SuperOffice has been helping customers for 30 years. With the SuperOffice cloud-based CRM solution, we help businesses get in control of their customer programs, pipeline generation, sales execution, and more. Taking on the role of the new Head of Services in SuperOffice, I’ve started by analyzing the role of customer service. How can services help the company attract, convert, and retain customers, as well as accelerate growth?
My background is in sales, and I believe we can elevate our customer service offering by taking a sales-oriented approach and rethinking what a successful service looks like. It’s time to let go of the idea of service as a “one-off” business and start seeing it as an ongoing process.
With more than 20 years in the game, I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about sales. I worked with sales directly and was in management positions, searching for answers to questions like: How do we improve the sales process? How do we become more relevant to the customers? What really drives the customer’s business outcome? How do we provide our salespeople with the best possible tools for success?
Thinking about all those questions, I often wondered why many customer service teams were treated with skepticism by their company’s sales departments. So, when I had the chance to join SuperOffice as the Head of Services, there was no doubt in my mind – this was my chance to do something about that skepticism.
With that as my main motivation, I was pleasantly surprised when I started in the job. This company is filled with dedicated, experienced, and kind colleagues. Every one of them is interested in how to do things better for our customers, partners, and each other. Here I found an outstanding opportunity to bring my ideas – and the ideas of my colleagues – into action.
In most organizations, the measurement for successful services is whether the service can be delivered within a reasonable time, quality, and price point. At SuperOffice, that’s already the case.
Our company has a proven track record of delivering quality on time and at the committed price. But this is not the end goal, it’s merely a good starting point. From here we want to raise the bar and focus on how services can keep adding value for our customers.
In the world of CRM, most people think of services as a one-off business. It’s about onboarding the customer to your solution before moving on to the next implementation. But if you think about it, even using the word “implementation” is dangerous. After all, it’s just an activity, and a technical term for planning and executing the onboarding of users to configured and well-integrated CRM solutions. By focusing exclusively on the implementation, you’re in danger of forgetting the value journey that spans way beyond the go-live date.
I would like to suggest a new approach – it’s time to start thinking about services as a continuous outcome-focused and value-creating process. By this, I mean that services shouldn’t be a one-time experience that happens after you purchase a new CRM solution. Instead, it should be the process of constant development and improvement in close coorporation with the customer. Because onboarding is just the beginning. After that comes the important part when the product needs to be used and generate customer satisfaction and business outcome.
I believe this “service as a process” approach provides SuperOffice and our consulting organization with a great opportunity for further development. Going forward, I want us to focus more on planning the customer experience process, improving our services solutions, and offering industry-specific packages. This will take our service offerings to the next level as it will engage our customers, help them with challenges specific to their industry, drive the full value of our solutions and make ourselves deliver even faster. And that’s just to name a few of the positives.
How do we get there? The simple answer is one step at a time.
A more complex answer is that service is a strategic element in SuperOffice’s growth strategy which is built on positioning, focus, and growth – in terms of people and pipeline. After analyzing our current capabilities and identifying how key service initiatives relate to the different elements, we started putting new initiatives in motion.
Over the last months, we have revised our methodology, and trained our consultants on how services can drive business value activity. We have introduced standards for sustainable customization of our CRM solution. We have launched new services and started developing service packages which will be available over the coming months. Finally, we have started working more as one consulting team.
Looking into the future, I believe very exciting things lie ahead. To reach this goal, we will keep our passion intact, work hard, come together, and trust the process.
