“Ask the CRM Guru,” in which customers like you ask business-solution related questions of our CRM Guru's here at Macdonald Consulting Group. What's your question?

Question:

Dear Guru:

The CRM system that we have chosen for our company includes functionality to handle incoming customer support calls. It can track them and help us build a database of common issues and solutions, and it allows customers to submit their own issues from the web. We're currently outsourcing our customer support, but might there be advantages to bringing it in-house since we have the technology?

Thanks! Call Center Confusion

Dear Confusion:

There are indeed distinct advantages to having your support center in-house. Having customer issues and resolutions data in the same system as sales and accounting data enables your entire team to have a holistic view of their customers, which can't help but improve customer service overall. And, since your team has already seen that CRM can be successful, this might be a good time to convince them to roll out Customer Service as part of the technology. But why not ask the people who are impacted the most by a change - your customers? Maybe you could test-drive the service function with a few of your best customers and get their feedback. After all, it doesn't matter what you like if your customers are not happy!

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