experience can’t be overstated. Just consider these statistics from eduMe:
- 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience
- Customers are shown to spend 140% more after a positive experience than customers who reported negative interactions
- 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience
- 52% of consumers have switched providers in the past year due to poor service
The evidence is clear. Good customer support isn’t a nice-to-have option, its a differentiator that is essential to customer retention and long term customer success.
A CRM strategy that involves more than just sales management can help you take your customer relationship management to the next level.
FreeAgent CRM is the best CRM for customer support
FreeAgent CRM is a modern work management platform that provides top-of-field software tools for organizations of all sizes and technical proficiency.
FreeAgent is the best CRM for customer support because FreeAgent is:
- Easy to use- FreeAgent’s modern user interface is quick to learn and easy to use, encouraging teams to work within the platform. This enables you to maintain a comprehensive catalog of every sale, support ticket, and customer interaction.
- User-configurable- With FreeAgent, the power is in your hands. You can customize and personalize FreeAgent to fit the specific needs of your business and teams without external support.
Plus, FreeAgent offers:
- Robust integration- FreeAgent’s flexible toolset and extensive integration library support teams and businesses of all types and structures.
- A mobile CRM tool- FreeAgent’s mobile app allows team members to access the FreeAgent platform from anywhere, at any time.
- Generative AI- Uplift your work with Generative AI-powered features. With FreeAgent, you can access AI across any app, allowing you to get the information you need faster.
With FreeAgent, it’s really that simple.
To see FreeAgent in action, get a demo, and discover for yourself how we are leading the way to a better workday.
