Enabling Customer-Centric Processes with Microsoft CRM
You are now in a position to take your model and map it against the functionality provided by Microsoft CRM. Some processes will map directly to the new product, whereas others require adaptation to take advantage of product features. Others require modifications to the way you set up Microsoft CRM, to provide custom features and functionality.
The business owners who have contributed to developing your customer-centric business process must be kept involved in the mapping process. Whether you are changing the defined business process, or customizing Microsoft CRM, the business representatives, and eventual users of the system must feel that they are the owners of the solution. That means keeping them involved at all stages, while providing the organization and direction to keep them from getting lost along the way. Even the simplest case of mapping business processes directly to the new product will require some getting used to.
Chapter 5, “Setting up Microsoft CRM,” explains organization management and provides the information you need for planning the customization of Microsoft CRM to accommodate the organizational structure of your business.
Best-practice methodologies for sales are provided in Chapter 7, “Sales Force Automation (SFA),” and for customer service in Chapter 9, “Customer Service.” This information will be useful as you begin to analyze your current, and plan for your future, business processes.
Automating Business Processes
Each organization has a set of business processes that are unique to that organization. Often employees are unaware of these processes, or that they are dependent on colleagues for information or the completion of previous tasks to complete their own tasks. To run smoothly, organizations must standardize processes across the organization, and encourage all users to adopt these standards.
Microsoft CRM provides a solution for automating internal business processes by creating workflows that carry out routine and repetitive tasks involving daily business operations. These processes can be designed to ensure that the right information gets to the right people at the right time, and to help participants keep track of the steps they have to take to complete their work.
Automating Your Sales Process
Microsoft CRM is designed to help an organization acquire and retain customers and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks. Microsoft CRM provides a robust account-management system that automatically tracks sales-related activities and revenues. It includes analytical, operational, and collaborative tools designed to improve and maintain good customer relations. It also provides tools that help assess customer value in terms of the future business they might generate. This type of analysis early on will help the sales department forge strategic corporate sales relationships.
The sales process is expressed as events, tasks, and dependencies in Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (Microsoft CRM). You use the Form Editor to convert the process into these items, but first you must define the process. When the process is defined, you can customize the default process that ships with Microsoft CRM into your specific sales process events.
Sales Process
Sales process management includes all the tasks associated with finding sales opportunities and closing deals. This includes
Prospecting and qualifying leads, managing contacts, opportunities, and accounts
Tracing the stages of deal closure and its related probabilities, and the variable compensations directly or indirectly related to closing deals
Managing and tracking communications between salespeople and customers, conducting email campaigns, and measuring their success
Maintaining a database of product information in a format that's easy for the sales force to access, either online in the office or offline at a customer site.
Sales Force Management
The automated sales force management in Microsoft CRM organizes the basic information required to track sales activities, account ownership, and variable compensation. This information also can be used to structure the sales force into territories and teams.
Automated sales force management systems are invaluable because they measure both the tangible and intangible factors that affect the bottom line, customer satisfaction, and sales force effectiveness. Even if company profits are up overall, tracking revenues generated by individual salespeople, and assessing these figures against sales costs, provides valuable insight into how the organization is faring. If this analysis reveals, for example, that the amount of time spent in administrative tasks is equal to or greater than the time engaged in sales-related efforts, sales costs are too high, and the sales force is not functioning optimally, then your organization can take steps to improve these areas.
Microsoft CRM provides automation tools that reduce the time salespeople (and their managers) typically spend performing administrative tasks. These tools include communication management, email campaign management, and sales process management.
Automated sales force management also provides managers with the information they need about the organization's sales efforts—a list of all salespeople and the contacts and opportunities they are working on, sales forecasts for the coming quarter, and a view of all the sales activity in each account. Microsoft CRM offers both predefined views as well as the ability to create custom views to access the information people want to—and have permission to—see.
Organizational Structuring
You can also use Microsoft CRM to structure the sales force into territories and teams, enabling greater flexibility for sharing and collaboration. In addition, new leads and contacts can be assigned to product or territorial teams until the manager can assign them to individual salespeople.
Territory is an attribute on Account records, enabling you to associate each Account record with a single Territory. Territory is not associated with any other object type. However, because many other object types can be associated with Accounts (for example, Contacts, Opportunities, and so on) you can reverse engineer your way back to Territory from those objects.
For example, to assign leads originating in the Northeast to that territory, you can associate a contact or an Opportunity with an Account that belongs to the Northeast territory.
Forecasting
Part of sales management is getting realistic sales forecasts and managing the sales activities to reach those forecasts. If actual sales do not consistently meet forecasted figures, management needs to find out why to identify whether the issue is with sales practices or forecast methodology. Microsoft CRM provides tools to help with forecasting and with analyzing these numbers against actual sales.
Comprehensive reports for measuring business activity and forecasting sales include the following:
Sales activity and quotas
Closed and pending orders
Support incident management and resolution
Financial summaries
Forecasting is usually based on a combination of factors, such as track record (sales activity and closed orders), expected demand (demand fluctuations can often be predicted by industry. For example, accountants are busy in the months leading up to tax time, retailers at Christmas) and, along with advance orders (pending orders) provide the basis for decisions. Support incident management and resolution reports provide risk indications, and financial summaries place the overall forecast in perspective.
Microsoft CRM also enables you to manage your pipeline, analyze the stages at which your opportunities exist, and use real-time data to decide whether you should start marketing programs to create more leads or, for example, focus on closing the top three opportunities to help make your monthly quotas, and so on.
Reports included in Microsoft CRM help you identify the opportunities, trends, and problems that guide your business decision-making processes. You also can easily export Microsoft CRM report data to other applications, such as Microsoft Excel, for further analysis.
Sales and Contact Management
As an organization and its customer base grow, more people seem to become involved in each sale. When more than one person is involved with handling an account, it's critical that everyone understands the history and future plans for the account. The contact management system in Microsoft CRM enables individuals, and organizations, to manage, share, and collaborate on accounts. Efficiently implemented and used, Microsoft CRM logging and tracking features benefit the individual who makes the sale, her sales team, other supporting teams, and her management. The customer also benefits from better service during and after the sales process.
Marketing and Communications
Marketing and communications is an important part of your sales process, encompassing the management of lists both for direct mail and email activity, leads and opportunities, contacts, competitive analysis, tracking of communications and campaigns, and managing your sales literature. Microsoft CRM provides the tools for automating your process for marketing and communications.
Marketing List Management
Many companies and salespeople purchase mass marketing lists. These lists often include names of people who make purchasing decisions and the companies for which they work. These lists are reviewed and individuals are either disqualified as unsuitable for the organization's sales strategy, or qualified for further contact and opportunity investigation.
You can use Microsoft CRM to import lead lists into the database, perform the usual qualifying activities, and convert names to opportunities or contacts if they qualify.
Names that do not qualify are marked as inactive but retained in the database for business reporting purposes, for instance to analyze the success of different list sources or to assess how much time the sales force spends prospecting.
Lead Management
Leads are individuals who have indicated an interest in finding out more about the products or services offered. They have been identified by a salesperson as recipients for targeted information through email campaigns or other communication activities.
Microsoft CRM makes lead information easily accessible from the interface, where profiles can be created and communication activities performed. All activities, such as email, notes, and meetings, are logged, so a history is kept of every contact with the lead.
Leads that show an interest in buying become opportunities. Leads that do not qualify are marked as inactive but retained in the database for business reporting purposes.
Opportunity Management
An opportunity is a potential sale to an account or contact that may be won or lost. Microsoft CRM enables your sales force to
Track information about each opportunity
Save the contact information
Track the stage the opportunity is in
Identify the salesperson who is actively working it
Assign revenue credit if the sale goes through
Assess the likelihood of closing the sale and the projected date
Opportunities can be linked with competitor information and analyzed to identify the most effective selling strategies.
Contact, Account, and Customer Management
Contact, account, and customer management covers the basics: the name of the person the salesperson works with and his or her contact information, including address, phone numbers, and company title. This information is stored with a log of any activities (email, meetings, campaigns, and so on) that have been performed.
This feature enables salespeople, managers, and other authorized personnel to view and handle corporate accounts. Each account is also linked to order information, proposed sales opportunities, and so forth, so a complete history of each account is accessible from one place.
Microsoft CRM also enables the creation of “child accounts” when, for instance, a salesperson does business with more than one department in a large corporation. In this situation, there might be individual department-level accounts that have separate contacts and ordering activities, but all invoices are processed through a single corporate purchasing account.
Competitor Management
Competing effectively is a valuable business strategy, and Microsoft CRM provides the means to create and disperse competitor information quickly and easily. This information helps salespeople quickly access information about the companies and products they are competing with, and to assess how large a threat the competitor represents. For quick comparison facts, competitor information can be linked to product information.
Communications Activity Management
Reliable and effective communication between members of the sales team as well as between salespeople and customers is essential to meeting the bottom line. Through innovative automation tools, Microsoft CRM facilitates communication and tracks activities, enabling the sales force to focus on the business of pursuing leads and making deals.
The Microsoft CRM communication system provides email support and records incoming leads. It also provides a calendar that can be used to schedule meetings and events, create To Do lists, and so on. Salespeople commonly keep notes on conversations and a running log of product information sent, and send task requests to other members of the team. Microsoft CRM provides tools for writing notes and linking files—for instance, copies of letters or product information files—to those notes. This helps other members of the sales team easily scan a list of what was sent, and then open up files to read the contents.
Salespeople can also create email templates that add prepared messages and greetings, maintaining message consistency across the board.
Email Campaigns
When sending mass email or email campaign messages, it's useful to measure the response rate to find out which marketing messages are working and where the best mass mailing lists come from. One way to track if messages are being opened and read is to set the “read receipt” option on all outgoing email messages. Microsoft CRM also tracks email response rates automatically.
Reports
The best way for managers to be apprised of account data, sales activities, and booked revenue is reviewing reports on a regular basis. Microsoft CRM comes with templates for several commonly used reports.
Sales Literature Management
The final important element of the sales process is to provide product information in a format that is easy for the sales force to access, either online at the office or offline at a customer site. Microsoft CRM includes tools to create product catalogs that include
Product descriptions
Pricing and discount levels
Links to sales literature
Competitor information
Customer profile and order history
These product catalogs help salespeople quickly learn about new or unfamiliar products and services, and provide them with account-specific facts and data they need to help them close deals quickly and efficiently. Because product catalogs are downloadable to their laptops, salespeople can make customer calls equipped with all the information they need. Based on customer needs and past orders, they can make recommendations, answer questions about products, and make comparisons to competitor products or services. In addition, when a customer is interested in closing the deal, the salesperson can use Microsoft CRM to calculate product volume discounts and offer price quotes immediately.
Automating Your Customer Service Process
When businesses think of customer service, they think of the high cost of finding and training customer service representatives (CSRs) and look for how they can provide customer assistance for the lowest possible cost. Unfortunately, the quality of service they provide usually reflects this policy. When users think of customer service, they usually think of customer disservice—long hold times, poor service, not enough time speaking with a human being, no help, and no answers.
Customer service does not have to be synonymous with frustration, however. The Customer Service module in Microsoft CRM provides an extensive set of features designed to increase the efficiency of customer service and provide assistance. This module provides tools that help create a multilevel customer assistance policy that provides an interactive CSR-based service. This service includes
Call routing and assignment— enables you to route service requests automatically to the appropriate representative or teams for resolution, escalation, or reassignment.
Queue management— enables you to send cases to a waiting area, the queue, where individuals and teams can easily access them.
Call tracking— provides tracking and reporting on service call activity.
Entitlement processing— checks user's level of access to system functions.
Problem resolution— supports the identification and resolution of customer service problems.
Logging— enables the system to keep track of incidents through a problem log.
Monitoring— enables you to maintain accurate customer-related communications records with automated tracking of customer email messages.
Performance management— provides reporting tools to help identify common support issues, evaluate customer needs, track service processes, and measure service performance.
Customer Support Cost Levels
The following describes a customer support policy designed to keep costs relatively low while simultaneously increasing the quality and efficiency of service that customers receive.
Level 1— At the first level, the customer utilizes self-service options such as online help database, FAQs, knowledge-based articles, and chat or discussion lists.
Level 2— Customer sends a service request to the company. The service request may be sent through an email message. This engages a CSR on a less time-intensive relationship because one CSR can respond to several messages.
Level 3— At the highest cost level is a phone call, which engages a CSR on a one-to-one relationship. This level of support should be reserved for the most challenging issues or customers with a preferred support relationship with the company.
Contract Services
A challenge of managing services is keeping track of what customers are entitled to, both internally and from the customer's standpoint.
Through the Customer Service module, sales representatives and CSRs create and track Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and entitlements for new and existing customers, and edit and update existing ones. Creating contract templates makes the process go faster when a business offers different service plans to meet customers' specific needs. They can also view the details of service agreements and update or renew existing ones. Integrated billing is not available for Version 1.0
FAQs and Knowledge Base Articles
The Customer Service module offers internally managed content repositories stored in a “question and answer” system that tracks associations made between questions and answers, and a powerful search tool that includes intelligent searches.
As an internal tool, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and Knowledge Base articles also answer questions CSRs might have about new or unfamiliar products and services. CSRs can also use these resources to reduce case handling by pointing customers to specific articles that provide solutions to their questions. CSRs can perform advanced searches, explicit searches, and browse through articles to find the information they need.
Although CSRs can add or delete questions from existing lists or create new lists based on cases they encounter, the Customer Service module automatically generates a list of suggestions based on the questions asked by customers. This reduces the dependency on manual identification of issues and provides an efficient basis upon which to add or archive Knowledge Base articles. All creation, editing, and publishing of content and their templates are managed with internal tools and stored in a SQL Server database. Knowledge Base authors can also specify sections within an article that are restricted for internal use and should not be available to customers.
To preserve the integrity of your Knowledge Base, a user with management privileges must submit the addition or removal of all content. Users with the appropriate privileges can do more than just search and browse for Knowledge Base articles. They can also
Change the content in published or unpublished articles
Approve or reject articles that are submitted to the unapproved folder
Publish articles so that they are available in the Knowledge Base
Delete or unpublish articles that have already been published
Case Management, Queuing, and Routing
Resolving cases is a key function of customer service, and the Customer Service module makes this process easier by providing collaborative activity tools with a browser-based interface through which issues can be submitted and tracked to resolution and closure.
Using one of the predefined views, cases can be filtered and reviewed, activities can be logged, and the time spent on each case can be tracked for performance and productivity analysis and contract allotment. Both open and resolved cases can be accessed through searches, and, when necessary, closed cases can be reactivated. This tracking information can then be turned into reports that measure statistics, such as individual CSR numbers (call lengths, resolutions, and so on), average length of cases, and types of cases.
The Customer Service module includes Web-enabled queuing and routing tools designed to improve how incoming requests for customer service are handled.
With the help of a wizard, CSRs can create queues based on existing product team assignments or subject matter expertise, and modify or merge them as organization, product, and customer needs change.
By adding routing rules to determine how service calls are handled within a queue, organizations that provide high-priority or VIP service can create an “escalation queue” to handle specific callers. Customer service departments organized by product or expertise can create product queues to handle specific types of calls.
An additional benefit of viewing queue details is that it provides immediate feedback on what's going on in the customer service organization, for example, who is assigned to a particular queue, how many customers are waiting in a queue, and how many CSRs are engaged in handling cases. This kind of information can be used to quickly organize staffing when demand increases, and also to forecast and schedule the workforce long term.
Performance Management and Customer Feedback
Logging and monitoring service requests provides the information needed for precision scheduling, workforce forecasting, and improving performance management. The Customer Service module offers management and administration tools that provide detailed transcripts of customer interactions, statistical information about call length and calls handled, as well as information about products, their components, and their usage.
Traditionally, the success of customer service operations is measured by internal and quantitative data, such as how long the average interaction time is and how many calls each CSR works on. One reason that these metrics are cited so often is because quantitative data can be collected and analyzed automatically and internally. The Customer Service module can be used to provide detailed quantitative statistics for efficiency analysis and forecasting purposes.