There may be no department in a company with more impact on the customer experience than the customer support team. In many ways, customer support agents are the face of the company as they are the ones who address customer needs, resolve customer issues, and interact with customers during the most challenging and frustrating times.
That said, many organizations underestimate the importance of customer support and fail to recognize its strategic value in driving customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. This can lead to underinvestment in the tools and resources needed to overcome the challenges of customer support.
Fortunately, many companies already invest in a software tool that can improve customer support processes across the board and turn the challenges of customer support into areas of differentiation — CRM (customer relationship management software).
Knowing how to turn CRM towards the needs of your customer support team can help you provide a higher level of customer service while getting even more ROI out of your CRM.
What is CRM?
A CRM platform is a software toolset that assists businesses with managing their people (customers and employees), work processes, products, and projects on a day-to-day basis.
Once thought of primarily as a customer engagement tool for the sales team, modern CRM software has evolved to address the needs of many different business aspects, including marketing, customer support, customer success, and HR.
Through the use of advanced automations tools and data centralization, a CRM system can help businesses improve communication (both internal and external), work more efficiently, and track performance.
The challenges of customer support
There are many challenges commonly faced by customer support teams regardless of size or industry. CRM can help you overcome all of them.
- Poor ticket management- The foundation of your customer support processes is your ticket management strategy. Unfortunately, for many customer support teams, this is a weakness not a strength.
With CRM, ticket creation and routing can be automated, ensuring that support tickets are assigned to the right customer support rep quickly, reducing response times and improving resolution rates.
Tickets can also be viewed in detailed visualizations that organize tickets by stage, type or rep. This allows you to track progress, identify trends, and assess overall performance at a glance.
- Insufficient customer communication channels- Customer communication preferences vary, requiring customer support teams to be able to address issues across a variety of channels. This can increase the complexity of your customer engagement and operational processes significantly.
A CRM platform can integrate with all your communication tools including phone, email, text/SMS, and chat. This helps your customer service agents communicate with your customers on their terms, speeding up response rates and cutting resolution times while improving the customer experience overall.
- Lack of coordination across teams- Many customer support issues require a coordinated effort to resolve. This can be challenging for companies whose sales people, marketing department, and product/development teams operate independently of each other.
CRM fosters better collaboration and knowledge sharing between your support agents, sales people, and product teams. Team members can send notifications, assign tasks, discuss solutions and coordinate efforts more effectively, leading to faster problem resolution and improved teamwork.
- Limited visibility into trends and emerging issues- For customer service teams, the ability to identify emerging issues is often hampered by lack of visibility. This means customer support teams are forced to take a reactionary approach to issue resolution which causes frustrations for customers and support agents alike.
CRM’s customizable dashboards and data visualization tools enable customer support leaders to monitor trends in real-time. This can help them get ahead of emerging issues and create proactive strategies that improve customer and employee satisfaction.
- Lack of context- In customer support, context matters. Without it, support agents may struggle to fully understand the nature of the customer’s issue or ask redundant questions and provide duplicate solutions, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction on the customer’s end.
A CRM platform serves a centralized database for all your customer information, including:
- Purchase history
- Interaction history
- Past support tickets
- Contact information
- Demographic information
- Communication preferences
This type of contact management helps customer support reps to address a customer’s issues more effectively and efficiently while at the same time providing a personalized customer interaction that increases customer retention and builds customer loyalty and trust.
- Lack of integration with other tools- For many companies, customer support operates independently of their other departments, using their own tools and following their own processes. This disconnect forces customer support reps to switch between tools for contact management, to access and update customer data, and to complete tasks. This leads to disjointed workflows that limit efficiency and add complexity.
The software integration capabilities of CRM can connect all your teams and processes to one unified platform. This enables you to create workflows that ensure consistency and alignment across your whole company.
Plus, team members can send notifications, assign tasks, discuss solutions and coordinate efforts more effectively, leading to faster problem resolution and improved teamwork.
FreeAgent CRM is the best CRM for customer support
FreeAgent CRM is a modern work management platform that provides top-of-field software tools for organizations of all sizes and technical proficiency.
FreeAgent is the best CRM for customer support because FreeAgent is:
- Easy to use- FreeAgent’s modern user interface is quick to learn and easy to use, encouraging teams to work within the platform. This enables you to maintain a comprehensive catalog of every sale, support ticket, and customer interaction.
- User-configurable- With FreeAgent, the power is in your hands. You can customize and personalize FreeAgent to fit the specific needs of your business and teams without external support.
Plus, FreeAgent offers:
- Robust integration- FreeAgent’s flexible toolset and extensive integration library support teams and businesses of all types and structures.
- A mobile CRM tool- FreeAgent’s mobile app allows team members to access the FreeAgent platform from anywhere, at any time.
- Generative AI- Uplift your work with Generative AI-powered features. With FreeAgent, you can access AI across any app, allowing you to get the information you need faster.
With FreeAgent, it’s really that simple.
To see FreeAgent in action, get a demo, and discover for yourself how we are leading the way to a better workday.
