CRM administration overview

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) should be considered as much more than just call handling; it is a customer-centric, contact management solution, focused on the provision of exceptional quality of service and increased profitability, as well as the timely resolution of queries. With access to all related business systems, the principal aim of CRM is to record, track and progress customer interactions in a way that increases satisfaction levels within the social housing community. This integrated approach helps to realise significant efficiency savings on a number of levels, specifically:

• Empowering advisers to resolve more queries during initial customer contact, thus increasing call throughput and reducing waiting times.
• Supporting the tracking of unresolved queries and related actions to improve the overall customer experience.
• Facilitating the analysis of instances where service delivery has not been met, allowing for informed decisions on potential business process improvements.
• Tailoring all services to meet the needs of the customer and being proactive in defining new CRM case subjects in response to repeat queries.
• Managing a diverse range of services through a relatively small team of advisers, potentially releasing specialist resource for back office duties.
• Ensuring that all queries of the same subject are processed in a consistent way, in line with housing organisation policy and their published customer charter.

Where enquiries merit expert assistance from other colleagues, or a specific process needs to be triggered outside of the call (e.g. raising a new repair request and securing contractor resource), a case can be raised and assigned to a specific owner or team. The definition of the subject selected for the case, including all supporting activities (CRM tasks), then provides a controlled structure for how the customer interaction will be progressed, both in terms of the chronological steps taken and also the inherent target completion dates for each.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of CRM administration, including:

• CRM configuration management overview
• CRM interaction management overview