According to a recent Gartner report, by the second half of 2009 Microsoft along with Salesforce.com will emerge as the most influential powers in the customer service application market (0.7 probability). Gartner continues "to see a great need for advanced decision support and complex knowledge-management capabilities, customer feedback management, an interest in creating composite applications through a combination of in-house development, and best-of-breed customer support system vendors".
The Customer Service module of Microsoft Dynamics CRM makes for the creation of a database of service cases which are easy to create, assign and manage. Account and contact records with associated activities and histories are shared with the Sales and Marketing modules, allowing key data to be shared across teams and departments, therefore avoiding needless embarrassment caused by the right arm not knowing what the left arm is doing. As in the case of the other modules, the Customer Service module enables customisation of workflow rules, provides powerful templates as well as automates tracking of all support issue correspondence from initial contact through to case resolution.
The storehouse of information you create and build is fully searchable, making it easier and quicker to resolve customer service issues.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Service Module allows you to spend more time serving and less time typing, as well as more time on looking after customers than on serving applications.
Key Features
Works through familiar Microsoft Outlook to manage customer incidents and service contracts
Easy activity and task management
Global service calendar with Outlook synchronisation to co-ordinate appointments across all service sites and locations
E-mail management of service requests, including auto-responses via Web connector
Automatic association of communications, tasks and appointments with cases using tokens
Workflow to route and escalate cases and tasks to appropriately skilled, available team members
Powerful case management collaboration
Service request with activity and case queuing
Reporting functionality to analyse case progress and resolution
Searchable knowledge-base of articles organised by product and service category with built-in review process to ensure information is complete, accurate and properly tagged
Contract management to ensure accurate billing for support incidents
Product catalogue including support for complex pricing levels, units of measure, discounts and pricing options
For service staff out on the road, Google Earth map overlay (available with Version 4 end 2007) to quickly locate location and routes to service addresses
Key Benefits
Instant adoption by on-site and off-site service personnel (familiar look and feel with Outlook interface, Office integration and remote access options)
Quick service case resolution via a streamlined and automated process of support incident routing, queuing and escalation of service requests
Save time and costs through better service resource scheduling
Deliver a consistently efficient and professional service to win long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty
Figure 1 shows the setting up of a service case. There are fields with multiple drop-down options, but all these can be easily customised by a super-user (without code) to fit a particular organisation’s service requirements. Figure 2 shows that a Task activity has been set up against this case and this can be double-clicked to reveal fuller details. From Figure 2 you can see that the CRM system automatically assigns a token to the case once saved. This helps track all communication (e-mail, fax, letter) and activities (appointments, tasks, campaigns) associated with this case. Figure 3 shows the setting up of a Service activity against a particular case. Figure 4 illustrates the Service Activity screen and availability of service engineers upon clicking "Find Available Times" button. Figure 5 depicts the search capability within the Articles Knowledge Base, the article link is double-clicked to reveal the full story – Figure 6.
