5 Ways to Streamline Customer Service Using Sugar

(Editor’s Note: the following is a guest blog post from Rachel Brink, the marketing manager at 3CLogic. It originally appeared on the SugarCRM Community)

For most of today’s consumers, customer service plays a larger role in purchasing decisions than both price and product. And this fundamental shift has led many businesses to invest more resources in innovations that enhance the customer experience, including CRMs, Marketing Automation platforms, and contact center software. But despite an increased focus, there continues to exist a large gap—while 80% of businesses think they are delivering a superior customer experience, only 8% of consumers agree. How can organizations make better use of their data management and customer engagement solutions to streamline and automate customer service processes, and boost customer satisfaction?

1- Help customers help themselves

Consumers are increasingly gravitating towards self-service channels to resolve their problems and inquiries—in fact, self-service recently exceeded phone as the most used customer service touch point. Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Ultimate each offer a self-help portal, enabling customers to create cases, upload notes, track case statuses, manage subscriptions, and update account information. They also offer a searchable knowledge base where customers can find FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and product updates. Platforms such as 3CLogic’s contact center software also offer the ability to enable self-service via IVR menus—all of which will help decrease support costs, and boost customer satisfaction.

2 – Leverage client data to optimize queue management and call routing

While every customer is important, certain instances may require the need to prioritize specific incoming calls due to the client’s size, the urgency of their need, or their status (i.e. Premier Customer, etc.). When integrated with Sugar, 3CLogic’s contact center solution can automatically prioritize calls in the queue based on the clients’ information stored in Sugar records. It can also intelligently route calls to the individual best suited to address them based on a number of factors, including language, who the customer has worked with in the past, and the complexity of the case/agent skill level.

3 – Offer users immediate access to client records and cases

When assessing why certain cases were not resolved on the first call, customer service managers have found that more than half the time, it is due to the agent’s inability to quickly access customer information. But by leveraging Sugar in combination with a cloud communications platform, help desks can automatically populate agent screens with each client’s record and open cases upon every incoming call, facilitating fast and seamless customer support. Users will also have access to click-to-call functionality within each customer record or case for enhanced efficiencies.

4 – Automate the recording and documentation of calls

Less than ten percent of interactions are entered into the typical CRM, largely due to the fact that it is an extremely time consuming and manual process. And this lack of interaction data can inhibit service rep and managers’ ability to adequately understand previous as well as existing client issues. But by using a solution such as 3CLogic’s telephony platform, businesses can automatically save all call recordings and call details within each Sugar record or case, enabling reps and supervisors to better understand each customer’s service history. Call recordings can also be used by managers for coaching, and quality and training purposes.

5 – Measure, measure, measure

The only way to truly understand how your customer service team is performing, how satisfied your customers are, and what product or process changes need to be made, is by properly documenting all case information, interaction details, and customer feedback. Thanks to Sugar, this is quite easy to do using its reporting Module, offering actionable business intelligence including support team responsiveness, customer satisfaction scores, and incident frequency. Combined with call center data, managers can gain a better understanding of their team’s efficiency and where improvements should be made to cut down support costs and improve CSAT scores.