Customer Service

Customer Service Role

Customer service is a critical role within an organization whether this is a dedicated person or one of many roles that an employee holds. Customer service consists of checking on customers, following up with service status, sending out announcements, and general communication with customers.

The following are some of the tasks that a user in the customer service role will do:

Checking on Customers Follow up on service status Sending out announcements General communication with customers

Checking on Customers

Checking on customers is easy with SME. First, you will go through a list of customers to provide some follow-up. the order of your follow-up depends on your goals for customer service. For example, maybe you want to follow-up a few days after some service was performed. Or maybe you want to just make sure you "touch" each active customer every 3 months.

So first determine your goal for your customer service follow-up:

I hope to achieve the goal of through regular follow-up with customers.

Once you have the goal, create a search view that provides the customer search list of the customers requiring follow-up. See the view section to see how to create a view. Once example field to use may be "Last Edit". This field tells the last time that the customer has been touched is some way. (Note that this may not have been an actual call to the customer, but just that some edit has been made to the customer record). Another approach may be to use some unused field to track your responses.

If you are following up a few days after a service order is closed, your view may be on service orders instead of customers.

Once you get to the customer to follow-up, make sure you add notes. You can use CSR notes or use Sales Notes, as long as your organization is consistent. See the Notessection for more info of adding notes.

Follow up on service status

A good strategy for service companies is to follow-up on service calls a few days after service is completed. This will ensure if the service was completed properly and also if any additional service is required (more revenue opportunity!). The customer service rep should be totally open and curious to whatever the customer may say about the service. The are three steps to the process:

Find the customers that need to be followed-up: Create a view to show all service orders with closed date of the last few days. See views section on how to create a view. Contact the customer for follow-up: Either make a call to the customer, send an email, or send a survey to customers. We recommend to use SurveyMonkey to create an free online survey. If you need to contact many customers at once you can use SME email marketing tool or something like ConstantContact. Take notes and record the results of the follow-up: Go to the customer record and enter the results of the follow-up in CSR notes or Sales notes. See the Notes section for more info of adding notes. If the customer needs additional service, enter a new service order.

Sending out announcements

Sending out announcements to customers can be performed using SME email marketing tool or something like ConstantContact. These tools will allow you to send out many emails at once. The SME email marketing gives a basic email marketing tool while Constant Contact provides a full featured email marketing tool tracking link backs and tools for creation of nice looking email campaigns. The advantage of SME email marketing is it's easier to get the emails from SME customers and sales leads.

General communication with customers

General communications with customers can be through emails, phone calls, or SME email marketing tool. To send an email to customers, just double click on the email address and your default email program will open. Be sure to also add a note within SME Notes section to record that you send out an email. You can use a quick abbreviation of em to note that you send out an email.

When you make a phone call or send an email email to a customer, be sure to record the phone call info in notes also.