Making customers feel supported and cared for is crucial not only for making new sales, but also for retaining business and creating repeat sales. Outstanding customer service is essential to creating perceived value and driving customer loyalty towards your brand. To achieve this ideal, it’s imperative you have a 360 degree view of your customer’s wants and needs. That ranges from initial lead generation to after sales support across your various business units. This requires systems, processes and practices that enables everyone in your organisation to access the data they need, when they need it and in the format that delivers value and enhances the overall customer experience.
But in growing businesses, these foundations may be legacy systems using a variety of platforms and channels acquired through mergers and organic growth. How can you quickly find value from your customer data and ensure your processes are capable of meeting future growth plans?
A European Healthcare provider requested our help when they identified issues within their Lead to Cash process (L2C). When the service you provide is care, making sure you understand the experience a customer has with your business is essential.
In this scenario, the client was struggling to provide the level of customer support they wanted for three main reasons;
- An underperforming customer service department
- Outgrowing their existing Salesforce instance configuration
- Disjointed systems creating duplicated information and inaccurate customer views
Assessing Capabilities and Outlining Objectives
The client wanted to make significant improvements based on the three business challenges identified. To make the project more manageable, it was split into multiple phases.
The first step was to recognise the current issues while understanding their capabilities so we could formulate a plan that prioritised deliverables and created rapid returns. It was important that stakeholders throughout the business were fully onboard with the project aims and adopted a fully customer focused culture.
Creating a Legacy
To avoid future duplication of customer data and to improve customer service, we were able to standardise the enquiry handling process across multiple geographic sites. This led to a number of benefits including:
- Improved visibility of the customer and their point in the sales cycle to all departments
- Better integration between CRM and Operations systems
- Increased ROI on marketing campaigns as a result of better reporting and lead tracking
- Reduced need to customise the CRM tool, simplifying its integration with other products
To ensure a smooth and effective delivery of this project, we provided Business Analysts, Trainers and a Change Analyst to support the client’s internal teams.
Phase two saw the implementation of this improved sales process within the second business unit as well as the movement of that part of the business onto the same CRM tool as the first. This implementation was supported by Business Analysts and Trainers from Clarasys as well, making sure all the learning from both parts of the project were passed onto the internal teams so they were better placed to implement their own projects in future.
Integrating Systems to Improve Customer Service
By putting both business units onto the same CRM system, the client received a number of additional business benefits including;
- A reduced number of processes and systems across the business which comes with associated cost savings and smoother integrations and transformations in future
- A clearer view of the customer’s’ interactions with the business as a whole rather than with individual business units
Integrating multiple systems helped to eradicate inaccurate recordings that the client had gathered over time. But perhaps the latter benefit has the biggest impact. A single, consolidated view of the customer allows for a much higher level of service and this is reflected in a consumer’s experience. They receive a much more personalised service across the different business units.
Throughout the project, every decision made was focused on the customer experience. The client moved away from using a number of operational systems, instead transferring to a fully integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
This enabled staff to make better decisions thanks to more accurate and readily available information. This put the consumer at the heart of everything. Customer service improved, which in turn increased the opportunities to generate additional revenue through cross selling and upselling. Naturally, this helped to improve their Lead to Cash process.
The client has seen multiple benefits from these changes and is now expanding the scope of the project to improve marketing interactions and their customers’ online experience. This will let website visitors quickly and easily see what services they are subscribing to, and see the other services they are eligible for. This has the obvious benefits for customer experience and support, but also provides other opportunities to reduce costs (e.g. time taken by internal teams to find and provide information) and increase revenues even further.
They’ve also benefited from the legacy we have left them with. Our team of experts have passed on invaluable skills and knowledge to the client’s internal teams.
