“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” Carl Jung
My former company, New England Office Supply (NEOS), provided an outstanding customer experience. I know this because we were acquired by our toughest competitor and witnessed the differences first hand. The transition was difficult, and customers frequently told us how much they missed our service.
But an outstanding customer experience wasn’t always the case!
We got it right most of the time but had occasional lapses. Such as: Buried email, a lost note, or we’d get busy resolving another issue and forgot, requiring the customer to call a second time. Many times, a manager had to spend time finding out what happened. It was not the ideal customer experience and just not very efficient.
We had no choice but to make a big effort to address all of this, and we truly evolved into a great customer service company when we implemented a dynamic case management system.
What is dynamic case management (DCM)?
DCM is the process of utilizing technology to manage customer service interactions to facilitate prompt and accurate issue resolution. Each interaction is entered as a case or ticket triggering a workflow to route it to the best individual or team for timely and accurate response. Response and resolution times are defined by service level agreements (SLAs).
Here are the core benefits of dynamic case management (DCM):
Increased Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Customer issues are resolved faster with higher quality responses. Response and resolution times are defined by service level agreements (SLAs) which are set to meet or exceed customer expectations. Workflows route cases to the appropriate team/individual based on issue priority, capacity, and expertise to resolve issues faster. Alerts and reports help managers confirm that deadlines are being met, and identify reoccurring issues to address deficiencies and initiate process improvement. At NEOS, we scheduled a 30 minute weekly meeting to review escalated cases, reoccurring issues, and customers with high issue frequency. Process break downs were identified, analyzed, and addressed to promote constant improvement.
Increased Efficiency and Bottom Line
Dynamic workflows automatically route cases to eliminate time spent chasing internal experts to get answers. Cases are routed based on issue priority, team capacity, and expertise to optimize productivity. Customer interactions and related documents are stored in a central database visible to sales, marketing, service, and management. Integration with back-end ERP and digital marketing systems provide a complete view of the customer and empower service teams to understand customer health and make better decisions. Self-service tools allow customers to create service tickets and check status to reduce workload.
Improved Team Performance
Service level agreements (SLAs) keep your team accountable for prompt response and give management better visibility into performance. Alerts and reports help confirm that support deadlines and milestones are being met and enable managers to proactively manage bottlenecks, resource imbalances or other constraints. At NEOS, we used SLA performance metrics to set team and individual goals, conduct evaluations, and celebrate team and company successes.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
There are top Customer Relationship management (CRM) solutions that incorporate dynamic case management (DCM) functionality and integration. SugarCRM is a prime example of a total CRM solution that automates sales & marketing process along with process for case management. A major part of this functionality offers customers portal access to manage their cases in the CRM system remotely.