Use Case Corner

Consider the following true story from a large provider of employment services, before they achieved integrated customer service systems:

Mac, from sales, has finally gotten his client Bill Smith to agree to a face-to-face meeting, to discuss follow-up business. He's excited because Bill's company is a big client and a lot is riding on this sale, so he's not leaving anything to chance this morning. He's wearing a $500 suit, he's got all the collateral sales materials the client could possibly want to see, he's even got his laptop with a fancy new calculator program that allows him to generate a price quote on the spot.

But as soon as he sits down across the desk from Bill, he suspects something is wrong. Bill's not smiling as big as usual and he seems to be keeping his distance this morning. Mac's antennae are shouting, “Something's wrong!” but he doesn't have a clue what it might be.

“So, Mac, your company services a lot of accounts for us all over the country, right?”

“That's right, Bill, in fact, that's one of the reasons we're a good fit for you locally, we know your company, how you like to do things; it won't take much to ramp up operations here based on what we're already doing for your company.”

“So what can you tell me about the problems in Denver last night? I understand Tom's still waiting on his morning reports…”

At this point, Mac knows he's dead in the water. It's happened before, and even though he went through the roof last time, it's happening again. Nobody called to brief him, and now, instead of making the sale he's got to pacify an angry client even though he had nothing to do with the problem.

If Mac had known ahead of time that the Denver account had encountered processing problems the night before, he could have come prepared to give Bill a status update immediately, putting to rest any lingering fears Bill might have had about facing the same problem.

Mac was not the only one to suffer from that company's lack of customer service integration. Important new business that could have been written that day was lost, and Mac's coworkers would tell you that it happens all the time. Small, single-location accounts are not a problem in this respect because the sales rep usually knows about any activity on an in-town account. But keeping up with the big accounts, where the big contracts originate, is often a convoluted nightmare. Customers merge and move, they divest and enter new lines of business, and without integrated systems that can track these developments across the country and internationally, the sales force is in the dark when information matters most.

After this company integrated its service applications enterprise-wide, it was able to set them up so that problems in Denver can easily be reported in Atlanta. An early-warning system generated and delivered a trouble report to Mac before he went out on any customer call. Now, if a large multilocation client experiences problems anywhere in the country, Mac knows to expect questions and develops strategies beforehand for handling concerns.

In Microsoft CRM, the Announcements Cell provides a remarkably simple mechanism for publishing early warnings about service problems occurring across territories. This cell lists announcements that all users of Microsoft CRM will see when visiting the homepage. If you use this method to publish announcements, keep in mind that users can customize their homepage in such a way as to exclude announcements. However, they still have the option of visiting a “show all announcements” page that would provide the information. Finally, to make this work in Microsoft CRM, procedural requirements have to be established to identify and report service problems of the type discussed in this case study. With these few changes in place, the kind of advance warning that Mac's need can be provided.