A CRM system, as the name suggests, ensures that a housing organisation's relationship-building goals are on track, improving visibility and management of daily activities on a company-wide scale, as well as maintaining customer contact in the most efficient way. One major advantage is the ability to collect and analyse data from all system entries, allowing housing organisations to better tailor their customer-related strategies across the many varied services they provide. At its heart, a CRM system is used to record, track and analyse activities that operators are performing throughout the lifecycle of each new customer interaction. In configuring the CRM system, a number of key components should be considered:
- Scripts - Devising a sequence of instructions, guidance notes, questions and, where appropriate, links to other related sources of information that will be presented to an operator when processing a customer interaction.
- Escalation Rules - Once an SLA indicator is reached, the system can be configured to dispatch an automatic alert to one or more user accounts, notifying them of the situation. Achieved through the creation of CRM escalation rules, these automatic alerts can be defined for any combination of companies, roles and individual user accounts, at the discretion of the housing organisation.
- Communication Integration - All individual communication methods that are supported through the business processes of a housing organisation - telephone, email, SMS, housing surgery, post room, etc. - can all be configured on the system and linked to specific attributes such as the direction (inbound or outbound), the precise location where the communication took place and what scripts, if any, should be launched at the point of contact e.g. Pre-Script and Security Script.
- Tasks - The specific subject-centric activities that must be undertaken as an outcome of a customer interaction from which a case has been generated. Each CRM case is steered by its associated subject type, which in turn comprises one or more related tasks, and it is these tasks that define how the case will be progressed. Any number of discrete tasks can be linked to a CRM case, with a specific attribute governing whether each can appear more than once within the same execution plan. Recurrent tasks can also be configured to facilitate specific activities that need to be repeated over a defined period, or until such time as a particular outcome is achieved. In structuring all the activities that are relevant to a case, tasks can be added manually at the point of need, or they can be linked automatically by virtue of their existence within an underlying workflow path. Dictated by the nature of the assigned tasks, dependencies can be configured between them to restrict the point at which related tasks are commenced.
- Subjects - All customer interactions can be categorised into specific subjects, with each subject defining the nature of the interaction, the advice available to support the operator, and the activities to be undertaken - in the form of assigned tasks - in order to secure a successful outcome.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of CRM configuration management, including:
