Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot topic over the last decade.  It should be as attracting and retaining customers is more challenging today than it ever has been.  In many organizations CRM sits at the heart of the enterprise, spanning marketing, sales, and service as noted in the diagram below:

When working with customers we find that there is continuous interaction between CRM and scheduling.  For example, when companies have a workflow that needs to be executed for every new customer, schedules have to be created.  In cases where people need to be scheduled in a coordinated workflow, providing scheduling answers is hard. 

For example, suppose that these steps have to be executed before a new customer can be setup:

1. One hour introductory meeting with an implementer.
2. After the introductory meeting, a project manager has to spend a half hour creating the project plan for the customer.
3. The account manager has to be scheduled to do a follow up call after the project manager has the plan.

In many companies this scheduling problem is solved by manual processes and numerous email messages back and forth between teams and the customer.  It is prone to all sorts of errors.  By automating this scheduling the customer experience completely changes:

1. They get the scheduling answers they need when they place their order.
2. Things are delivered when they said they would be.

This level of customer delivery is what people expect today.  Is your company making it easy and accurate for your customer’s first customer relationship with you to be an outstanding one?  With automated people and resource scheduling, you can.

David Greer

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 11:38 am and is filed under Customer Service, Scheduling, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.