5 Reasons Why You Should Not Use Your CRM for Enterprise Customer Service
- Cesar Marcillo
- Oct 27, 2021
- 4 min read
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, love them or hate them, are essential to your business. They help you keep track of your clients, their purchases, and help build relationships with potential customers. And so it would seem logical that your enterprise customer service should be driven by the same system. The reality however is complicated because using a CRM for your enterprise customer support comes with inherit limitations and road blocks when a system designed to sell is also used to support.
We are going to dive into 5 promises CRMs make and what that means for your customer support team.
1) NATIVE INTEGRATION WITH YOUR CRM
THE PROMISE:
CRMs hold all of your customer information and can organize them, help with prospecting, and even manage renewals and leads. All of this information is essential to your support team and leveraging the same system gives you an edge since there is no need for mediocre integrations.
THE REALITY:
The people supporting your customers don’t need all of the information from your CRM and having all of that data can be more cumbersome than helpful. Supporting customers requires some basic integrations so that your customer service system can display, search, and use the data to find and link it back to customers. The basic synchronizations typically include:
Company synchronization
Contact synchronization
Asset and Company Asset synchronization
Product synchronization
Case synchronization to your CRM
Another plus is that the information that is pulled into your CS (Customer Support) system is only relevant data that will be useful to your support staff, cutting down on the noise and clutter.
2) BETTER INTEGRATION WITH 3RD PARTY APPS
THE PROMISE:
CRMs are mature products with a wealth of plugins and apps from CRM market places. You can leverage the vast number of plugins to customize your support system to match your business.
THE REALITY:
Although very true that the plugins offered within CRMs are vast and in some cases highly adaptable, they are typically not focused on customer service and can have costs associated to them. Integrations are more functional and better implemented on native customer service solutions as they are tailored for support teams rather than CRMs.
3) SALES ARE ABLE TO SEE ONE VIEW OF THEIR CUSTOMER, A 360-DEGREE VIEW
THE PROMISE:
CRMs were created for one purpose, to sell. Having one view wholistic view of the customer, knowing what issues customers are having, and knowing when things go wrong helps sales people sell and increases your bottom line.
THE REALITY:
Depending on your business, much like having renewal information or notes on prospects within CS systems, having support issues within your wholistic view does not necessarily increase sales, but can add to more clutter and confusion.
If your business does actually need this wholistic view, a system like Supportbench can manage pushing the ticket information you need into your CRM giving you the wholistic view you need. Either way, having the option for a 360-degree view can increase your sales depending on your sales model.
You can learn about how a 360-degree view can give you an edge here.
4) FLEXIBILITY AND CUSTOMIZABILITY
THE PROMISE:
CRMs are typically well supported solutions and are inherently flexible. Platforms like Salesforce let you customize your CRM to do whatever you like with advanced permissions and programmability that few others can claim they also offer.
THE REALITY:
While true CRMs like Salesforce give you the ability to mold it to almost anything you want, that flexibility and customizability come at a price. Most businesses are unable to actually do the customizations needed to mold the systems to their business as they require expertise or come with a high consultation cost.
CS systems are already tailored to meet the needs of support departments and systems like Supportbench take it a step further and ensure that flexibility and customizability is already built in without needed consulting or experience.
5) ONE VENDOR, ONE SYSTEM
THE PROMISE:
Having one vendor cuts down on training time, allows IT staff to support less, which saves your business money.
THE REALITY:
Having a complex CRM can increase training time, and IT staff typically don’t have the experience to support or customize CRM platforms and seek consultation help to do so. CRMs also come with a comparatively high licensing cost when all of the features are added. Going with a CRM will in reality increase your costs and bring down your bottom line.
Customer service systems are less expensive, very user intuitive and can be managed easily by their support teams without expensive consultation.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Support CRMs are created for one purpose, managing your company’s Sales and Sales pipeline and not customer service. All of the features you need for customer service are better implemented elsewhere on native solutions. Integrations within customer service products are more functional and better implemented on native support solutions. And finally, CRMs don’t actually help your bottom line and are more expensive.
The real question is, what customer service solution should my business use to help my customers better? Every business is unique but with similarities and you should be choosing a system that can meet the support needs that your business calls for with the ability to scale, and adapt to new customer service challenges.
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