Three successful business leaders share their best technology strategies for serving up great customer service.
Every experienced business owner knows that customer relationships make or break a business. That much is simple.
The hard part is creating, enhancing and sustaining those relationships as your business grows. How can you successfully manage relationships when your customer database grows from 100 to 10,000? What happens to the personal touch when you suffer high staff turnover? How can you ensure concierge-level service for your very best customers?
There are no pat answers, but here are technology tips from three business leaders regularly recognized for their companies' stellar customer service.
TIP 1: Your customer's needs will change, so build a solution that is flexible enough to meet those changing needs. - Jay Rollins, vice president of IT, Churchill Downs, Inc.
Jay Rollins has customers, plenty of them. His problem is that they show up on the same day — including 175,000 visitors for the famed Kentucky Derby. Customers would line up scores deep at the wagering window. But often they got to the window after the race began and wagering had closed.
"That's a problem when your profits rely on every customer having the opportunity to wager. It makes for lost revenue and frustrated visitors," says Rollins, whose company hosts horse races at four major racetracks.
Churchill Downs management decided to do something about it and gave Rollins the go-ahead to build a combined wired and wireless network that allows customers to wager at self-service kiosks or with roaming employees using wireless handheld devices.
Since the underlying network extends to all track vendors, customers can also order food and beverages at the kiosks. And as soon as any wager or order is placed, the information is sent securely over the network and tracked with the company's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
The result? Churchill Downs has seen an increase in wagering from two percent to seven percent, depending on the location within the facility. "That's a significant increase," says Rollins.
The 900-employee company is also installing an all-IP communications infrastructure to collect and integrate information from interactions with customers before and after race days.
"We'll be able to track our top customers and give them a higher level of attention than ever before," Rollins says.
Best of all, when the fickle demands of race fans change or new wagering technologies hit the market, Rollins will have the wherewithal to act promptly.
"With this infrastructure, when management asks, ‘can we do this?' I can answer ‘yes.'
TIP 2: Define your customer service requirements upfront, and use products that integrate easily and scale to your needs and changing workforce — Rick Morgan, CEO, Sunset Learning Institute.
Talk about long-term customer relationships. Sunset Learning Institute (SLI) is a global training company that delivers learning solutions for leading-edge IT professionals and their organizations. Its customers range from small companies to big corporations. From the moment of first customer contact, a customer relationship with SLI can last years, even decades.
"It was a challenge keeping up because our customer database exceeds 20,000 companies and we suffer, like all companies, from salesforce turnover," says Morgan.
When it came time to improve customer relations, Morgan and team huddled with front line employees to ask what they wanted in a system. Among the requests, a system that didn't take a lot of reeducation or customization, and one that would make it easy for new staff members to get up to speed quickly on customer needs. Morgan and company selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a solution lets the company handle all of its customer-facing business processes with a familiar interface.
An additional one-two punch was the addition of advanced telephony and integrated voice and video conferencing - all over a single IP network — and all working in concert with the CRM software. SLI employees can be more productive with features such as "click to dial" capability, call duration tracking, and easy customer information capture and record creation.
"It gives us a full view of our customers at all customer touch points, from prospecting through the most important component -- customer feedback of our training sessions," says Rollins.
As a result, SLI has seen an 18 to 20 percent jump in customer retention, according to Rollins.
"My advice to colleagues is to really understand your business needs and then evaluate the available products in the market to find one that is scalable and easily integrates with existing business applications."
Tip 3: It may be the Web 2.0 world but you can't ignore the telephone — still a critical customer touch point. -- Nicolas Führs, connectiv! CRM consultant
connectiv!, an Internet Service Provider based in Lingen, Germany, has been delivering an ever-expanding suite of Internet and e-business solutions for the past nine years. So an incoming phone call is more than a sales lead or a customer calling for support; it is an opportunity for connectiv! to demonstrate how networking can power responsive, informed customer service.
"Our business depends on our phones, but our existing system had limited capacity and functionality," explains explains Hermann Silies, CEO at connectiv!
connectiv! employees could not place callers on hold and were unable to use headsets. Callers had a difficult time even leaving messages because the 26-employees at the company didn't have voice mailboxes. And the company was forced to use third-party web sites and other outside services to set up conference calls.
connectiv! searched for an integrated solution that would enable the company to respond to callers with the type of customer service they deserved.
After researching the field, the company selected a solution based on Cisco Unified Communications. connectiv! was the first organization in Germany to use the solution with CRM software, and the company is reaping a number of benefits, from more efficient customer service to better sales and marketing.
"Now every employee has their own extension and voice mailbox, making them easier for customers to reach. If an employee is not available, callers leave a voicemail or transfer quickly. The solution makes it easier for callers to reach the person they need to talk to," says Silies.
This solution also enables connectiv! management to develop better customer statistics, and to understand the needs of customers individually and as groups.
"Naturally when a customer sees that we are using the system, it's helpful for sales, as well."
Bottom line
Take it from these pros: technology solutions alone don't improve customer relationships, but they provide the tools that let your employees do what they do best.
Eric J. Adams writes for Cisco Systems.
