A fundamental goal of CRM is to improve long-term growth and profitability through a superior understanding of customer behavior. Here, CRM examines all aspects of the interactions a company has with its customers and involves the implementation of methodologies and technology to help an enterprise manage its customer relationships in an organized way.

And while CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, all too often for many companies, CRM is predominately focused on Customer Acquisition Management – moving customers and prospects through the sales and marketing process to land new customers or up-sell existing ones. This bias leaves a lot of meat on the bone for companies to get more out of their total CRM investment, and bring the focus back to the customer and good customer service.

The reality is that most organizations simply don’t do their due diligence when it comes to servicing their customers, or do so in a way that is tagged as being time and resource consuming. For example, in 2006 only 59% of contact centers reported that they had achieved their customer satisfaction KPI, down significantly from 79% in 2005 (Dimension Data, 3-1-06).

At a time when companies are under extreme pressure to transform customer service from a cost center to a profit center, how do we rise above this plateau of productivity in customer support and refocus our vision on the customer?

The key to successful customer service, and using technology and software to power the customer service operation, is to adopt a holistic approach that unifies all the different points of customer interaction.

At the heart of this approach is the concept of collaboration, bringing different elements together into a cohesive, working unit. As goes the old adage “the sum is greater than its parts”, two or more people working together to solve a problem are more effective than one.

When applied to CRM, this means involving multiple internal and external resources in the resolution of a single customer service inquiry. Here, collaboration goes one step further than simple linear processes (which make up the classic sales and marketing part of CRM) to encourage interactive communications that incorporate business processes into the complete service chain. Collaboration ensures that customer requests are handled not only in the context of the help desk or customer service department, but also allows smart agents to work in real-time with other departments such as sales, marketing, supply chain, accounting as well as with external partners to utilize their efficiencies and achieve faster case resolution.

A complete, holistic approach builds on collaboration to provide a complete ecosystem of tools for the agent and all stakeholders involved in solving customer issues. These must-have ingredients for a successful customer service operation include:

· Customer-Centric Strategies– While it sounds obvious, strategies modeled first and foremost around the customer are much more likely to result in greater satisfaction for the customer and, subsequentially, greater customer acquisition and retention for the company. Align resources in a fashion that most effectively respond to the evolving needs of customers to not only exceed current requests, but anticipate future needs. Put the customer needs first and the rest will follow.

· Shared Knowledge Base- A searchable, structured document database can be used to create, organize, and publish case knowledge and aggregate best practices in a more formal way. Having an easy-to-navigate receptacle for all past case histories enables agents, partners or customers to be automatically provided with the most relevant documents depending on the specified context to facilitate rapid case closure.

· Self Service Center– The ultimate reflection of the role of the customer – it’s important to offer customers some measure of self-service that gives end-customers direct access to the company’s knowledge base at any time for automated assistance prior to case creation. Rather than outsourcing and departmentalizing this work, a self-service solution provides the proper information for an end-user to create a new service request, track the status of existing cases, and to interact with the customer service team in the resolution process from start to finish. And integration is key. If a customer makes some progress on his or her own via self-service, these efforts shouldn’t be lost when the customer chooses to pick up the phone.

· Partner Center– A partner center is similar to a customer self-service center but usually includes additional, customizable functionalities so that partners can play a more proactive role in the resolution of open cases. In giving trusted external entities tailored access to the knowledge base, partners can seamlessly interact as a member of the extended customer service chain on the creation, monitoring, and request closure process.

· Role-Based Experience- Creating easy to use, role-based dashboards and reports gives managers a snapshot view into case progression and performance of what each customer service agent and team member is working on in real time. Comprehensive reporting capabilities allow for results to be instantly quantified and problems to be fixed to ensure even more efficient case resolution in the future.

· Business Intelligence – To fully harness the knowledge base and information aggregated through collaboration, it is critical to then create value from this data. This boils down to integrating this intelligence into the service resolution process and changing fundamental business processes to provide insight into what customers want improved.

· Cross-SalesIntegration – In creating a more engaging, collaborative experience, customer service becomes more logically integrated with sales and marketing departments in leveraging incoming queries to increase cross- and up-sales opportunities.

In short, agents should be able to optimize the information exchange with internal and external resources to effectively improve operational efficiencies and pay stronger attention to customer detail. Redefining the customer service function by empowering the agent in such a way can serve as a key competitive differentiator and bring the focus back to the customer, resulting in higher quality service, new revenue opportunities, a substantial reduction in operating costs, and increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Philippe has more than 25 years of leadership experience in the hi-tech industry, where he has held a variety of executive positions spanning product development, operations, sales and business strategy with leading companies. Prior to joining Neocase, Philippe served as President and co founder of Supporter, a company specializing in customer support and help desk (via phone, internet, and on site). Under his leadership Supporter's revenues grew ten-fold, the workforce grew to over 400 employees and its customer base expanded to hundreds of companies throughout Europe and the United States. While at Supporter, Philippe initiated the concept and development of Neocase Software solutions for use at Supporter and for the use of companies of any size and industry. Prior to Supporter, Philippe was President of GM Technology, a telecommunications software vendor for the Apple Macintosh platform where he demonstrated his dedication to developing and building groundbreaking technologies. Neocase