The construction industry is highly competitive.

This is the story of how one of our biggest customers (130 employees, €18 million turnover) managed to:

• turn a customer service team in disarray into a high-performing digital operation center,
• cut response times from 4 days to 24 hours,
• surge their customer satisfaction rates from “meh” to “wow”.

All by putting the customer first and at the heart on their business.

Like any good story, it started as a handful of challenges, but soon turned into a success of how a business can optimize its growth and serve its customers better without scaling up its support staff.

Realizing the main challenge

It all started with the realization that the customer lacked a unified customer view.

Each department was using their own systems to store information about customers. Those systems, sometimes outdated, were not able to support the growing customer base.

In a nutshell, the exchange of information on their customers was cumbersome, long and led to errors.

As a result, it led to slow customer service, long waiting times, growing dissatisfaction, and the lack of trust among customers.

After running several workshops and identifying the most painful organizational pitfalls, top management decided that things had to change and working in silos had to stop.

Facing the pains

The pioneer of change was driven by their customer service manager with the goal of radically improving the ways customer service was delivered and make great customer experience a USP of the entire company!

But there was a challenge.

With a small team of support agents working remotely, they were expected to handle more than 20,000 customer engagements per year!

Here are the key pain points that were highlighted during the workshop:

• Most questions to the support team arrived by phone or email, and required expertise, skills, complex solutions, and – as a result – time. 
• Information about their customers was not quickly and easily available. It took time and effort to find out who their customers were, what they needed, and who spoke to them last.
• Since customer service was provided by email, the volume of back and forth messages was high.
• Both service agents and customers had to trace emails in their overflowing inboxes.
• Private information was sent via the unsecured channel – email.
• It took several days before the agents could send a comprehensive answer to the anxious customer, leaving them in the dark for a long time. 
• Internal cooperation with other departments was insufficient and took too much time, slowing down the overall speed of ticket resolution.

Adding to this – hiring more agents was not an option.

So, they had to find a way to improve the way they communicate with customers without scaling up the team.

Finding the solution

The change started at the very top.

The entire company, not just the service team, decided to acquire one shared solution. This solution had to give everyone a 360-degree view of the customer, meet every department’s needs and support their existing work processes.

Put simply – they put their customer first and at the center of their businesst.

For the customer service team, the new solution had to offer two key functionalities:

a. tools to manage incoming requests better and faster,
b. self-service options that would help their customers to find solutions to simple or recurrent issues themselves, whenever they needed to.

This solution was SuperOffice CRM for sales, marketing and service departments, and the SuperOffice Customer Engagement Platform that helps improve customer experience without scaling up the inhouse support personnel.

Implementing the solution

First, the company implemented SuperOffice CRM across all teams giving everyone a unified view of their customer.

RESULT: all customer-related information is shared and stored in one central location, there is no need to spend time looking for it, and everyone in their team knows that the information is up to date. Also, the collaboration between departments significantly improved, while problems get solved faster.

Secondly, the customer service team finally got the necessary tools to manage all their incoming requests in SuperOffice Service.

RESULT: now the agents are able to assign tickets, manage queues, use escalation, send auto-replies, work with templates and FAQs, as well as pull out reports.

Third, their existing processes changed radically with the introduction of the Customer Engagement Platform that offered self-service options and more digital communication channels.

Available “out-of-the-box”, Customer Engagement Platform allowed the customer to launch a website (Customer Center) where their own customers can log in to register new requests, find answers to questions, and – most importantly – control who has access to their own data and manage their subscriptions.

RESULT: Agents save time on service, customers are able to get help quicker, the data quality has improved, and it became easier for the company to stay compliant with the GDPR data privacy laws.

Fourth, the customer decided to remove email as a contact option altogether and asked all customers to communicate with them via the web and by phone.

Interestingly, this change was quickly welcomed by customers, as the communication became easier, faster and more secure than before.

RESULT: Their customers can simply log in and view their submitted requests, communication history, and ongoing dialogues. Also, the customer always knows who is handling their requests, and at any time, can go back and find a solution to the previous issues.

Reaping the rewards

The implementation of SuperOffice CRM and the Customer Engagement Platform resulted in 10 key improvements for the customer:

1. Average ticket resolution time has decreased from 3-4 days to just 1 day!
2. 250-300 users visit the Customer Center website every day to get help or check on the status of their inquiry.
3. All smaller issues are resolved by the customers themselves, giving the support team more time to focus on more complex requests.
4. In cases when ticket resolution takes more time, their customers are always informed and aware of the waiting time, which builds trust and confidence.
5. Unlike before, the customer service team no longer receives any complaints about their service. Instead, they receive positive feedback from satisfied customers.
6. Collaboration between departments has improved.
7. Upsell opportunities (such as training or consultancy) are identified quicker and passed on to sales.
8. R&D personnel has uninterrupted access to all the information about customer requirements and reported bugs.
9. The new system collects important feedback about customer satisfaction, concerns and even directions for future developments.
10. The Customer Center now provides easy access to their educational products, stimulating exposure and demand.

On a higher level, the customer also noticed that the improved performance of the customer service department has become a competitive advantage for the entire company.

All this is due to the Customer Engagement Platform offering tools that allow you to connect and interact with your customers through multiple digital channels, as well as balance your digital and human interaction.

Are you ready to put your customer first?

Do you want to learn more about the SuperOffice Customer Engagement Platform?

Book a meeting below and one of our CRM-experts will show you the features, benefits and use cases for how you can improve the customer service experience.