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Former Member

If you interact with customers in your role, you know how important it is to resolve customer issues as effectively and quickly as possible.

Happy customers lead to repeat business and higher order values. Unhappy customers lead to not only fewer sales but also – in worst case scenarios – angry reactions on social channels that poison your relationship with further customers and prospects.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a sales person or a customer service rep – for anyone in a customer-facing role, getting clients from unhappy to happy quickly is imperative. What's clear is that resolving customer issues faster kicks off a chain reaction of positive effects.

If you:

1. Reduce time to resolution (for your service requests)

...you'll:

2. Increase customer satisfaction

...which means you'll ultimately:

3. Shorten sales cycles (for additional sales to those customers)

In other words, if you’re a sales rep who’s trying to close additional business with a customer, getting satisfactory closure on an outstanding issue may be even more urgent for you than for your colleagues in customer service. If you haven’t resolved their existing problems, will your customer trust you enough to do more business with you?

But if a customer issue is stalling your deal, how do you quickly marshal experts from across your organization – whether from customer service, engineering, or another department – to work together to fix the issue?

Sales people that use a CRM often have access – at least theoretically – to the same system that customer service reps use. That’s why it’s called customer relationship management, after all. But in practice, how easy is it for both sales reps and service reps to see the same detail about a customer issue and communicate within the context of that system without resorting to inefficient workarounds?

The latest release of SAP Jam, through its native integration with SAP CRM, addresses this problem head on. With its new Service Request Resolution work pattern, you’ll be able to bring together a strike team of experts from a wide variety of teams – not just from sales or customer service – to resolve the customer’s pressing problem.

Even if those experts from outside customer service and sales don’t have access to your CRM system, they’ll still be able to see – within the SAP Jam group – key customer data that’s being pulled live from the CRM to keep everyone on the same page.

Here’s a brief example of how it might work.

Perry is a sales rep who’s beginning to work on a new deal with one of his key accounts, National Rivera. To get an overview of the account before proceeding, he goes into his Account Management group in SAP Jam. In the service requests section, he sees several outstanding issues – one of which, worryingly, is marked as critical.

He’s immediately concerned that it could affect his ability to proceed with his new deal. To see more details about the issue, he hovers his mouse over the request. In the description that pops up, he sees that the issue is currently being worked on but is marked as having a high impact. He decides to take initiative and create a strike team devoted to closing the critical issue before he continues with his new sales opportunity.

He clicks Create Group to initiate a new SAP Jam group devoted specifically to resolving that critical customer service ticket. The group automatically includes details pulled live from SAP CRM about the issue, and Perry is able to invite anyone from inside his organization to help drive to resolution, whether or not they otherwise have access to SAP CRM. And because the implementation in question also involves a regional partner, Perry is able to make the group available externally and invite a consultant from the implementation company.

In the group, the team can now discuss a strategy for coming to a resolution. Perry is able to keep track of the details, which of course, he’s keen on knowing about as soon as possible. As the customer service team updates the status of the issue in SAP CRM, everyone in the group is notified of those changes in their event feed. Once the issue is resolved, Perry is notified immediately, and he can go back to what he needs to focus on – his next deal with the customer.